What is Internet Marketing?

Internet marketing is advertising and marketing using email and the web to attract buyers to the point of sale as well as gathering email leads.

Although you may think that internet marketing is purely for online businesses, that’s not strictly true. An offline business can use email and the web to attract buyer to their physical location or phone number and may be combined with advertising by the usual means of the press, glossy magazines as well as television and radio.

Internet marketing can be broken down into different areas; web marketing, email marketing and social marketing to name the most popular

Web marketing can range from a simple website advertising the whereabouts and contact details of a business to something more complex.

E-commerce is a form of web marketing; I would cite Amazon.com as an example of web marketing. Amazon don’t have shops; all their business is conducted via the internet using a website, an ordering system, a shopping cart and a form of electronic payment. The only part which isn’t conduced over the internet is the despatch and carriage of products (unless they’re e-products).

Affiliate marketing is another form of internet marketing except that the affiliate marketer has no product of their own and holds no stock, but advertises other people’s products (such as Amazon) or e-books/services (such as Clickbank) sends buyers to those sites and in return receives a commission. In order to do that, the affiliate marketer might send buyers direct to the marketing site or may have a search engine optimised site of their own which would contain informative, related content encouraging visitors to click on affiliate links.

Email marketing is what it says it is; marketing via email to people who have opted in to your mailing list via a web form. Unfortunately, a lot of people sent unsolicited mail which is not only irritating to the recipient but illegal. If you’re new to this, build a proper opt in list; don’t even think of harvesting email addresses from web sites and spamming as you might find your ISP address blocked by the large email companies and then you won’t be able to send legitimate emails either.

Social media or Web 2.0 marketing involves the use of social bookmarking and networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Linkdin and many more besides. This involves either promoting your own website via these social sites or promoting your own or affiliate products. It is recommended that you don’t do the latter until you’ve built up a following by means of friendly informative posts without any advertising.

So, that, in a nutshell, is what internet marketing is but for a full answer to the question what is internet marketing check out the Wikipedia definition.