Electronic marketing, also referred to as digital marketing, internet marketing, web marketing or online marketing, is the marketing of products or services through online channels. E-marketing is a generic term utilized for a wide range of activities, including advertising, communications, branding, loyalty programs, etc., using the internet. It is evolving as one of the most powerful, economical and scalable marketing strategy.

Today e-marketing isn’t just about the simple development of a website, it may include online communication, dialog with consumers who directly or indirectly participate in the evolution of new products and finding efficient approaches to win customer's loyalty.

Here are some free or low cost e-marketing approaches and tools, which you can use right away to increase online presence, get better search engine rankings and drive quality leads to your website.

Post Quality Articles Online
Well studied and articulated articles are a good media to showcase your expertise in the field of your interest. Write quality articles and post them on various article publishing sites like ezine.com etc. Make sure the articles contain your signature and a link to your website. This tactic will increase your web presence, search engine ranking and in turn will bring quality web traffic.

Create a Company Blog
A simple paragraph a week with information related to your industry vertical, current market trends, etc. and a link back to your website can get you lots of potential customers and website traffic. A number of portals offer free blogging services, e.g. blogger.com.

Comment On Other Blogs
Leave quality comments for other blogs, which are related to your industry in some way or other. You can showcase your knowledge and expertise through your comments. Put a link to your website below your comment.

Use Free Advertisement Sites
There are many sites offering free registration for businesses. Some may debate that use of these sites may bring you spam, it may be reduced substantially however by publishing url of your website instead of email in your advertisement. And some spam, is worth it to increase your online presence for free!

Market to Your Inactive Clients
Give reasons to your clients to use your services again. Stay in touch with them. In most of the cases, income comes from the retainership model. If you have your visitors email you can get in contact with them and offer them new products and services.

Exchange Links with Relevant Sites
This is another traffic enhancing technique being used for a while now. To find out where to do the link exchange, the simplest way is to find out relevant websites from search engines and ask for exchange. Take care not to use link farms to get the back links, as these are not received well by the search engines and could result in banning of the site from the search results.

Participate Proactively in Networking Sites and Forums
Networking sites have exploded on the internet over the past few years. With the help of major ones like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, you can search for new people, groups or potential customers, interact with them and make your presence known.

Use Email Signatures
Use simple links or banner ads in your email signatures. Use personalized greetings. You can also launch email campaigns but it will require you to procure email addresses from various mailing list providers. Generally these techniques are avoided as emails land up in spam folder of clients. To avoid classification of marketing emails as spam you need to ensure that the email service provider is sending out emails with proper SMTP authentication, and is using a domain name which is recognized by the mail server for the sender’s email address.