Internet Business - An overview

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Date: 10th Aug 2005
Author: Webmaster
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Ranking: 8.33 (3 Votes)

Since the advent of computers and then the Internet, businesses and organisations have been rapidly moving and extending their businesses to the Internet. The most popular term used for the business over the internet, is E-Commerce (Electronic Commerce or transactions over the internet). Internet has proven to be the most effective way of communication and information exchange as well as the business. Amazon is one big example of a bookshop over the internet. The World Wide Web can not be ignored which has performed a key role in this regard.

Marketing is the process of creating, promoting, distributing and selling goods and services. Hence internet marketing is the process of developing, promoting and distributing goods and services in E-Commerce or a business operating over the internet. Marketing involves advertising, market research, media planning, public relations, product pricing, distribution, customer support, sales strategy, and community involvement.

Since the start of E-Commerce, many companies have joined the race and have failed badly and eventually had left. The biggest reason for them being unsuccessful has always been not doing thing in the right way. Electronic commerce depends on three elements: communications infrastructure, software, and products/markets. To run a successful business over the internet, you must have a good communication infrastructure along with a competitive customer relation strategy, have state of the art software to support your activities on the internet safely, efficiently and reliably and have a reasonable product and product market for your goods and services.

Ways to market on the Internet

There are many different ways of marketing over the internet. Internet Marketing differs from the traditional marketing in many ways. Before the advent of e-commerce, people used to use Newspapers, TV, Radio and Pamphlets & Brochures to advertise their businesses. Now in the e-commerce world there are lots of new ways of advertising goods, ideas and services. A few of the major Internet marketing methods include Bulk Emailing, Banner Exchange Programmes, Search Engines, Sponsored Links, Cookies and the naughty Ad-wares Here is a short detail of each of them :

• Bulk Emailing is the process of collecting a whole lot of email addresses of different people and organisations and sending a pre-formatted advertising/marketing message to all of them in one go using software.
• Banner Exchange is the way of advertising your products and services by exchanging a banner with another website with the advertisement message on it. Exchange programmes are often called Affiliate Marketing.
• Links work pretty much the same way other than the fact that links are normally text based while banners are in other image or animation formats. In October 1994, HotWired, Wired Magazine's former online counterpart, made history by placing the first banner ad on its site. It measured 468 x 60 pixels, was purchased by AT&T, and read, "Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will."
• Search Engines are one of the major and effective ways of advertisement on the internet. Google is one of the most popular search engines to advertise on.. Search Engines charge Pay-Per-Click.
• Many e-commerce organisations use cookies to store and collect information about individual customer likings, surfing habits and other customisation options. New browsers now provide option to accept, partially accept and fully refuse any cookies.
• Ad-ware software have been in the market since quite a few years now and these software actually targets different users through IP addresses and other penetration methods and protocols and make changes into their OS, so that the Ad-ware always comes up on their screens with the advertisement messages. Pop-ups is the term specifically used for such activities.

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