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With the advent of Web 2.0 social networking sites and interactive online browsing and shopping, many more people are turning to the internet to market their business. But what is internet marketing exactly?

Internet marketing is basically promoting products and services that you have to offer, whether free or paid, via the world wide web.

Generally, the sales and marketing principles that apply offline in ‘traditional’ businesses still apply to online marketing, such as building a relationship with the customer, offering a good value product/service at a fair price and selling the benefits (the ’sizzle’) rather than the features (the ’sausage’).

However, there are a few fundamental differences with marketing online, most of which offer distinct benefits over offline marketing. A fantastic advantage is that costs can be very low and market leverage very high…

Take this scenario: If you’re in offline telesales selling an insurance product then you can only speak to one person at a time, so to reach 100 people, you need to make 100 phone calls, in fact probably a lot more than that as many people won’t be available to take the call. Added to that, you’d have to repeat the work you did today again tomorrow, in order to continue to see the same results. Compare this to an online sales letter. You may spend a whole day or more writing the sales ‘copy’ letter to promote your product or service but then, once you’ve uploaded it to a website and drive traffic (i.e. people searching online) to that page, it can ’speak’ to many tens, hundreds or thousands of people at a time, without requiring you to be there and on an ongoing basis. This offers massive leverage.

It may cost you a few hundred dollars to produce and host an online sales letter and you may have to pay some advertising costs, but compared to the hours upon hours that you’d have to spend selling one-to-one offline, it’s a lot less and has the potential for many, many more sales.

Every heard of the phrase ‘make money while you sleep’? This is the online marketing dream catchphrase – the idea that you have on online ’salesperson’ working for you in the form of a promotional webpage or sales letter that communicates your message to your potential customers all round the clock and to all people across the globe and you could be in bed fast asleep

So really to answer the question ‘what is internet marketing?’ the first answer would have to be marketing leverage via the world wide web.

Laura Wilson is an internet entrepreneur and owner/publisher of iLearn Internet Marketing. For a completely free 126-page eBook ‘Innovative Internet Marketing Strategy’ and 5 MP3 audios (over 1.5 hours) go to http://www.iLearnInternetMarketing.com

Article Source: ArticleSpan