Amazing fact: The United States alone accounts for 9.5 billion Internet searches every month.

Pointed question: What do prospects discover when they google you?

If the results amount to anything short of a strong Web presence, you should begin crafting one right away. Simply put, businesses need to market themselves online — or be eaten by the competition.

Internet marketing starts with a professional, effective website. If you’re a business  without a site, wake up and embrace the wonders of the World Wide Web. Beyond the basic site, your plan of action might focus, too, on a host of ever-evolving high tech tools, such as a blog, audio podcasts, video clips, social-networking (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), paid advertising on others’ sites.

Online marketing is no hula hoop fad: The medium is here to stay — and growing more sophisticated with every new cyberspace advancement.You’re building confidence by moving the user step by step. If you don’t motivate people to move on to the next level in the process — to contact your business your website hasn’t done its job.

Right now is a critical time to create online tools for keeping in touch with customers on an ongoing basis. The web allows them to personalize communications in a mass way. If you’re not creating a presence that will be picked up, you’ll be at a major disadvantage — and maybe not even know it.

In the Internet’s first phase, websites were stagnant informational sites that told the users about you but didn’t really involve the business owner interacting. To really wow people today,  you need to provide much more sophisticated interactivity — a new phase referred to as Web 2.0, which is distinguished by user-created content. Examples include blogging, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter.

With Web 2.0, the main goal is to start an interaction. Twitter, the social-networking sensation, lets those who sign up to receive other folks’ feeds read short — 140 characters or less — messages called tweets. The object is to stay connected by answering Twitter’s key question, “What are you doing?” But plenty of celebrities, businesses and politicians have latched onto Twitter for marketing and promotional use.

What’s neat is that most of these newer online services can be interconnected. For instance, your business profile on LinkedIn can be tagged back to your website. There, you might have a link to your blog, where you can elaborate on the brief tweets you post on Twitter. If you’re involved in community activities or enjoy strategic partnerships, you can cross-link with those sites too.

Web 2.0 services position you as a savvy business person, it’s also a way to be novel and to have reason for people to want to interact with you and start a dialogue.”

The secret to having the website accomplish something for you is to make it personal and interactive, it’s not enough to simply post your standard sales pitch and brochure… Make [the site] engaging and easy for people to navigate so it becomes a very fluid instrument for research.

Online marketing is a surprisingly cost-efficient way to connect with clients and prospects. The cost-benefit trade-off is usually pretty good.

Customized websites, which, depending on needs, can cost several thousand dollars, make your special qualifications and unique value proposition stand out, as well as allow enhanced interactivity.The biggest negative is to have a generic website, There are so many cookie-cutter sites out there that…all look the same. They aren’t customized in communicating who you are, what you do and why somebody should be a client.”

To drive visitors to your site, ideally it should emerge high in search engine results when a prospect types in, for example, “your business” and your locale. The process called search engine optimization (SEO) can help affect that. Websites have to be coded and worked so they will give you high organic rankings in a search.

It’s not a simple matter, though. Each engine has its own variables that determine which results turn up at the top. Moreover, the variables are always changing. And though you may show up high in Google results, that may not be the case in a Yahoo search or a Bing Search.

Websites, social networking, e-mail and other technologies will keep on merging. here’s no doubt that [Web marketing] will be increasingly important for maintaining client relationships.

If businesses don’t have a site, they’ll be at a disadvantage — and that has been true for at least five years. They may be in denial that a website is important; but it’s essential.