What is Internet Marketing?

In a broad sense, it is marketing or advertising products on the internet. In a more narrow sense, it is the targeting of specific “niche markets” in order to funnel internet traffic to a particular product or service. Internet marketers generally use affiliate programs to promote someone else’s products for a percentage.

Forms of Internet Marketing

There are several forms of internet marketing, and they fall into two general categories: paid marketing and free marketing, also called bum marketing. Free Internet Marketing forms include SEO, article marketing, and forum marketing. Paid forms include pay-per-click, pay-per-action, and pay-per-lead campaigns.

Free Marketing

Article Marketing

Article marketing is by far the most popular form of free internet marketing. It involves writing informative articles on a subject related to a product and submitting the article to an article directory or posting it to a blog. The article does not take the form of an advertisement in this case. It simply offers free information on the subject in question. The advertisement itself is simply a link in the resource or signature area of the article to another web page or web site.

The reason for the popularity of article marketing is that the article can acquire the page ranking of the directory site or blog that it is posted on. The article can also be copied and reposted elsewhere, with proper permission given, which creates more backlinks to the target site.

Forum Marketing

Forum marketing is very similar to article marketing in that the forum post itself contains purely free information with a link in the signature area to another web page. It is important in this type of marketing to not simply spam a forum with advertisements, but to offer something of value to the forum members. Spamming a forum will likely get you banned.

SEO

Search engine optimization is a form of internet marketing, in that its purpose is to increase search engine rankings to capture more internet traffic. There are two basic types of seo: on-page optimization and off-page optimization. On-page optimization includes adding html meta tags to a page and “optimizing” the content of the page for particular keywords. Off-page optimization includes article marketing and forum marketing, or anything that establishes links to a web page.

Paid Marketing

PPC Marketing

There are several types of paid marketing as mentioned earlier. Pay-per-click is the most common form of paid internet marketing. This type of marketing involves creating an ad campaign and paying a search engine, like Google or Yahoo, each time the link in the ad is clicked. The placement of the ad on the search page is dependent upon keywords used for the campaign as well as the relevancy of the landing page assigned to the link.

PPA and PPL Marketing

Other paid marketing techniques that are similar are pay-per-action and pay-per-lead. Pay-per-lead normally involves getting paid a flat amount for sending traffic to a site in order to capture the email addresses of potential customers. The company collecting the email addresses pays the marketer for funneling the traffic to their site. A similar type of marketing is pay-per-action which could involve a person opting into a service, etc.

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