What is your website doing for your business? Is it your strongest marketing tool? Is your offline advertising spend measurable?

If your website is your top marketing tool and does not cost you much, then you do not need to read any further. But if your website is just an accessory to your business and does nothing to generate income for you, then it is time to look at Internet marketing.

This can be loosely defined as marketing your business on the Internet, or online, marketing. You can either have your own website, or be listed as part of an online directory and you can consider various forms of online advertising, such as pay-per-click and paid inclusions or search engine optimisations.

With 63 per cent of shoppers now relying on the Internet for information, the power of the website cannot be under-estimated.

Key benefits include: l Enhancing your brand image: A website has the power to make a small business look bigger and better.

l Increasing market access: Websites have no boundaries and the potential growth for small businesses on a global scale is phenomenal. The marketplace is no longer the sole domain of major corporate entities.

l Building targeted website traffic: Do not use a cannon to kill a mosquito. Mailshots and badly targeted advertising waste time and money. With a website, you do not have to pay to get leads, because your website can capture that data.

l Customer convenience: No traffic, no parking and hassle-free shopping!

Your website is an investment and, unlike traditional mailshots, it is easy to measure the Return on Investment (ROI) from it.

The ROI is essentially based on how many visitors are converted to customers.

Building an affordable website with strong site architecture is critical. If you want that website to work for you, get a specialist who can advise you on the best site architecture and the latest technologies that suit your business.

With a well-built website, you have two key ways of using it for marketing your business.

Targeted e-mail marketing means your website can automatically capture your prospective and actual customers' details like e-mail addresses and names. It can also send information to those contacts easily.

Once you have e-mail addresses, use them! Do not use e-mail to sell. Use it to thank people for their business, make them a special offer, give them a free article or report in a newsletter, or share some news.

The idea is to be creative in your marketing. You pay nothing more for this advertising - it is free.

Online advertising can take several forms: l Pay-per-click campaigns (PPC).

How would you like your business to be at the very top of all the search engines without spending months on search engine optimisations?

PPC can get you to the top of search engines like Google and Yahoo but you only pay when someone clicks to go to your website.

So, unlike other advertising methods, you only pay when someone visits your site. How much you pay will depend on how much competition there is among other advertisers in your category.

l Banner advertising You can purchase banner advertisement space, and when a viewer clicks on a banner advert for your business, they are taken to a page on your website.

Well-designed and targeted adverts can increase brand awareness and targeted traffic to your site.

l Paid inclusion Businesses can pay search engines like Google and Yahoo to guarantee their websites are listed in search engine results for certain keyword search terms.

l Online video advertising This is predicted to be the fastest growing area of online display advertising. Many small businesses are presently not embarking on this method yet but it is sure to be a tactic in the future.

But before you embark on an online advertising campaign, you need to do one very important thing - research.

Research your target audience - the people you most want to reach with your adverts. Understand their demographics, their attitudes towards buying and their typical behavioural preferences.

Research your keywords - with both PPC and Paid Inclusion, keywords must be well researched. The key here is to understand the keywords your target audience actually uses to search on the Internet, not the corporate catch-phrases peculiar to your business.

Contact: WSI Oxford, 01865 862727.

E-mail: fphang@wsimarketing.com