Before the dawn of Internet marketing, there was direct response marketing. It involved sending long sales letters by postal mail to customers about a certain product; the direct response marketer wanted the customer to fill out the order form and mail it back to the address posted with his/her order information included.

This was (and still is) a very effective form of marketing, but was (and still is) quite expensive - sending out just 1,000 letters can cost you at least $2,000. It also takes good to great sales copy in order to convert those prospects into customers; if your sales copy falters, your financial loss will be that much larger, as you won't recover much of the cost from sending out those letters.

With the advent of the Internet, a new direct response marketing was born. Using the Internet, marketers could now quickly and inexpensively send thousands of emails at the click of a button to potential customers, instead of relying on slower and more expensive snail mail.

Prospects can open the email, read the sales letter of the website you are promoting, and order the product using the "order button" on the website.

And while traditional products, like books and CDs, can still be sold over the Internet, a new type of product also emerged - digital products, including ebooks, MP3 files, and software programs. These digital products can be sent to the customers immediately after payment, just by redirecting them to the download area where they can download those products.

Due to the emergence of digital products, people's appetite for instant information continues to increase. The power of the Internet allows information marketers to be able to fill that need instantaneously.

Information marketers who do business on the Internet (a.k.a. Internet marketing) have great advantages over those information marketers who only do business offline:

- You can set up an online sales page in just a few hours.

- You can deliver the product(s) to your customers instantly after they complete their transactions.

- You can create digital products at far less cost than traditional books and CDs.

- You get your payment before you send out your product(s).

- You can automate the online sales process, allowing it to work for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Orders can come in anytime, even while you are asleep or away from your computer.

Conversely, offline marketers have to

- spend more in order to create their books and CDs.

- have to have retail space to store their inventory.

- advertise in magazines, newspapers, and other print media.

- have someone working for them to make sales, whether it's themselves (costing them time) or someone else working for them (costing them money.)

Online marketing is also becoming a richer industry because more and more people are coming online each year to make their lives easier. Tens of billions of dollars are spent online each year. The amount spent will keep growing each year for the foreseeable future, as Internet marketing isn't likely to go away or be surpassed by anything anytime soon. This is evident by the growing number of emails we get in our inboxes on how to solve every problem we have, from Internet marketing to weight loss.

Thanks to Internet marketing's accessibility to every one with an Internet connection, lower costs of doing business, and quicker delivery of products, it has become the "direct response marketing" of the 21st century.