I have to stop thinking of our website as the center of our marketing universe. It’s simply no longer the case. Recently, I was looking up at the night sky when it occurred to me that the canopy of stars above me is very much like the Internet. There are, after all, more than 150,000,000 websites and 200,000,000 blogs—and each one is a tiny dot in the firmament. Sure, some are brighter than others but very, very few.

Suddenly I realized that the only efficient way to expand your online radiance was to stop imagining your website to be a pole star but rather to be one star in a constellation. That constellation is anchored by your site (the globe in the image above) but completed by the other stars of search engine optimization and advertising, blogs (whether your own or your guest posts to another), YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

It’s unlikely your star will ever shine bright enough to overtake the brightest stars in the sky. So organize your marketing efforts in 2010 to get noticed and be remembered. We live in a new brand world. Be Orion. Be the Big Dipper. But be something. Or burn out.