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The Internet is like having thousands of those wagons on one street, with the legitimate products competing with the suspect ones. Regardless of what you’re trying to sell, marketing your product on the Internet has become mandatory. Whether you’re selling widgets or wiper blades, purchasing products online is not just a fad; it’s a billion-dollar industry as Web shopping continues to outpace brick-and-mortar stores by a wide margin. Online retail sales are not only burgeoning, they’re even contributing to the closing of traditional retailers. According to online business magazine Chain Store Age, total online sales reached $109 billion in 2005, an annual growth of 24.5% since 2001.

In order to sell your product, you will need to market it. But not all products are created alike. Marketing items designed to sell on the Internet isn’t the same as marketing products that weren’t meant to be sold online. There are, however, common themes to follow when creating a successful marketing plan, no matter what you’re trying to sell:

■ Stay informed: Keeping up with The Jones’ when it comes to the latest fashion trends and fad diets may be useless and self-absorbed, but knowing the latest Internet trends is vital for your business. Internet marketing veteran and author Larry Chase says “If you don’t develop this sense, you won’t be in this tumultuous business very long.”  Two trends Chase sees in 2006 include video downloads and multidimensional Internet marketing. Chase sees the success of iTunes and the more than 3 million videos downloaded since October of 2005 as a wave of the future. The multidimensional trend which includes the overlaying of datasets over visual maps “will be a boon to advertisers and consumers alike,” says Chase.

■ Site Unseen: A cool website with flash and fancy graphics is great, but the meat needs to be in the service itself. You must know what you’re marketing and send a clear message to potential clients what that is. All the bells and whistles won’t mean a thing if the content is sub par. Furthermore, search engines like Google use sophisticated software to measure the relevance of your site’s content to keywords that people search for, so content that’s written well and optimized to draw traffic to your site will improve your ranking and rake in more visitors. And keep the content professional. The over hyped copy that’s laden with empty promises and guarantees may sell steak knives and the latest juicers, but won’t ensure trust, especially if you’re selling professional services like counseling, financial consulting, etc.

■ Traffic Jam: When it comes to attracting traffic, bigger isn’t always better. You could invest in all the ways it takes to generate a million visitors to your site, but if only one is interested in buying what you have to offer, you’ve failed. It’s important to appeal to your target audience, not every Tom, Dick and Harry surfing the Web. Like a steak that’s overcooked, your website optimization can be overdone as well. Websites that are overloaded sites with search engine tricks like hidden links, “doorway” pages, and “mirror” sites are punished by search engines like Google who now have the capability to detect these tricks. Search engine optimization is an important part of generating traffic, but don’t rely on it too much because the algorithms that control rankings are always in flux.

■ Be a pro: Treat your Internet marketing campaign like every part of your business. Keep it professional with a solid message. Building trust and a relationship with clients will always win out in the long run. Sending out a puffed-up messages and trying to make a quick buck like the snake oil swindler will likely come back to bite you in the end.