Internet Marketing

It seems all the marketers have turned to internet marketing to satisfy their thirst for new clients and to market their product to anyone, anytime, and anywhere. Internet marketing encompasses several variables including search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click advertising, banner advertising, email marketing, and several other genres. Internet marketing is also commonly referred to eMarketing. Quite simply, internet marketing is placing a product or service on the internet in hopes that through various advertising procedures that it will attract attention and generate revenue.

Internet marketing is much cheaper than traditional forms of marketing that included target mailings, radio advertising, print advertising, and television advertising. Companies have the ability to reach a global audience with the click of a button. One of the largest benefits to internet marketing is the ability to receive instant response from consumers and clients. Internet marketing requires the use of several different aspects including marketing, sales, product design, product development, and several other areas. In order to create a successful internet marketing campaign, a company must combine email marketing, SEO, banner advertising, and web site design together and sync them with the goals of the company. A web site needs to function in an easy manner and be able to attract visitors with its appearance, media, and overall design.

A good internet marketing strategy must include the following:

• A clear message about the company and the product.
• Target research on the needs, preferences, and demographics of the audience.
• An easy-to-use web site with a shopping cart and contact information.
• Budget for advertising space on the internet.
• Plan for reaching new customers using internet marketing.

The web site is perhaps the single most important aspect of a good internet marketing strategy. The web site alone has the ability to sell itself to the customer. A web site needs to consist of a variety of information including text, images, and video elements. Everything on the site should tie into the mission of the company and feature key information about the company's products and services. If a web site does not include a shopping cart, it needs to have the ability to capture leads on new consumers. A web site is considered the equivalent of mailing a brochure or catalog to a customer. The best part about a web site is that there is no limitation on the number of pages you include and it can have more information at hand than a brochure or catalog.

One of the most popular forms of internet marketing is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). SEM is simply listing your web site on the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. When a potential consumer does a search on the search engines, your web site will appear in the search rankings. The goal of every company is to have their web site listed at the number one or number two web sites under organic searches. The best way to increase your search engine rank is to get more people clicking on your site. As a web site increases in popularity, the search engines will recognize this and reward the site by giving it a higher ranking. The content on web sites is "crawled" by the search engine "spiders" to create a listing of web sites that match the keyword search term or phrase used by the internet user. The crawlers use the text in META Tags, Page Headers, URLs, and the actual content on the page to determine the page rank in the results. SEO involves using keywords to help a potential client find your web site using the search engines. Pay-per-click advertising is the most well-known form of SEO. Google, Yahoo, and MSN all have pay-per-click programs companies can participate in. It is quite simple to sign up for the account and begin selecting keywords. You will create a 2 line ad, usually 20 words or less, and it will be placed on the internet for every search a user does using those keywords. Pay-per-click campaigns can become expensive as there is a lot of competition for certain keywords.

Email marketing is one of the most popular forms of internet marketing. The best email marketing campaigns are sent to members that have opted-in to your mailing list. Consumers that request you send them information are your perfect target audience. Email marketing is simply an electronic form of distributing information about a product or service offered by the company. Email campaigns usually ask for some form of feedback from the consumer, whether it be to purchase the product or simply to participate in a poll. Email addresses can be purchased, but the best ones come over time when you collect them from consumers that purchase the product or those that request information from your company. Email marketing campaigns can be used to send daily, weekly, or monthly newsletters to consumers. Email marketing campaigns are also used to offer products or services to existing clients and new clients as a replacement for direct mail marketing.

Banner advertising is the most popular form of internet advertising. Banner advertising is simply placing an ad on a web site for a fee. A banner ad is the equivalent of a newspaper ad, magazine ad, or other print advertising. A banner ad is a graphic and link that is display on a web site when it loads. A visitor will see the ad when they are using the internet and searching through various web sites. The banner ad typically is promoting a product, service, or another company or web site. Banner advertising is quite popular among political groups and medical associations. Presidential elections have numerous banner advertisements on various types of web sites. There are two major types of banner advertisements, static banners and dynamically-rotated banners. The static banners remain the same, the look exactly the same to every user that visits the web site and remain the same each time the page loads. A dynamically-rotated banner changes for each user. Dynamically-rotated banners allow users to have multiple advertisements with the potential to send different ads to consumers each time they visit the site.

The final form of internet marketing is called "online promotion". Online promotion includes press releases, news articles, distribution, or anything that promotes the web site. Blog pages are a popular form of online promotion. Several companies have turned to blog marketing as a way to reach a new generation of consumers. Companies have the ability to create a blog and promote their products and services and invite consumers to comment on it. Blogs are a wonderful way to have consumer interaction without sending individual emails to consumers.

Google, Yahoo, and MSN provide additional services to their customers that participate in pay-per-click campaigns. Google has a program called Google Ad Sense where companies can go and check the web activity of their web site. They can see what pages users are clicking on, what days they are clicking on your site, where the most traffic is coming from, what search engines are working to get people to your site, and numerous other things. Internet marketing is so great because companies can post information on their site and have it available to consumers in a manner of seconds.

The largest factor you will have with internet marketing is the budget. While internet marketing may be less expensive than print advertising and other traditional advertising efforts, it can quickly add up. A company that is running a pay-per-click campaign will pay for each time a person clicks on their ad. The pay-per-click campaigns are wonderful to get your site noticed by others, but without the right budget, you could spend more than you gain in revenue. Building a web site will also cost your company a lot of money. If you already have a web site, you need to look at it and decide if it needs to be revamped. Older web sites often do not rank as high in the search engines because the coding does not stay updated.

Many companies hire SEO or SEM companies to do all the internet marketing for them. For a company that doesn't have a trained marketing professional in SEO, this is a wise decision. Learning SEO takes some time and it takes a long time before results start appearing on your web site. The content on your web site will need to be rewritten by SEO firms or marketers in order to make it friendly for the search engine crawlers and for consumers. It is important to hire a webmaster to maintain the web site and make sure it stays up-to-date and doesn't have broken links. Web sites with numerous broken links will receive negative points in the search engine rankings and your ranking could drop quite a few places.


Internet marketing requires a lot of patience. Internet marketing cannot be learned overnight and it doesn't work overnight either. It is important to create a good internet marketing strategy and track the results with the major search engines. Once an internet marketing campaign is launched, you will learn what mistakes you made and find ways to improve it for the next campaign.