There are some things you should know before getting started with online marketing. The good news is that Internet Marketing has grown rapidly over the last few years and there are many tools that provide great opportunities for small and large businesses alike.

Before we dive into how you can use the Web to grow your business,  it’s worth getting some terminology under our belts, so let’s define some main terms.

Online marketing deals with websites and Web pages, search engines, email and the Internet as the basis of the World Wide Web. All of these areas are used to advertise and sell goods and services. Wikipedia provides definitions for some of the main terms you will bump into when talking about the web and internet marketing:

The World Wide Web ("WWW" or simply the "Web") is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents that runs over the Internet.

The hypertext documents, or Web pages, reside on Web servers - special computers that receive requests for Web pages and can "serve" them to whoever asks for them

Each Web server, or host, has its unique global address used to find it over the Internet. This address is called an "IP address". A typical IP address looks like four numbers separated by dots. For example, 63.146.123.0 is the address of the server where google.com is situated.

Each server can hold one or many websites. A website (or Web site) is a collection of Web pages, typically bound to a particular domain name or sub domain on the World Wide Web on the Internet. A website is identified uniquely by its domain name, e.g. www.flipwire.co.uk

Domain names are translated into IP addresses by the global DNS - domain name system. That is, when you type www.flipwire.co.uk  into your browser, it sends a DNS request, and receives the IP address of the server where www.flipwire.co.uk is hosted. The browser then connects to that server directly and asks for BrowseWorks home page.

When a new business is born on the Internet, or when an established brick and mortar enterprise goes online, it starts by creating a website. This is done by purchasing a domain name from an organization accredited to sell domain names, e.g. 123-reg.com or register.com. Also, some hosting space must be purchased, so that there's a server ready to store the website. Then, several Web pages are created and linked to each other to make up this website. Finally, the website is linked to the domain name so that everyone can type this domain name in a browser and view these pages. There are many options for creating a web-site from a free web-site providing limited functionality and a few pages to a very complex all singing all dancing e-commerce solution.

FlipWire is focussed on helping Small to medium businesses and independent professionals get access to the full, rich capability the web has to offer in a cost effective and scalable way.

The internet has had a massive effect on modern life. Since starting to gain momentum in the early 1990’s it’s had an impact not unlike the industrial revolution. As the technology has matured to a form where consumers use it every day – the opportunity to use the internet for marketing and supplying services to businesses and consumers alike has grown with it. In fact Internet Marketing has developed at an astounding rate, and web-sites have transformed from simple text only pages, that were little more than electronic product brochures to rich and varied sites which are self contained businesses in their own right.

A complete industry has grown out of the need to be able to use the internet effectively to reach and service customers. We must not forget however this industry is still relatively new and continues to change at a rate that can make your head spin. As such Internet Marketing can still be viewed as much of an art as it is a science, and can appear mysterious to the uninitiated.

Simply put, Internet Marketing means using the internet advertise and sell goods and services. There are many elements that can be used to achieve this, including Banner and Text advertising, Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, Interactive advertising, Affiliate marketing and Search Engine Marketing.

Through this blog, we’ll explore each of these in turn and attempt to demystify them, enabling businesses to quickly grasp the key concepts and understand how to leverage the amazing resource of the internet to accelerate growth of their business.

In the first step we’ll discuss Search Engine Marketing, as a specific tool for Internet Marketing. Search Engine Marketing (or SEM for short) encompasses Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC). The main purpose of this activity is to drive traffic to your web-site from search engines, and paid advertising. In this series of posts, we’ll discover the main principles for optimizing your site for Search engines, and how to use these tools to build traffic and improve your ranking on the main search engine results pages …. Stay tuned!