Internet Marketing: Introducton
These days internet marketing is a broad church that can be defined as the 'use of the internet to advertise and sell goods and services'. Essentially anything that is a service and which can make money on the internet is and can be interpreted as internet marketing.
As a result, marketing techniques and strategies such as: cost per click advertising, banner ads, search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, affiliate marketing, interactive advertising, search engine marketing (including search engine optimization), blog marketing, article marketing, and blogging can all come under the auspices of 'internet marketing'.
History of Internet Marketing
With all the hype about internet marketing at the moment and the stories of 'netrepreneurs' (internet entrepreneurs) gaining million-dollar cheques every year it's often forgotten that the internet is a very young medium. However, I am very cogniscent of this as the internet began alongside my career as a computational scientist. The very early internet (during the late 1980s) allowed me to do things that might never have been imagined before. But the public use of the internet as a publishing and marketing medium did lag behind its scientific use as a data and information exchange tool in the early years.
Indeed, it wasn't until the early 1990s that marketing first began on the internet. This was mostly based around simple text-based websites that offered little more than straight-forward product information. But during the 1990s with the advent of faster internet connections, image availability and then video availability the marketing strategies evolved into more than just selling information products, there are people now selling advertising space, software programs, business models, and many other products and services. Companies like Google, Yahoo and MSN emerged and then evolved into providing advertising that any size of website could take advantage of and make money from. They even provided adverts targetted to the search terms and the locale of the person who havigated to a given web page. Indeed, this kind of emocratization of internet advertising has allowed return on investment for even small-scale websites to grow while the bottom line has been lowered.
Iternet marketing has also grown because internet marketing is inherently computationally based. There is so much information you can gain about your users, even using farily simple software tools and if you're a marketing site you can see what products your visitors buy so that you can track them individually and can then offer them exactly the type of goods and offers that they are looking for. Which is precisely what Amazon's operating model is.
Business Models
As various marketers have been experimenting with the internet and the 'latest thing' of the week has come and gone several basic business models have emerged as winners.
The main models include business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C), which are effectively internet versions of the processes used by real 'bricks and mortar' companies. B2B consists of companies doing business with each other, whereas B2C involves selling directly to the end consumer.
When internet businesses first came to note almost all were using B2C models, after all these were just internet versions of existing non-internet businesses. This is also the simplest model to put into operation. After all you're selling a product to a customer. The B2B strategies only evolved later as the demand for bespoke applications and systems such as autoresponders grew and systems such as Google's ads came of note.
As internet marketing has matured we've also seen the growth of new strategies not seen in the 'bricks and mortar' world. A good example of these is the P2P (peer-to-peer) marketing model which is built on individuals sharing or forming communities (also sometimes known as Web 2.0). An example would be the Kazaa file sharing system and in some respects at least, it could be argued that eBay is also a kind of P2P system in that though eBay are the moderator and provid the overall system software sales are, for the most part, made between individuals.
These are all proper, functioning, business models. Yet, the bread-and-butter of internet marketing remains advertising. But the truth is advertising includes direct placement of advertisements from Google or MSN or Yahoo! to affiliate marketing from internet marketing companies to affiliate marketing for the big players such as Amazon and eBay. In the end, whatever strategy you chose, it will be successful for you as long as you can make money from it. This website is designed to show you the strategies and to present you with a range of models and methods to deploy these strategies to increase your internet income.
I should also tell you that I am an internet entrepreneur who has been in this business in one way or anther for more than five years. Here I will present varous things that have worked for me, as well as letting you know what other marketers are doing and what the latest trends are.