In our modern world of today, marketing is an important tool to attract customers to purchase one’s goods and/or services. Newspapers, television, and radios have been the traditional medias for advertisements for many years. With the emergence of the Internet, marketing has taken a new horizon.

Internet marketing is becoming more and more popular each day. Many different techniques have been adopted by marketers in their desperation to get people to consider purchasing their products and/or services. There are also a number of websites offering marketing services and/or tutorials. Some of them concentrate on getting more visitors to their members’ websites. You may ask if Internet marketing will stay very much the same in the near future or something more exciting will happen. I believe the latter will become true.

Base on my experience in marketing my own websites and products online, this is what I believe will increasingly happen in the area of Internet marketing:

1. Videos will be more widely used to attract potential customers. I do not mean putting videos on sites like Youtube but on those that deal with traffic exchanges. What you will see in such videos are very much the same as the commercials you watch on TV. Some may even contain jingles. The quality of the videos of course depends on the budget and the effort of the businesses that put them on. Already, some websites are using videos to attract customers. The videos will be very attractive to look at, and arouse the interest of many people just like some of those on Youtube. Tutorials and short courses will be conducted to teach the people how to create such videos.

2. Advertisements will also appear in specially highlighted words in e-zine articles. When you place your mouse pointer over a highlighted word, a list of sponsors relating to the word will pop up on your screen. For example, if you place your mouses over the word exchange, you may see something like “The word exchange is sponsored by:” follow by a list of links to sites whose webmasters had entered the keyword exchange.

3. People can download a special software that allows them to choose specific kind of advertisements they want to see. Incentive will be given to those who purchase from the businesses that advertise using the software.

4. Search engines will be more efficient than it is now. It will be common for us to key in a phrase or question rather than keywords to make a search. If we want information on a song but cannot remember its name, we can sing the tune through a microphone to get the search engine to list the websites containing the song. Musicians can advertise their songs on such a search engine.

5. Images have been used for advertising for years. In the future, when you place a move over an image, a new window containing a list of links to websites may pop up on your screen. For example, if you wish to purchase a new home, all you have to do is to place a your mouse over an image of a house, and a list of real estate websites will pop up.

6. Marketers will increasingly advertise on mobile devices in the hope to attract more customers. Perhaps, in the future, people will carry portable electronic shopping guides that allows advertising of some form. The advertisements will have links to specific websites.

7. There will be stricter controls to Internet Marketing to ensure the integrity of the industry. Internet Marketers will have enter their license numbers online before engaging themselves in any marketing activities, and be members of Associations governing Internet Marketing.

8. Advertisements on the Internet will be so much fun to see that it will be very hard to resist them.

Despite of the advancement of technology, marketers still face many challenges and problems. The greatest of these are getting people to view the advertisements in the first place, and complying with the current laws. The advertiser is eager to reach as many people so as to earn as much as possible. The potential customer wishes that there will be less advertisements as he or she finds them annoying. This is why marketers will have to create advertisements that are hard to resist.

Rainier Wong is the webmaster of Nicepods (http://www.nicepods.com)