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 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 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! |
