Internet Marketing

We call at the supermarket and are given loyalty cards. We can get points by using our card as we shop. The greater our spending, the more points we amass. With a lot of loyalty cards we are sent special offers for things we buy regularly. Hmm if the shop knows what we buy regularly, they are obviously scrutinizing our shopping.

Yes, this is the true reason for their loyalty cards. They want to know what consumers are buying. Which of us buy what. Who they need to be advertising certain things to. Well, we all know this in reality, but we like the suggestion of getting money back, or fuel, or special treats, so we take the loyalty card in spite of ourselves. Even our banks are now conscious of when we go abroad, and if we have not updated them before we travel, our bank accounts are frozen, to protect us from fraud, but again it reveals how our movements are being traced.

So now with the growth of the Internet Business, we buy on line. We may Work From Home and think to use the net to search for things we need. This may be as straightforward as doing our normal supermarket shopping via the web. If we do, we will observe the next time we go to the virtual shop, many of the Online Jobs are sorted for us, we do not need to remember all the goods we put in our basket last time, and what area of the virtual supermarket they are, the site remembers we chose these goods and prompts us to place them in our basket.

If we are using a search engine for random queries, we start entering our query and are prompted by other queries we have entered previously – is this what we are searching for again?

As I Work From Home, I often use a web based bookstore to locate certain books I may require. I am prompted to confirm that it is me and not somebody else who is looking at their site, then they let me know, as I search, what other folk who have made similar purchases also bought. So, they know who I am, what I have bought in the past and what other folk with similar tastes have also picked. The Internet Business is certainly very complex!

When we search through internet sites, looking for answers, perhaps in relation to something we have heard on the radio, we may often see a counter on a web page, advising how many folk have visited this web site. They are monitoring traffic through their web site. Maybe they want to know which pages are of most interest to other folk, or maybe they just want a general idea of how popular their web site is, but somehow when we click on their web site, they know.

As we all do more and more Online Jobs and tasks we would have gone to the library to do before, or gone to the local high street with cash, we leave a trail which is easy to follow. We are making ourselves visible to the outside world and anyone who wants to follow us in our virtual world can do it quite effortlessly.