Internet Marketing Approaches

Under the umbrella of Internet Marketing are various approaches.

Some sell their goods directly to consumers or other businesses. I believe the most common examples would be websites of signature brands, and any other sites which contain information about their products and directly sell them. Customers normally pay through credit cards or Paypal.

Another model is that called lead generation. It is said by Mplan to be the process of turning a member of the target market into a prospect. So a lead is basically equivalent to a page with form elements in which a prospect enters his/her contact details. Wikipedia mentions two types of lead generation namely sales leads and marketing leads.

The third approach to Internet Marketing is something called Affiliate Marketing. The latter involves an advertiser, who wishes to promote a certain product. The advertiser looks for an online marketer to make their products known online. It is then the online marketer who ties up with affiliates to help them in promoting the advertiser's product. In return, an affiliate gets commission for every successful marketing transaction.

So these are basically the main approaches to Internet Marketing. Time to explore on each one of them. First up - Affiliate Marketing.

What is affiliate marketing

Now that I've become interested in it, I actually realized that I have been encountering a lot of the term Affiliate Marketing since I-don't-know-when. The reason probably is because it has become what we all would like to call an emerging type of venture that many would wanna embark on.

So what is affiliate marketing?

It is actually one of the approaches of Internet Marketing that is on a commision-based framework. Here's how it works...

1. You own a website. You are the affiliate. 

2. You enroll in affiliate programs and obtain affiliate links. The latter come in the form of websites like Commission Junction, Clickbank, Amazon, etc. They are a bridge between you(the affiliate) and the merchants (people or companies who wish to advertise their product or service).

3. Your website visitors access the affiliate links you obtain through enrolling in the programs. Visitors would either click on the affiliate link, purchase a product or service, or merely view the advertisement you've placed on your website.

4. You get a commission for every action done by visitors.

Easy as 1-2-3, huh? Well, not exactly. There are more than a few things you gotta learn and do along the way. Those more-than-a-few-things are what we'll be talking about in the next few posts.

Discovering Internet Marketing

When I signed up for Friendster some 5..6 years ago, the first thing I asked was – why would these people allow just anyone to place their profiles and photos over the Internet for free? Don’t they get any money back for this? I was only in high school then, void of any technical knowledge. I didn’t understand that creators of websites such as the aforementioned needed to invest on a tremendous amount of money for the equipment to host their website. Upon finding about such investment I was pretty sure they were getting something back in return. And I was then led to ask another question – how?

The answer is advertising. When websites like Friendster get more than just a few visitors and members, this gives them the opportunity to tell merchants – Hey, we got an audience right here. Wanna get your products known? It’s all about Internet Marketing - promoting products and services, digital or not, by means of the Web.

So how does Internet Marketing work? One would have to create an online presence, most likely in the form of a website, which is targeted towards an audience of a certain category – this might be according to age, gender, interests, etc. Once the website gets enough visitors, its creators may choose to get returns by asking merchants to promote products through their website. This is when the money comes in.

David Bain, an Internet Marketing specialist from Scotland, says that in order to be successful in this field, it is essential to know and implement good website coding, good website design, increase visitors, and maximize the potential of turning mere curious on-lookers into actual customers of merchants.

Over the years, more and more people have come to realize the potential of Internet Marketing. Thus, many constantly innovate on ideas about websites and how they could translate it into business. And because of all those ideas, various Internet Marketing techniques have emerged.

As I read more about this new-found interest, I discover how vast a field it is. And I also learned about how almost every major website I encounter is actually involved in it. And now I can’t help but become a lot more curious than I was the minute I first minute I asked that money-back question.