Online Marketing is marketing on the Internet. It is a type of e-marketing, which in turn is a type of e-commerce. While at first the confusion of experiments, beta versions of websites, search engines and other online devices cause marketers to consider this world of the Internet unknowable and perhaps too unpredictable, there is now a growing body of work to which marketers are now paying attention in order to develop online marketing programs. The most known tools to marketers in the mid 2000s are currently tools grouped into 2 fields: online advertising and search engine optimization. E-marketing tools used to drive visitors to a web site include:
- Pay per click
- Search engine optimization
- Press releases
- Web banners
- Link campaign
- E-mail and Newsletters
- Viral marketing and Word of mouth
- Affiliate marketing
- blogs
- wikis
- news headlines carried by Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
- discussion boards
- encyclopedic sites
However, marketing online is simply not offline marketing applied to a new online world. Online marketing has a slightly different character and purpose as indicated in such seminal works as The cluetrain manifesto, Purple cow, Permission marketing, and other texts of smaller nature compiled in blogs and news sites.