With the sudden but inevitable emergence of Internet marketing process, we have witnessed a prominent change in Global marketing scenario. Online marketing or the Internet marketing has highly dominated the marketing strategy and has become people’s favorite day-by-day.

Like any other business process involves some kind of advertisement to make people know about your presence and business process, online marketing also needs effective advertising strategy to make Web traffic aware of ones online presence.

When you enter the Web world to look out for any information, you might have noticed the number of small images, texts, video and audio clips that appear in the Web page. Not only this, you receive list of emails not from your intimate friends but from various companies who send such mails to advertise their products and services.

According to description given in Wikipedia, which is the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet, online advertising has dual face - former is legitimate and latter is illegitimate. Legitimate online advertising involves search engine advertising, advertising networks and opt-in e-mail, whereas, illegitimate online advertisement is done through spamming.

Let us discuss in brief both legitimate and illegitimate face of online advertising-

Search Engine Advertising - Advertising your business process through search engine is the most effective way of advertising, because various Internet research have revealed that more than 80% of Web search is generated through search engines. People consider the search results gathered from search engines is pure and highly relevant. So, if you are serious about search engine marketing, you should concentrate on ethical way of website optimization and submission of your website to major search engines and directories to receive online visibility.

Advertising Networks- This process involves banner advertising and rich media advertising like audio, video, text, electronic mail etc.

Banner Advertising – Banner is the graphic representation of a company that represents a website. Banner is a tool any website can prepare to impart a prominent impression on people’s mind so that they may like your way of business promotion and remember your name as soon as they enter to the net to search the kind of products or services you sale.

There are two types of banner- static and dynamic. Static banner remains same each time a Web page is loaded but dynamic website keeps on changing and rotating for each visitors. Advertising through dynamic banner is highly advisable since, more than one banner for the same product can be shown to the visitors and that help to increase people’s confidence over the products.

Rich Media - Online advertisement through rich media involves the use of interactive digital media such as videos, audios and animations which is done with implementation of advanced technological effects that catches the eyes of majority of Web searchers.

Opt-in e-mail Advertising – This is a process of email marketing where businesses are advertised through email. In this case, there is consent of willingness of mail acceptance between customers and advertiser. The advantage of such practice is the direct contact with the customers in low cost and the major disadvantage is the possibility of deleting the advertisements without being viewed. Although, such process helps website owners keep updating their customers regularly regarding new products/services or any new added features.

Illegitimate online advertising involves spamming, which refers to sending unsolicited email, instant messages, mobile messages to people who are not the willing recipient of such mail and messages. Spammers often harvest users address from Usenet postings, DNS listings, Web pages and by a unique way of guessing common names under each domain which is known as dictionary attack. Spammers also use Web spiders to find e-mail address on Web pages.

But, to achieve a long lasting advertising effect, one should never follow illegitimate methods, rather should always follow fair way of advertising. People often feel irritated if they are provided spam advertisements, but they obviously paid fair amount of attention to view and understand the advertisements presented in a graceful manner.