Internet marketing refers to effective leveraging of online advertising to enable the target audience to respond positively. Design, Development, Marketing and Promotions, are crucial to Internet Marketing which entails:

• search engine marketing,
• display advertising,
• e-mail marketing,
• affiliate marketing,
• interactive advertising and
• viral marketing

Among the different business blueprints that Internet Marketing relies on, are the B2B, B2C and the new P2P varieties. The first comprises companies making busines deals with each other while the second involves direct sales to the final client. The third model or peer to peer, entails individuals exchanging goods among themselves.Some of the interesting formats seen within the domain of Internet marketing are:

• where you have to name your price and then choose items within that range,
• where you can find the best and lowest prices for a product, and
• where you can bid online for a product.

Pay per click or PPC is essentially a model to generate more ad revenues. Under this scheme, Advertisers pay only when the users click on ads to visit their site. The bidding is on keywords which advertisers believe will be entred by their target audiences on a search engine when searching the product they want. When the user’s keyword matches the advertiser’s, the latter’s ad will feature on the search results page as a “sponsored” one. Thus PPC advertising is a search engine marketing gimmick used predominantly by Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN adCenter to name a few.

Pay Per Action or PPA is prominent within domains of online advertising and marketing. It involves an advertiser paying for an ad only when an action determined by the advertiser has been undertaken in the form of purchase of a product, filling a questionnaire etc. Google Adsense and eBay Adcontext are instances of this model.

Pay per call or PPC is akin to the pay per click method but the difference lies in the former being a blueprint for ad postings on search engines and online yellow pages which allows those publishing it to levy a per-call charge on the advertisers for every call gnerated. Technologically speaking this “pay per call” is enabled by the click-to-call and call tracking systems. PPC, however, is not restricted to advertisers within a geographic boundary. Most of their search engines involve advertisers nationally while the ads created use local contact numbers. A survey by the Kelsey Group has determined that the pay per call market will touch the US$3.7 billion mark by the year 2010.

Internet Marketing has impacted hugely on industries: music, banking, advertising, auctioning, and flea markets. The evolution of Internet marketing has ushered in some advantages:

1. Swift availability of information
2. Purchase of products possible at any hour
3. Massive savings on sales force
4. Local market expansion to both national and international arenas
5. Internet marketing can be a lot less expensive while
6. Tremendous exposure, response and overwhelming efficiency enables easy tracking compared to offline print media