If you’ve recently started looking into turning up your online visibility or your online presence, you’re taking the first steps in putting your brand in front of more eyes and generating more revenue. Is it important to have a greater online presence? If you like making more money, yes it is important.

Gone are the days of a brick and mortar-only business. Everyone is putting his or her products and services online because it’s proven to add value to business. Whether it’s taking reservations or ordering a large amount of product, almost everybody is wired-in, and they want make online transactions.

A recent news article pondered whether Amazon, the online shopping giant, would kill retail stores all together. While that seems far-fetched, it proves a point – establishing an online presence will undoubtedly bring more eyes to what you’re offering.

Having a superior online presence means a lot more than a busy Facebook account. Social media is definitely a way to improve your online presence, but companies today are looking to more comprehensive approaches to gain a foothold. Consumers are searching the Internet en masse for products. What you’ve got to sell, be it product or service, needs to get to the consumers’ browser and search engine results.

Let’s say you’ve expanded your horizons to include YouTube, Twitter, dig, and Linkedin to your online presence. Good work, but we’re not finished yet. Building an actual website that has a great look is the first step in going that extra mile to up the profile of your business. After you’ve done the dirty work of establishing a clean, usable and attractive site, you need to know who your audience is and drive traffic toward your site.

Online marketing is the most important aspect of this step. It involves search engine optimization (SEO), which is a formula for making your site come up first when various keywords are used in the search engine. Social media remains an important part of driving traffic, as you can optimize your local listing settings to attract more people in the social media realm to your site. Plus, search engines crawl the social media sites and the more active you are without mimicking spam, the better your results.

In the early days of the Internet, most website designers had to know a ton of code to build even the most basic site. Having a site built was incredibly expensive and there weren’t many perks like those available today, such as video and self-service capabilities. It’s not only the elite and privileged who have sites of their own anymore – it’s the everyday mom and pop store or business headquartered in the basement of suburban homes. Anyone who is looking to increase sales is establishing a strong online presence.

The Internet has become the go-to place for information and as consumer increasingly carry smartphones to stay connected and informed, your online presence is more accessible than ever before. The key is to make it strong, consistent and accessible. If you haven’t built your strategy around these three elements, it may be time to start over.