Website Promotion, also referred to as i-marketing, web-marketing, online-marketing, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or e-Marketing, is the marketing of products or services over the Internet.
The Internet has brought media to a global audience. The interactive nature of Internet marketing in terms of providing instant response and eliciting responses, is a unique quality of the medium. Internet marketing is sometimes considered to have a broader scope because it not only refers to the Internet, e-mail, and wireless media, but it includes management of digital customer data and electronic customer relationship management systems.
Website Promotion also refers to the placement of media along many different stages of the customer engagement cycle through search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), banner ads on specific websites, e-mail marketing, and Web 2.0 strategies. In 2008 The New York Times, working with COM Score, published an initial estimate to quantify the user data collected by large Internet-based companies. Counting four types of interactions with company websites in addition to the hits from advertisements served from advertising networks, the authors found the potential for collecting data upward of 2,500 times on average per user per month.
Website Promotion is associated with several business models:
• e-commerce — this is where goods are sold directly to consumers (B2C) or businesses (B2B)
• Publishing — this is the sale of advertising
• lead-based websites — this is an organization that generates value by acquiring sales leads from its website
• Affiliate marketing — this is the process in which a product or service developed by one person is sold by other active sellers for a share of profits. The owner of the product normally provides some marketing material (sales letter, affiliate link, tracking facility).
• local internet marketing - this is the process of a locally based company traditionally selling belly to belly and utilizing the Internet to find and nurture relationships, later to take those relationships offline.
