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Celebrating A Decade Of Online Marketing

Yes, it has been ten successful years of online marketing in the E-world. Many small companies have made it real big in this online world, by applying different marketing strategies and techniques.

However, what I have seen in these ten years of time is that originality and simplicity survives, just like the Mona Lisa's smile.

So I have decided to take your minds on a way back machine and look into how far we have reached in the Internet marketing arena. So fasten your seat belts and hang on to your eyeballs, as I take you right from the start to the current situations prevailing in the Internet marketing world.

Starting Point: Affiliate marketing, Banner adds, Classified Adds (1995)

* Who hasn't heard of Amazon.com, the biggest giant of Affiliate marketing technology. Amazon.com started with this technology in the year 1995 and is now a multi billion-dollar company with the biggest affiliate marketing network on the entire web.

Soon many companies adopted this technology and were very successful. Affiliate marketing involves selling your product to the normal users by a third party who are known as "affiliate marketers". These resellers sell your product for a timely commission.

* Now coming to the banner ads, it was also considered as a good marketing technology in order to increase the sales of your product. Banner ads, which are small graphical images, display the ad for your product. Many huge sites like Yahoo and MSN use "Banner Advertising" and in the process lure in customers to buy their products.

* Classified Ads on the other hand were also successful but had some drawbacks. Like a huge number of marketers submitting their ads on large portal websites, wouldn't get the notice of potential buyers easily. Later, it became highly unprofessional by the Internet marketing gurus, to display classified ads.

Next Stop: Search Engine Optimization, E- mail marketing (1998)

* Whoever invented the search engine technology, would be getting a million thanks for what he did. Without the search engines, your site would be lost in the no-man's land. Search engines generate almost 70% of targeted web traffic for your website. According to a recent survey, it reveals that, the number of searches done on Google crosses 500 million people per day. So now think of the power of these search engines and how much traffic they can generate for your website. It all depends on how you do your search engine placement and how you make your keywords work for you.

* Coming to email marketing, the focus of e-marketing is shifting more and more towards the use of emails. For acquiring and retaining customers, email is ideal. Offering an interactive, low cost solution, this medium of marketing is more flexible and gives the marketer an opportunity to build a strong relationship with it's customers.

When people switch on their computer, the first thing most will do is, checking their email. Email marketing can be a fantastic way of staying in touch with your customer base and making an impression on new customers. Whether it is simply a welcome message, a promotional offer, a fortnightly newsletter or quarterly company magazine delivered into your customer's inbox. Email marketing increases and maintains product awareness. But good email marketing is also selective. If you start spamming your customers with junk mail every day or sell your customer list to an advertising firm, then email marketing will work against your business.

Last Stop: RSS (Real Simple Syndication) (2003)

"RSS" stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a standard for publishing regular updates to web-based content. Using this standard, web publishers provide updates, such as the latest news headlines, special announcements, press releases or web log postings. Since it's increasingly challenging to reach the inbox of your users, with Spam filters, ISP black lists, abandoned email addresses, etc. I'm sure RSS will emerge as the preferred tool for communicating with the normal consumers as well as your affiliates; it is a one-hand solution and the best of all.

RSS is a special Internet tool that gets your content delivered directly to your recipients, without any Spam filters to get in the way. And that's just one of the things where it can help you save the losses, which you can experience in Internet marketing and publishing. On top of this, it's easy to use ... and is very cost effective.

Syed Ibrahim manages the marketing for http://www.rapidfeeds.com - A Free online service, which helps anyone, create, edit, publish and track RSS feeds online. Sign Up for your FREE account on his site and learn how to Create and Publish your own RSS Feeds today!