In recent years, the term "internet marketing" has come to refer to a broad range of topics. For many, it means exactly what it says: "internet marketing", in which case it is considered synonymous with "digital marketing" and "online marketing". For others, it has become synonymous with affiliate marketing, information products, and the "making money online" sector. For our purposes, we will err on the side of the former and adopt the following definition:

Internet marketing is the process of generating leads, sales, or brand awareness through the utilization of internet properties and traffic. Typically, this is accomplished through search engine optimization, social media marketing, email marketing, and various forms of paid advertising.

One of the most effective methods to begin learning internet marketing is to break it down into the numerous objectives that a firm may pursue with it. Of course, the ultimate purpose of marketing is income. With that in mind, we may categorize sales as a main objective of internet marketing, and many firms do focus on driving people directly to paid offers whether they are digital product sales pages or physical product pages within an eCommerce store. However, sales remain a distant, long-term goal for many organizations. However, a more prevalent immediate or short-term objective of internet marketing is lead generation. By collecting leads on the internet rather than making individual sales, a business can then use its lead list to market to potential customers for free (or close to free) in the future with the expectation that multiple future sales will increase the average lifetime value of each lead and result in a higher long-term ROI on each dollar spent on marketing.

For an online firm, lead generation may be as simple as developing an email list, possibly with customer names attached. Lead generation for an eCommerce firm or a local "offline" business may also contain actual postal addresses and phone numbers so...