Web site: You must have a Web site to successfully market your company on the Web. And you need a domain name that reflects your company's identity and brand. Using your company name as a domain name is a good place to start.

Check out your competition: You will find that Web sites have varying degrees of sophistication. Make sure that yours reflects your industry. If you are a designer, for instance, you cannot get away with a low-tech text-heavy Web site.

Reliable ISP or Web host: The inadequacies of your service provider will come across to customers as inadequacies of your company. Make sure you do your homework first and research potential Web hosts. The key factors in choosing a provider are connection speed, site uptime, spam policies and support. In addition, watch for hidden costs.

Also, make sure that certain technologies are available to you should you need them. For example, you may want to run server-side scripts to extract information from your database to include on your site. Many basic Web hosting programs do not include such functionality.

Email: Customers need to be able to contact you by email. All employees should have an email address. Train your employees to use email for customer service. And make sure your email address is easy to find on your Web site and your marketing material.

Email newsletter: An email newsletter can be a key component of successful online marketing. Its success hinges on the number of customer email addresses you successfully collect, so it is helpful to have a strategy and set up your Web site with that in mind.

Internet Marketing by David Carlick
Q: What tools do I need before putting together an Internet marketing plan?
A: If you want to have an online presence, you need several basic technology tools at your disposal to guarantee that you will be successful with your Internet marketing plan

Peter Adams
Ask the Expert Bio: Peter Adams is an entrepreneur, an advisor to prominent Internet companies, an authority on Internet marketing, and the former CTO of LookSmart

Tim Berry
Ask the Expert Bio: Tim Berry is the author of CPA’s Guide to Developing Effective Business Plans and the founder of Palo Alto Software, a leading business planning software company