A recent report for PayPal claims that UK online retail spending is set to more than double by the end of 2011 to £21.3bn. Its research showed that almost one in four adults (24%) believes that online shopping will become the norm and high streets will die out.

This is looking purely at online retail transactions and is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of business generated online and transacted offline, as most business-to-business sales will be. Indeed, many of the higher value business-to-consumer (B2C) sales, such as residential housing - and I'm sure there are still some of those happening - will have been generated from an online search.

Your business certainly doesn't need to be an online shop or B2C-facing to get your share of new revenue from the internet, but you do need a lot more than just a website to succeed. Building a website is only part of the battle but, surprisingly, it is as far as many businesses get, which is a great shame because they have already undertaken the main expense but failed to take the next step and implement the strategy that's necessary to recoup that cost.

No matter how good your website looks, you won't realise its full potential unless it is visible to every potential new client who is searching for the type of product or service you offer. This may sound like a tall order, but reaching that audience is often far simpler than you may imagine. In reality, it boils down to a simple financial equation:

• How many people are delivered to your website each week?
• How much does that cost to achieve (B)?
• How many of those people become clients/customers?
• What is the net profit from those new clients (A)? You may have to take repeat business from a client into consideration, depending on the nature of your business

If A is greater than B, then your online marketing is working; if it isn't you try to fix the equation, and if it can't be fixed you don't do it. Like any other form of advertising, internet marketing works better for some companies than others. But it doesn't matter what size your business is or what stage it is at, it is never too early to address this. Even at the conception stage a report on the real online potential can help secure funding. We've helped small start-ups with virtually no budget and established clients like Manchester United and Epsom and Aintree racecourses and there is always value in reviewing your online potential.

The one thing you can be sure of is that if your website does not appear in the results on major search engines like Google when people are searching for products or services that you can provide, then other companies will and yours will not be an option for that potential new client.

Once your target audience has found your website, it needs to be capable of converting those visitors into enquires or sales, but that's another story for our next article.

For more information visit www.theclientfactory.co.uk [1]