Business models

Internet marketing is associated with several business models:

• e-commerce — this is where goods are sold directly to consumers (B2C) or businesses (B2B)

• Publishing — this is the sale of advertising

• lead-based websites — this is an organization that generates value by acquiring sales leads from its website

• affiliate marketing — this is the process in which a product or service developed by one person is sold by other active sellers for a share of profits. The owner of the product normally provide some marketing material (sales letter, affiliate link, tracking facility).

• local internet marketing - this is the process of a locally based company traditionally selling belly to belly and utilizing the Internet to find and nurture relationships, later to take those relationships offline.

• blackhat marketing - this is a form of internet marketing which employs deceptive, abusive, or less than truthful methods to drive web traffic to a website or affiliate marketing offer. This method sometimes includes spam, cloaking within search engine result pages, or routing users to pages they didn't initially request.