The dictionary says marketing is the process of creating, pricing, promoting, and distributing ideas, goods, and services to satisfy personal and organizational goals.

That's the simple definition. There are many different forms of marketing. Do you know the differences? Here are the definitions of some common types of marketing.

Internet marketing, also referred to as online marketing or emarketing, is the marketing of products or services over the Internet. The Internet has brought many unique benefits to marketing including low costs in distributing information and media to a global audience. The interactive nature of Internet media, both in terms of instant response, and in eliciting response at all, are both unique qualities of Internet marketing.

Network Marketing is the same as multi level marketing.

Multi-level marketing businesses function by recruiting salespeople (also called Distributors, Independent Business Owners, IBOs, Franchise Owners, Sales Consultants, Beauty Consultants, Consultants, etc.) to sell a product and offer additional sales commissions based on the sales of people recruited into their downline, an organization of people that includes direct recruits, recruits' recruits, etc.

This arrangement is similar to franchise arrangements where royalties are paid from the sales of individual franchise operations to the franchisor as well as to an area or region manager, but in some network marketing programs, there can be several levels of people receiving royalties from one person's sales.

Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of infectious and computer viruses. It can be delivered by word of mouth or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet.

Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily.Viral promotions may take the form of funny video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, images, or even text messages.

Example: How many of you have seen this picture?

Affiliate Marketing is a method of promoting web businesses in which an affilliate (publisher or producer) is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, or sale provided through his/her efforts. Affiliate Marketers use one site to drive traffic to another.

Search Engine Marketing is a form of internet marketing that promotes websites by increasing their visibility in the search engine result pages (SERPs). Search Engine Marketing methods include: Search Engine Optimization (or SEO), paid advertisements, and paid inclusion.

In 2006, North American advertisers spent US $9.4 billion on search engine marketing, a 62% increase over the prior year and a 750% increase over the 2002 year. The largest SEM vendors are Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN. As of 2006, SEM was growing much faster than traditional advertising.

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to:

• Sending emails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or old customers and to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business.
• Sending emails with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing old customers to buy something immediately.
• Adding advertisements in emails sent by other companies to their customers.

Researchers estimate that US firms alone spent $400 million on email marketing in 2006.