Internet marketing is carrying out certain activities that create 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 appears 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 a constantly changing playing field . As each year passes there is a greater need to bring in specialists and consultants that work only in this arena, in order for website owners to be able to get their sites at the top of Google’s search engine results for the keywords that everyone thinks will generate sales and leads. This service is called SEO or search engine optimization. Another way for  website owners to get the same results is to arrange for their employees to participate in focused training seminars, or one on one training, to gain the necessary skill sets to do this work in-house

Internet marketing has grown to include pay per click advertising. Ads that are placed within the results pages of search engines (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 forwarded to \ they end up on the advertiser’s website, and the advertiser is charged for that “click”. This is how Google makes most of its income.

The future of Internet marketing will be 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 difficult to manage than search engine optimization and pay per click advertising, but has the potential to be much more lucrative!

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