A method of promotion that used to be the hot new thing in marketing is internet marketing advertising through banner ads. Banner ads haven’t gone away, of course. You still see them every time you’re online, unless you’re luckily using software that blocks them. But I’ll bet if you stop and think of all the banner ads you saw during the short period of time when you were online recently, all of those companies advertising in those banner ads are huge companies with vast advertising budgets. Few small business owners could afford the banner ad rates for something like the spot at the top of your mailbox when you check your Yahoo! Mail.

Internet marketing advertising with pay-per-click programs has also changed the face of online promotion. Now, a business owner can have a small ad displayed through a vast program of providing ads on various websites, and be charged a certain fee each time a consumer clicks on the link. It’s essentially paying for traffic, and the traffic is targeted in that the ad should only show on a relevant website. If a website is all about guitars, for instance, and the website owner is in a pay-per-click program, each time someone clicks on one of the guitar-related advertisements displayed, it earns him revenue. And costs the business owner.

Another thing that’s changed the internet marketing advertising landscape recently is SEO, or search engine optimization. Websites used to stuff themselves full of keywords to get hits for a variety of difference searches, whether or not the content was really on their website. Now, keyword “stuffing” as it’s called can actually get a site blackballed from a search. This keeps web searchers from entering keywords like “apple pie recipe” and getting search engine listings with an adult site at position #3 and a website full of stolen software activation codes at #5.

Now during internet marketing advertising, websites have to use keywords correctly to show their content is expert content and not just a list of random keywords most commonly searched that day. The growing sophistication of the search engines makes “cheating” to get the most hits a foolish thing to do since the engine can actually block your site from coming up in the results. Proper search engine optimization and keyword use can put your site in the top few results, though, and get you more valuable traffic.

When you get that traffic, you have to convert browsers to buyers, and the best way to do that is to make sure they see your product or service several times. One of the best methods of internet marketing advertising is by advertising to people who have given you permission to send them emails through an opt-in list. Visitors to your website will be enticed to sign up for your mailing list by you offering something valuable to them for free for doing so. Then you have their permission do some of your most effective internet marketing advertising--sending them very targeted ads.