what is internet marketing?

Internet marketing is carrying out certain activities that generate sales and/or capture sales leads from potential customers that are searching on the internet for services or products.

This means getting your website to rank in Google, Yahoo MSN, article directories, blog directories, RSS Feeds, Social Networks, and other search related sites so that appears when a potential client of yours types in a “keyword phrase” that relates to your business .

This is something of a mysterious art  these days and is an art that is always evolving as the search engines evolve. As each year passes there is a much bigger need to hire specialists and consultants that work only in this arena, in order for companies to be able to get their sites on the first page of Google’s search engine results for the keywords that will generate sales and leads. This service is called SEO or search engine optimization. Another way for  website owners to get the same results is to arrange for their employees to participate in focused training seminars, or one on one training, to gain the necessary skill sets to do this work in-house

Internet marketing has grown to include pay per click advertising. Ads that are postioned within the results pages of search engines (when you do a search, they show up on the right hand side of the page) that are written by advertisers to be triggered when certain keywords or phrases are searched on . Each time a person clicks on the ad, they are sent to the advertiser’s website, and the advertiser is charged for that “click”. This is how Google makes huge revenue .

The next big thing in Internet marketing is the social networking sites like Facebook. Here, the best form of advertising  will be “viral” and more “virtual word of mouth”. This is much more complicated than search engine optimization and pay per click advertising, but has the potential to be much more lucrative!

There are many companies that specialise in assisting company’s in their Internet Marketing efforts.