Internet marketing or web-marketing is the marketing of products or services using the internet as a medium. It involves strategies and techniques applied on the internet to support any organization’s overall online marketing objectives. Internet marketing hepls in driving targeted traffic to your product or company website and market the features listed on the website. It may include strategies involving meta tag , keywords, newsgroup and mailing list, banner advertising, online promotions, content positioning, email strategies and other features.

Internet marketing works using online tools like search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), banner advertisements on specific websites, e-mail marketing, and Web 2.0 strategies. Internet marketing has grown into a large subset of web development that includes paid advertising, affiliations, paid linking, and other promotional tactics. Although internet marketing sounds expensive, it does not have to be.

Why Internet Marketing

Internet Marketing helps accelerate the sales and marketing cycle, increases the number of business contacts, and most important of all, it gives a large number of qualified contacts. The end result, your business gets fast time- to- revenue, and also low cost per lead. That is less money is spent to get more contacts and awareness about your business. Similarly less time need be spent to deal with unqualified contacts and leads, which means less time will be spent on unproductive marketing activities and on planning strategies that do not work.

Types of Internet Marketing

Few important types are:

Affiliate marketing: Here the products of one business owner are sold by another for some profit margin.

E-commerce: Using internet as a medium products are sold directly to consumers (B2C model) or other businesses (B2B model).

Website: Here leads are generated using websites.

Methodology used:

They include methods like pay per click, pay per impression, pay per play or action etc. These methods can be quickly evaluated and results quantified to determine campaign success rate.

Disadvantages of Internet Marketing.

Businesses and their clients have to use new technology as and when a change occurs. Internet speed should be adequate otherwise marketing efforts may fail and money gets wasted on heavy websites. Buyers cannot get personalized experience with the product – cannot touch, try and taste the product before ordering it. Clients are hesitant to use internet as a medium due to security issue and data theft of personal details.

However, internet marketing is the most happening phenomenon today. Gartner report suggests that internet marketing by 2015 will control more than US$ 250 billion in spending worldwide. Hence if used properly companies can increase traffic to their company’s homepage and convert them into sales effortlessly.