What Is Internet Marketing

Internet marketing is just about using the power of the Internet to sell stuff. By 'stuff', I am referring to products or services.

It can be your stuff, or somebody else's stuff - in which case you'd make money doing Internet Marketing by earning a commission on every sale you obtain for the real vendor, or perhaps for every prospective customer you send to their web pages. This is called earning by pay per click or PPC, or earning commissions for each sale as an Affiliate.

Affiliate Marketing is a sub-set of Internet Marketing, and is covered elsewhere on these web pages.

The goods or services being Internet Marketed can be 'hard' items (physically touchable), or they can be information in 'soft' products - downloadable computer files containing text, audio, video - or a combination of all three.

Some Internet Marketing enterpreneurs make the best profit selling a downloadable ebook, which is then backed-up by a printed copy and a set of CDs or DVDs which are then sent to the customer.

The buyer gets to see and read the ebook immediately, and the hard good arrive in the post or by courier a few days later. Everybody's happy.

The greatest profit is in 'selling electrons', not in selling molecules.

When you sell hard items (molecules), they have weight and they take up storage space. They can even be damaged or broken. Then, you have to maintain an inventory. That means storage at your home, your garage, or in a warehouse. And then there's packing and shipping to be done and paid for, and even foreign Customs import duties and regulations to be worried about.

But when you do Internet Marketing to sell electrons, you have a computer file that you load onto a host fileserver somewhere out there in cyberspace. And customers pay you to download copies of that one file!

You have software scripts on your website pages to make secure credit-card transactions that accept money from the customers any time, 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. So it doesn't matter if you're sleeping, in the shower or away on vacation somewhere. The website does the sale for you.

And once the credit card details have been verified, the customer is sent to a hidden download page where he or she just clicks on a link to have the file(s) sucked across the world wide web and saved onto their computer's hard disk drive.

You read a notification in your emails that you've made another sale, or just check your monthly bank account to see what's been added automagically. That's the power and the magic of Internet Marketing.