Internet Marketing or Online Marketing is the 5th paradigm to the MArketing Mix. It is essentially marketing via your website, be it with an objective to create exposure, provide information or generate an income. This tool is used in varying degree depending on the expertise and budget apportioned by your company.

The demographics and psychographics of an internet user tend to deviate from that of the traditional consumer, although the profile gaps have greatly narrowed in the recent 3 to 5 years, thanks to recent years’ extensive proliferation of the internet. These differences have given rise to an entire spread of marketing-based activity in cyber-world to generate income.

The unique characteristics of the Internet gives rise to new approaches to bring internet marketing to the next level. The internet has the unique ability to receive and provide response. In addition, it works very hard for you, 24 hours 7 days a week , never missing a day. Customers from all over cyber, of all time zones, are hence exposed to your products and services. By the same token, your potential customers can be reached round the clock, 24by7, enhancing go-to-market strategies. Hence, the internet has a global appeal capable of immediately expanding your target segments exponentially worldwide.

So how does one manage such an open marketplace? The traditional marketing rationales still apply, with additional internet-specific marketing strategies to boost. Both traditional and internet marketing strategies synergize to support the overall business model.

A broad internet marketing model would include namely, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), display advertising, behavioral marketing, email marketing, newsletter marketing, affiliate marketing, blog marketing, viral marketing, CRM marketing etc.

Search Engine Marketing includes broadly keyword search, search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click. I would consider keyword search and SEO as trend-mapping marketing model. By maximizing the exposure of certain related keywords, the internet crawlers and search engines would be able to better locate your site and materials and you are able to maximize your’s website profile and increase traffic for potential business generation.

Display advertising is simply the internet version of your press ads and they cost less. There are ways to help you further narrow down your specific target segment. This is not to specially advertise for Google Adwords, but to highlight how display advertising works at a more efficient level. You create display ads, choose your relevant keywords, and when netizens run searches using one or some of your keywords, your ad may just appear in the search results. So you are effectively advertising to a very focused and interested target segment.

Behavorial Marketing tracks a user’s surfing or searching content & path on the web. They are then provided with relevant predefined categories of information which might interest them. A particular example is Amazon.com.

Email-marketing is all about list building, email delivery and tracking to help you keep in touch with customers, drive traffic to your site, sign up for newsletters or buy your products. With an active and high quality email list, you manage run email marketing campaigns. Should you intend to utilize email marketing as one of your tool, be reminded to apply permission marketing which lets you politely ask your customers to opt-in, which positions you as a considerate marketer who does not engage in spamming.

Affiliate marketing is the web-based version of physical network marketing. Affiliate marketing essentially leverages on the various online marketing approaches to maximize sales revenue, namely, search engine marketing, online display ads, email and newsletter marketing etc. The beauty of Affiliate marketing is that if done correctly, you can generate a comfortable income with low cost model and of course with a lot of hard work as well….

Viral marketing is essentially word of mouth marketing leveraging on the latest craze in social networking sites. Social networking potentials or SNPs are members of such social websites which has great word of mouth marketing powess.

To formulate successful Internet marketing strategies requires certain level of internet understanding, whilst not necessary IT-indepth. Such knowledge is easily acquired. More significantly, you must retain the primal creative instinct of a marketer.

For brick and mortar businesses, the Internet Marketing serves as an additional tool which adds ammunition for you to drive your revenue generating goals. However, if you run an online e-business, you will surely need to adopt a very focused Internet Marketing business model which utilizes much of the above tools mentioned.