Internet marketing is carrying out certain activities that generate sales and/or capture leads from potential customers that are surfing the Internet .

This means getting your website to rank in Google, Yahoo MSN, article directories, blog directories, RSS Feeds, Social Networks, and other search related sites so that appears when a potential client of yours types in a “keyword phrase” that relates to your website.

This is something of a new and mysterious art  these days and is an art that is always evolving as the search engines evolve. As each year passes there is a greater need to hire specialists and consultants that work purely in this arena, in order for companies to be able to get their websites at the top of Google’s search engine results for the keywords that will generate sales and leads. This service is called SEO or search engine optimization. Another way for  website owners to achieve the same goal is to arrange for their employees to participate in focused training seminars, or one on one training, to gain the necessary skills to do this work in-house

Internet marketing has come to include pay per click advertising. Ads that are placed within the results pages of search engines (when you do a 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. Each time a person clicks on the ad, they are forwarded to \ they end up on the advertiser’s website, and the advertiser is charged for that “click”. This is how Google makes huge revenue .

The next big thing in 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 complicated than search engine optimization and pay per click advertising, but has the potential to be much more profitable!

There are many companies that specialise in assisting company’s in their Internet Marketing efforts.