There are perhaps only a few fundamental rules of marketing. One of them is that marketing will always change. The phenomenon is by its nature and evolving, ever-changing one, as marketing is primarily a reaction to consumer activity. Marketing began in classic forms, but moves readily to new formats to attract the necessary attention of the consumer.

It stands to reason, then, that as the internet moves a lot of human activity onto a screen-based venue, marketing has shifted rapidly to focus on the web as the newest theatre for new sales. Marketing has hit the web hard and shows no signs of abandoning this lucrative front. In response to this, some recent trends involve the use of new software to target the audience via the screens of their personal computers.

Common forms of web marketing consist of things like ad banners and pop-ups that project themselves into the web user's vision; there are also the prevalent 'cookies' that lodge themselves in the user's hard drive to both propel the company's name into the drive and to collect information on customers based on web use. These have proven their effectiveness; however, software providers are still innovating.

In many cases, software providers attract marketers with tools that focus on regular web sales. Webmasters can use pre-packaged software to improve their own sites. One such item is the VIPCART and similar software that allows businesses to create their own

'shopping carts' without using HTML or web coding. Shopping carts are a popular way for consumers to buy online using their credit cards numbers, and despite fraud concerns, shoppers are doing this in droves.

Marketers can also use a package called SEO DETECTIVE to compare their web sites with the web sites of competitors. The advantage of this is that the data collected can be used to gain an 'edge' in terms of the most effective web site possible for a given product. Leaders of the field in web site maintenance will attract a vanguard of online sales.

Also, software firms have tried to reform the annoying 'pop'up ads based on consumer feedback. Pop-ups were criticized for slowing down computers and aggressively funneling ads into the user's view, blocking the sites that users were looking for. Software packages like 'POP-IN GENERATOR try to address that with more 'user-friendly ad formats.

These and a wide variety of other software tools make marketing easier and more effective for twenty-first century marketers to find their target audience and to promote products over the web. The online marketing phenomenon won't go away, it will only get more and more competitive with time. It pays to research ways in which marketing channels its strategies through the web.