Everyone might have noticed Pay-per-click ads in Google or yahoo that display the ads intermingled with another related content which is known as contextual advertising. If you are selling digital cameras online, you would consider placing an ad on a website that offers electronic product reviews. Furthermore, you would also like your ad to be displayed on Google. When the keyword „buy digital camera“ is typed into the search bar, the first option is often referred to as „contextual web marketing“ since your ad shows up next to contextually relevant articles, and the second is known as „search engine marketing“.

The most simplistic of all these methods is allowing advertising to be displayed on a web site that is the domain of the affiliate. Typically, the advertisement will allow the prospective customer to click on and be redirected to a page or site where there is more information and the chance to order the good or service in question. In return for providing a doorway for that customer to discover the product of service, the affiliate is rewarded with compensation, usually via electronic transfer or check.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising [or search engine marketing (SEM) as it is sometime known] is a popular way to buy visitors (traffic) to your site.The popularity of PPC advertising has skyrocketed in the past several years in part because you can easily track the return on your marketing investment and also due to awareness created by the success of Google and Yahoo!, which run the two largest PPC advertising networks, which link traffic buyers (advertisers) to traffic sellers

If you had a choice between getting a full-page story written about your company or paying for a full-page advertisement for your products/services in a publication, which would you choose? Any marketer will tell you how to go with the story that someone else writes (or seems to write) about your company because it’s more credible in the eyes of prospects than if you buy an ad, which is seen as blatant self-promotion. Just as with marketing in the offline world, you should spend a significant amount of time on public relations, no matter what your product is all about.

Affiliate marketing is all about getting attention for a good or service by utilizing online resources that are managed by partners or affiliates. Social book marking is defined as: „Social bookmarking is an activity performed over a computer network that allows users to save and categorize a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others. Users may also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others – a personal knowledge management tool