Articles and e-zines are two great Internet marketing tools to complement your online advertising efforts. If you sell the kind of technical product that needs to be explained at length, using articles and e-zines may be more effective vehicles than advertising in promoting your product. Articles and e-zines give you the freedom to go into great detail about your product or service. They are excellent selling tools.

In article marketing, the Web site owner prepares short articles about his product or business. He then makes these available for free on the Internet or distributes them to the many article sites online. As the Web site owner, your goal is to write articles that have real value. You should ask yourself, 'Are these the kinds of articles that Web users will want to search for and read?'

Like you, Web site owners are always looking for content, especially the kind of content that their users will find valuable. If the content is free, that makes them all the more valuable. And that's why you have a good chance of getting Web sites to publish your articles -- as long as you give them real value. And as an unspoken rule, the Web site has to publish your business information, usually with a link to your Web site. That's free advertising for you, too.

For Internet marketing of this nature, you should write an article or e-zine about what you know. Not only will this establish you as an expert, it will also help drive traffic to your site and increase your visibility. For example, if you're a Web site designer, you could write something like, 'How to Use Design to Make Your Site Stand Out.' A producer of sun tan lotion could write something like '10 Ways to Avoid Sun Burn at the Beach' and distribute the article or e-zine series during summer.

Remember that you want to establish credibility, so make your articles as factual and well written as possible. As an added bonus, your articles may even get new clients for you. Truly compelling articles can make your prospects visit your store or write you an e-mail.

This type of Internet marketing is a big advantage for for another reason: articles can help your search engine optimization. If your articles have strategically placed keywords and phrases, they can boost your ranking on search engines. Obviously, if your Web site is prominent on search engines, this will bring more visitors to your site.

If you have the type of site that lends itself to a host of Internet marketing articles, e-zine may be more effective for you than articles. In Internet marketing, an e-zine or electronic magazine is distributed regularly to subscribers via e-mail. Aside from promoting your site and products, the e-zine can even be an income-generating Internet marketing tool of its own if you can attract paid subscribers. You can also use e-zines as 'teasers' for your site by offering just enough information to entice them to visit your site.

As Internet marketing tools, articles and e-zines can be applied to virtually any product or service. You will be surprised at how effective they can work for you.

In the world of Internet marketing, eBay.com was the first ever online auction and shopping Web site. It is still the world's number one online auction site today and the best place on the Internet where people and corporations can buy and sell their products and services in a global setting. Without a doubt, eBay is a heavyweight when it comes to Internet marketing.

In 1995, EBay first made its presence felt in the United States, where many great Internet marketing tools originate. From there, eBay has expanded its reach to cover more than 20 countries worldwide, including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Today, eBay has expanded its business beyond the online auction and now owns other major Internet marketing companies such as PayPal and Skype.

At the outset, eBay was known as AuctionWeb and was only a small part of a bigger site owned by computer programmer Pierre Omidyar. The first thing ever sold was a laser pointer. It went for the princely sum of $14.83, which isn't bad, considering that it was broken to begin with. The sale was so curious that Omidyar called up the winning bidder to ask him what he was going to do with a broken pointer. The buyer explained simply that, "I'm a collector of broken laser pointers." That story has since been part of Internet marketing lore and just goes to show that you can buy and sell practically anything on eBay.

Barely a year after its birth, eBay was able to sign its first major deal with a third party, Electronic Travel Auction. Ebay did a magnificent job of selling plane tickets and other travel products online. It soon started creating waves in the Internet marketing realm.

In September 1997, the company officially changed its name to eBay, a name that was patterned Echo Bay Technology Group, Omidyar's consulting firm. Omidyar actually tried to get the name EchoBay.com first but it was already taken. A year later, the company went public and Omdiyar became a billionaire literally overnight.

Today, millions of products and services are listed on eBay and millions more are bought and sold on a daily basis. On eBay, you can probably find anything that you'll ever need, including computers, appliances, furniture, collectibles, even cars and other vehicles. EBay also has a wide range of services being offered in its listings. In 2004, the company introduced its Business & Industry category and now sells a wide variety of industrial supplies.

If you're looking to buy or sell novelty items, you can do that on eBay too. EBay has some rare and valuable gems as well as thousands of damaged and dusty gizmos reminiscent of the broken laser pointer that it sold way back in 1996.

EBay is a one-stop shopping paradise for anything and everything on the Internet. It's a valuable addition to any Internet marketing plan.

Affiliate marketing is one of the most effective Internet marketing tools for generating online traffic. It's a great way for one site to piggyback on the popularity of another site to attract visitors, for a fee of course.

There are two key entities in affiliate marketing ' the advertiser and the affiliate merchant. The affiliate merchant is the guy with the popular Web site and impressive traffic. For a fee, he will carry the banner ads, links or content of the advertiser's Web site to help increase traffic to the advertiser's site. The affiliate merchant earns from advertising revenues based on how much traffic he can create for the advertiser.

If you're a small or medium-size business with only moderate sales activity on your site, you might want to try affiliate marketing with a major Web site to boost your traffic and jump-start your sales. In this type of Internet marketing, the main thing is that you tap a popular site which has the same type of visitors that you want to target. On the other hand, if you're a relatively popular Web site, why not offer your affiliate marketing services to less popular sites who have the same target audience as you.

How well does affiliate marketing work as an Internet marketing tool? Well, let's look at a real-life example.

You may know Amazon.com as a leading seller of books and other publications. Well, in affiliate marketing circles, Amazon.com is better known as the granddaddy of it all ' the company that got the ball rolling as the first truly major affiliate program.

Amazon unveiled its initial affiliate program model way back in 1996. Here's how it worked: Web site owners who wanted to make extra money (and who doesn't, right?) simply signed up to Amazon's affiliate program. In exchange, Amazon would provide them with their ad banners, links and other Internet marketing materials which the site owner would then place on his site. Every time a visitor clicks on these links, he is brought to Amazon's site. If the visitor buys a book or any other Amazon product, the Web site where the visitor clicked the link to get to Amazon earns a commission.

That affiliate marketing program has served as the Internet marketing model for countless other Web sites today. And how has Amazon fared with its affiliate marketing? Quite well, actually. Over 450,000 Web sites are now partners in Amazon's affiliate program.

As you can see, there are many ways to implement an affiliate marketing program. For instance, Web sites for cars and credit cards pay its affiliates simply for clicks, not sales. It's also possible for affiliates to earn per subscriber or per-thousand visits (CPM). The main thing is that affiliate marketing is a pay-for-performance scheme. As long as your site has a significant number of visitors, then you have a good chance of making money as an affiliate merchant.

Today, affiliate marketing is an essential component of many Internet marketing programs. There's absolutely no reason why affiliate marketing can't do wonders for you, too.

Internet marketing through Web syndication is simply making one Web site's content available to other Web sites. For instance, if you have a very popular blog, you can have this licensed so that other sites may also run it. Web syndication is especially popular for newspaper columns and TV programs.

You can earn from Web syndication by making your feeds available to other sites for a fee. If you're an expert in your field, this approach can be a viable income earner for you. Other sites with similar content will want to keep themselves current by using your feeds, forum posts or late-breaking news.

As an Internet marketing tool, Web syndication traces its roots to news and blog sites. But syndication has exploded in popularity since its infancy. These days, millions of Web sites are into syndication and regularly disseminate news feeds that focus on their latest product offerings or blog posts.

Web syndication works as an Internet marketing tool because it provides benefits to both the Web site that provides information and the sites that carry it. For the info providers, syndication increases their visibility on other online platforms and increases online traffic. It's virtually a form of free advertising. Meanwhile, for the sites that carry the information, syndication provides fresh content and greater depth to make the site more appealing to Web users.

When it comes to Web syndication, the basic Internet marketing tool is RSS, an XML-based format that was invented by Netscape. RSS has many uses but it is most commonly used for distributing news online. Let's say you want other sites to carry your content, you simply create an RSS document, register it with an RSS publisher and other sites can simply pick up your content.

RSS is also used for other Internet marketing forms such as product information, corporate information, project updates, event listings, and even excerpts from discussion forums.

RSS is easy to remember, especially if you think of it as Really Simple Syndication. There are actually many versions of RSS, including RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9, RSS 1.0) and Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0). There's also RSS 0.91, the most popular RSS version, and RSS 2.0, the latest version.

If the content you put up for syndication can be frequently updated, such as news, weather or pop music, then Web feeds are the ideal Internet marketing vehicle for you. In this instance, you publish a feed link which interested Web sites will register to their aggregator program. Every time you have updated content, these Web sites' aggregator can notify Web masters about the new content or download it automatically. Since Web feeds are written in computer language and not human language, they're easy to transfer automatically from site to site without human intervention.

Web feeds provide sites with numerous advantages, foremost of which is that the sites no longer have to actively search for content since the feeds are delivered automatically.

Web syndication is a terrific Internet marketing tool to have. Examine your Web site and see if syndication can work for you.