Internet marketing can generally be defined as
generating sales and/or capturing leads from potential customers
that are surfing the Internet.
Traditionally, this has meant trying to get your website into
Google (and others) search engine rankings so that it shows
up when a potential customer of yours types in a “keyword
phrase”. This has become something of a mysterious black
art. There are specialists and consultants that make their living
working with companies to try and get their sites on the first
page of Google’s search engine results for the keywords
that everyone thinks will generate sales and leads. This consulting
service is called search engine optimization
.
Internet marketing has grown to include pay
per click advertising. These are ads (when you do a Google
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. 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 billions of dollars.
The future of Internet marketing will be the social
networking sites like Facebook.
Here, the most efficient advertising will be “viral”
and more “virtual word of mouth”. This is much more
complex than search engine optimization
and pay per click advertising,
but has the potential to be much more profitable! |
