What is Internet Marketing and Affiliate Marketing?

If you have recently browsed the Internet, you probably cannot help but find the phrases Internet Marketing and Affiliate Marketing. However, these words have a grave importance to those who work online and who are serious about making significant amounts of money on their online ventures.

What is Internet Marketing?

Today, Internet marketing, or online marketing, is evolving into a broader mix of components a company can use as a means of increasing sales – even if your business is done completely online, partly online, or completely offline. The decision to use Internet marketing as part of a company’s overall marketing strategy is strictly up to the company of course, but as a rule, Internet marketing is becoming an increasingly important part of nearly every company’s marketing mix. For some online businesses, it is the only form of marketing being practiced.

Essentially, Internet marketing is using the Internet to do one or more of the following:

Communicate a company’s message about itself, its products, or its services online.

Conduct research as to the nature (demographics, preferences, and needs) of existing and potential customers.

Sell goods, services, or advertising space over the Internet.

Components of Internet marketing (or online marketing) may include:

Setting up a website , consisting of text, images and possibly audio and video elements used to convey the company’s message online, to inform existing and potential customers of the features and benefits of the company’s products and/or services.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM), which is marketing a website online via search engines, either by improving the site’s natural (organic) ranking through search engine optimization (SEO), buying pay-per-click (PPC) ads or purchasing pay-for-inclusion (PFI) listings in website directories, which are similar to offline yellow page listings.

Banner advertising, which is the placement of ads on a website for a fee. The offline equivalent of this form of online marketing would be traditional ads in newspapers or magazines.

Article marketing, which involves writing articles related to your business and having them published online on syndicated article sites. These articles then have a tendency to spread around the Internet since the article services permit re-publication provided that all of the links in the article are maintained. Article marketing can result in a traffic boost for your website, and the distribution of syndicated articles can promote your brand to a wide audience.

Social media marketing, which can involve social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and social bookmarking sites like Digg.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Perhaps the simplest way to explain affiliate marketing is that it is a way of making money online whereby you as a publisher are rewarded for helping a business by promoting their product, service or site. There are a number of forms of these types of promotions but in most cases they involve you as a publisher earning a commission when someone follows a link on your blog to another site where they then buy something.

Other variations on this are where you earn an amount for referring a visitor who takes some kind of action – for example when they sign up for something and give an email address, where they complete a survey, where they leave a name and address etc. Commissions are often a percentage of a sale but can also be a fixed amount per conversion.

Before you even begin to thing about generating profits, building a website,  or offering services or products- you should become familiar with these words, what they mean, how they are important to your success, and how to implement them into EVERYTHING you plan on accomplishing online to assure your utmost success online.