Internet marketing is doing things that generate sales and/or capture sales leads from potential customers that are surfing the net .

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 loads up when a prospective buyer of yours types in a “keyword phrase” that relates to your operation .

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 bring in specialists and consultants that work purely in this arena, in order for businesses to be able to get their sites on the first page 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 postioned 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 internet user 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 billions of dollars .

The next big thing in Internet marketing is the social networking sites like Facebook. Here, the best form of 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.