Such customer-seller communication is called marketing. Marketing involves sending messages to the targeted audience of a business, with the aim to inform them about a certain product that is up for sale. Marketing utilizes various techniques, either offline or online.

The Internet has given marketers an avenue to easily and quick reach their targeted audiences because of its power to link people past several barriers like distance, language, etc. Because of this, marketers have developed or adopted existing marketing techniques to adjust to the Web.

Effective communication is not the only advantage that online marketing offers. Internet marketing is also relatively inexpensive compared to traditional marketing methods.

There are many kinds of online marketing techniques, and include the well-known viral marketing and pay per click marketing techniques. For all their advantages, all these techniques require careful planning and even careful execution in order to harness their power for your business? advantage.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing has been around ever since the Internet was first introduced. First it involved emails and now, with the Web 2.0 phenomenon, viral marketing has branched out to social networking websites.

So what is viral marketing?

Viral marketing is the technique which takes advantage of the ?word of mouth? phenomenon in its campaigns. So, basically, it relies on users passing news about their product offerings in order to gather traffic and potential customers. Because it needs positive opinion to gain attention, a telemarketer needs to tailor its information to make it appealing to Internet users and gain conversions or have visitors turn into customers.

One of the best examples of an effective viral marketing campaign is Hotmail. In the beginning of its inception, Hotmail inserted a link to the bottom of every email sent by its users. In a sense, although they did not intend it, these users were telling the world about Hotmail, and inviting others to sign up for a free account with the service.

Hotmail is now one of the biggest free web-based email providers, and one of the longest running alongside Yahoo! Mail and a few others.

Pay per Click Marketing

Pay per click is another mode of marketing using Internet that has given promising results back to businessmen.

PPC makes use of link advertisements that appear alongside search engine results. These ads are posted by businessmen, who pay for every instance that a user clicks on it and is redirected to the enterprise's website. They are tagged by keywords, which determine when these ads should appear. Thus, they show up when a user makes a search for these keywords and other related terms.

Compared to viral marketing, PPC offers marketers a flexible and affordable way of reaching out to their targeted audienc0es. Because they appear on search engine results, marketers are also assured that only those who are interested in their products see and click their ads.