In three years the Internet will influence 53 percent of all retail sales in the United States (Forrester). As a result, your online brand impact could be the single most significant differentiating factor for the future of your business.

Part of this equation is going to be about mastering the mechanics of actual transactions. As indicated in the Forrester study mentioned above, eCommerce spend will represent eight percent of all retail sales in the United States. Creating seamless buying experiences will be indispensable for some brands, but many would argue that the art and science of earning revenue online starts much earlier than the buy button.

In tomorrow's marketplace, the process of earning revenue might start on blogs or with a search term. Brands need to know how to touch every part of the user experience, and the difference between flourishing or being left behind is about extending your digital footprint far and wide in a big picture marketplace.

Part of this equation is about earning hearts with campaigns that inspire and make people aspire to own and be a part of your brand. For this, there is no formula. Successful programming that brings people together across platforms is about brilliant minds who understand how to create emotional affinity and share brand lifestyles in a slow drip. Because of this, there will always be a place for inspired creativity in online marketing.

There's also a place for data scientists though, and the sheer volume of streaming content reminds us every day that half of the online equation is about mastering the data to increase visibility and then take a seductive hold of consumers once they've been exposed to your brand. These are the people who take the shareable content of the aforementioned creative class and then put them into the hands of the consumer. They're the masters of site conversions and the people who can play their way to the top of Google searches and Facebook news feeds like AI chess masters.

The rest of this week we will address these creative and data centric components, painting a picture of the essentials that will give brands the ultimate chance at mastering their marketplace in the next three years.

We'll start with inspiring campaigns that motivate people to wear brands like badges of honor. Then we'll move into the knitty gritty of algorithms, from the latest in Edgerank statistics to the importance of branded content and Google's Query Demands freshness algorithm. Stay tuned, because all this Internet buzz is just getting started.