Internet marketing can generally be defined as generating sales and/or capturing leads from potential customers that are surfing the Internet.

Traditionally, this has meant trying to get your website into Google (and others) search engine rankings so that it shows up when a potential customer of yours types in a “keyword phrase”. This has become something of a mysterious black art. There are specialists and consultants that make their living working with companies to try and get their sites on the first page of Google’s search engine results for the keywords that everyone thinks will generate sales and leads – This consulting service is called search engine optimization.

Internet marketing has grown to include pay per click advertising. These are ads (when you do a Google 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 on. Each time a person clicks on the ad, they are sent to the advertiser’s website, and the advertiser is charged for that “click”. This is how Google makes billions of dollars.

The Internet marketing of today is rapidly including social media and networking sites (like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube). Here, the most efficient advertising will be “viral” and more “virtual word of mouth” and includes the most important media of all – Video. This is much more complex than search engine optimization and pay per click advertising, but has the potential to be much more profitable!

The future of Internet marketing is without a doubt mobile marketing. With the world having 4 times as many mobile phone users as internet users and with approximately 30% of all searches based around locations – it’s easy to understand why this is the future.

Having a mobile ready website today is an absolute must for any business…having a business ready “app” for a smart phone is going to become the next big thing – no, let me rephrase…having a smart phone app for your business, which you can give to your customers is going to be a bigger opportunity than the internet itself!