The Internet became increasingly popular in the late 1990’s in what is known as the dot-com boom. Day by day, millions of surfers started to get in touch with this new innovation, including many companies. Websites from these companies started appearing online, in order to advertise their products and/or services, and so Internet Marketing was born.

ADVANTAGES

      • Internet Marketing is very fast.

      • Online businesses can be open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year.

      • Spreading the message to customers is as easy and as fast as a few clicks away.

      • Updating customers about information can be done with just one e-mail.

      • You can deliver products straight to your clients, such as newspapers or online magazines which can be sold           through new digital distribution channels.

      • The Internet can provide worldwide coverage.

      • People can interact with your business, from the comfort of their homes.

DISADVANTAGES

      • There is a lot of competition online, because millions of people are using the internet.

      • Web visitors have learned to anticipate things being free.

      • There can be risks of information overload, due to the abundance of information now available online.

      • The Internet can open new windows of opportunity for scammers.

SIGNIFICANCE OF INTERNET MARKETING

Internet is playing a very essential role in modern business. Many people are now using the internet, and many of them are now also using it to support their own product or services as well as their everyday lives. In fact, it has turned into one of the most important parts of every business. Internet marketing is the ideal and best way to make your products or services known to the millions of potential customers worldwide.

BARRIERS OF INTERNET MARKETING

There can also be barriers to successful internet marketing. Since internet marketing is online, you definitely have to produce a high-speed computer that will meet the demand of your consumers and the companies affiliated with you. High-speed computers can give you fast access to all the people who want to get in touch with you.

Also, there can exist barriers to entry into the internet market, as to set up an online business you can need to rent or buy web space upon which to store your company’s website, secure domain names for your company’s website and ensure that your website can be easily found using the commonly used functions on the Internet, such as search engines.

This can mean that more time has to be spent ensuring that websites made are optimized for search engines, in order for them to rank well on the corresponding search pages. There can also be a lot of other influences to take into account when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

EFFECTS ON INDUSTRY

Internet marketing has had a large impact on industry, since billions of people now have access to the internet. An example of this is in the field of banking, where there is now online banking, which, for many customers is preferable because they consider it faster and more convenient than going to their chosen banks branches. In fact, in the United States alone, over 150 million people bank online, being one of the primary reasons for the fast-growing pace of the online banking industry, which has seen new forms of online banking emerge, such as Paypal.

In the advertising industry, internet marketing has also had a huge impact. Many technology companies now advertise their products and services online. In fact, it is expected that by 2013, over $26 billion will be spent on internet marketing in North America alone.

In the political industry (yes I’m calling it an industry), electoral candidates now hold their campaigns on the internet to reach their target voters. A very good example of this is the recent presidential election campaign of Barack Obama, were the campaign spread across the internet covering popular social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube (the online video sharing website).

CONCLUSION

Internet marketing has become the primary means of commercial marketing today, even taking over mediums such as television and radio. For any modern day business to successfully expand, especially over an international market, it needs to take Internet Marketing into account. Internet Marketing can now, quite literally, make or break a business.

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Now that we see what a brand is and how a brand relates to people, we can now get a good understanding on how a brand can relate to a business as well. When you start a company, especially a company that has a product or service that is similar to another product or service, you have no trust behind your brand at all. From day one the thing that is most important to your business is building that brand up. You do that by being a honest person to deal with and making sure that if you have employees that they are the same. Your employees, especially early on, can affect your brand just as much as you do. This is why you must have a good business culture that reflects in all parts of your business.  You must also have an excellent product that people feel comfortable in recommending. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the very best but it has to be very good.  Slowly but surely this starts to help build your brand into a powerful component of your business, a lot of the times it becomes the most important part of your business. The stronger your brand, the more you can charge because your customers know that they are getting a sense of reliability with that service. People are willing to pay premium for that reliability.

There are no shortcuts in building your brand up in the eyes of the consumer. The only way to build your brand is to have an excellent product or at the very least an excellent service. Sometimes your product might be only just as good as your competitor. In cases such as these you can still make your brand a stronger brand by having better customer service or being more reliable and on time. It’s little things like this that helps build a brand and you must remember to always take advantage of that. Remember your brand can lose favor-ability twice as fast as it took to gain it.

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A study conducted by Hofstede entitled “Dimensions of Culture”, identifies the cultural influences to web designs. He mentioned specific terms that became the point of comparisons. Discussing these terms would bring us to a technical discussion, which may be very hard to condense. Different countries gave emphasis to things differently. There are highly liberated cultures, while others are tight, reserved and conservative. Some are family oriented, while others are group focused. There are cultures that prioritize philosophies and value, while there are some who are in search for truth. These differences are vividly shown with the web design of these different countries.

Countries who give high regard to authority may produce a web design, which reflects the name and logos of the authoritative body. They would highlight the power of their leaders. On the other side, countries who value equality and less of a boss – subordinate relationship; may have web designs that reflect friendship and camaraderie.

There are certain cultures who cannot tolerate risk taking actions. While others believe that risk takers have higher chance in becoming successful in the future. This is reflected on the navigating toolbars, content and choices in a website design. Cultures that promote risk taking activities produce complex content, choices and navigating toolbars animation. Web designers belonging to cultures that prohibit risky activities will produce a very simple website layout and design.

An interesting citation on the said study was between the Asians as a very philosophical and value oriented culture, and Western countries who promote the search for truth. Asian culture considers patience as a very important value in life. Asians are fond of creating web designs that require patience in navigating the icons and other elements. Westerners on the other hand create designs that features direct realization of the goal, with its clean and functional layout.

Standards for a web design are created and taught in formal schools, but these are not able to consider the cultural differences around the globe. Considering these cultural influences in web design as another factor in web creation, is a big challenge for the web masterminds to take. It requires a genius that would reconcile these huge differences. It would be just like professing world peace. This may be impossible as of now, but with the changes and innovations of today, this may be possible. There will come a time that these rich cultures will meet at one point, in the World Wide Web. This major twist in the history of web design requires great effort. Culture as a treasure of every nation is well respected and valued, so a careful study is to be made in realizing this goal.

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The first website on my list is adobe kuler, which is located at kuler.adobe.com. It enables you to create colour schemes or use colour schemes made by others.

When creating colour schemes with kuler, you can choose to either make the colour scheme from a colour, or to create it from a picture, both of which can be very useful. The option to create a scheme from a colour is able to accept colours from hexadecimal codes (hex), as well as colours selected from its colour wheel, and it then generates complementing colours depending on what rule you have it set to follow, which ranges from analogous schemes to your own custom colour rules.

Adobe kuler also has a section called “pulse”, which is very useful in helping you find popular colours in certain countries, or even in certain seasons. It is a good source of inspiration when looking for that perfect shade. This site also has an interesting area for community spotlights, which can make an interesting read.

The second website on my list is a part of 2createawebsite.com, which can be located at www.2createawebsite.com/build/hex-colors.html. It has two very useful utilities on it, which can help you when coming up with a colour scheme.

The first useful utility on this page is a colour selector, which enables you to find a nice colour and shade, which it then outputs as a hex code, which you can either use in your design software such as Photoshop straight away, or you can use that hex code in the second useful utility on this page, which will take your colours hex code, and generate a full colour scheme from it, which it will then give you multiple hex codes for, for use in your design software.

I tend to use this site when I have less time, and so can’t sit on a site like adobe kuler for too long.
The third website on my list, while similar to the second, enables you to do practically the same thing, but faster. It is a part of the e-infotainment website, and can be located at e-infotainment.com/trixapps/trixcg/trixcgv1/.

Just as before, this site allows you to find a colour, and then get its hex code, or the hex codes of a matching scheme, but unlike before, rather than separately type in the first hex code into the second part, this website updates the matching colour scheme as you are still picking your base colour. I also use this one when trying to be a bit faster, and also like the way in which it also allows you to change the type of colour scheme, similar to in adobe kuler, but within a much simpler and faster user interface.

The fourth website on my list takes a completely different approach to the first three. This site is for when you are either looking for colour inspiration, or when you are feeling lucky. This site generates a random colour scheme for you to look at, and you can keep on asking it for random colour schemes until you find one which you are happy with. This site can be located at www.colortoy.net, and is also available as an iPhone app.
I find this site somewhat useful when looking for quick colour inspiration, which is likely to be a tad more unique than the user-generated ones on adobe kuler.

The fifth and final website on this list is a pretty cool site, even though it is currently still in beta stages. It is a site which enables you to get a daily colour scheme, to help with your inspiration, and so is appropriately called dailycolorscheme, and is located at beta.dailycolorscheme.com.

I hope that you find this selection of sites as useful as I do, and remember to also think about colour psychology while choosing your colour schemes when appropriate, which is a topic which I plan to write about in the near future if you keep an eye on my blog .

If there are any websites which you feel should be included, please feel free to share them in the comments.

EDIT: Someone contacted me via email with a very good suggestion as an addition, which I thought deserved to be added, which is a site called color scheme designer at www.colorschemedesigner.com .

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Twitter Marketing works the best when it is mixed with other social networking campaigns. MySpace and Facebook are also great places to find targeted traffic. If you already have an account on MySpace or Facebook, let your friends there know that you are now on Twitter and hopefully a good chunk of those friends will start to follow you on there as well.

You’ll defiantly want to make sure that your messages are unique, fresh, and frequent. This is the biggest hurdle for most Twitter Marketers. The best advice for writing your messages so that they don’t look like an advertisement or spam is to make them sound genuine or maybe even give a testimonial about how great this service really is.

To generate more followers on Twitter, you simply need to search for other members with similar interests to the types of products you are selling. Are you trying to sell eBooks about freelance web design? Start following people with “web design” in their profile. This method of getting friends works with virtually much any product or service.

In a nutshell Twitter Marketing is very easy once you get the hang of it and have established a long list of followers. All things considered it is probably the cheapest and simplest way to drive targeted traffic to your sites, ads and affiliate offers.

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