So you have your great idea for your business, you may have a great product or a service to offer. So what are the essential internet resources you need to make a success of your new business.

1. A Website

In the current business environment your website should be the hub of your business even if you are not directly selling an online product.

The type of website depends entirely on what your business is going to do. Choosing the correct type of website can be tricky but they can generally be divided into easy to understand categories.

If your new business has a range of off the shelve products you should consider an e-commerce site as this will give your customers the ability to buy online. This has the added benefit that you are creating a sales process that does not require your involvement every minute of the day.

Maybe you have a range of products or services that are not off the shelve or are bespoke to the customers requirements. In this case you are better having a website that feels like a catalog or a portfolio to showcase your business. You can create explanations of your products and services just remember to sell your products with the benefits, not the features.

If you are going to make your money by selling advertising or by selling other peoples products through affiliate marketing, you should consider a blog. You can create regular posts and constantly add new content. You can fill your blog with articles, reviews, testimonials and your experience with the product in question.

2. Tracking Software

When you start getting visitors through into your site you need to know where they came from. Using tracking software you can determine how you visitors came to your website. This is really important as it will let you now which of your traffic sources and marketing methods are giving you the best responses. Using this data you can then spend more time working on getting visitors from the most successful places.

Other features of tracking software allow you to track the geographical location of the visitor, which pages they viewed on your site, how long they spent there etc. You can even see some really cool stats such as the visitors operating system, web browser, screen resolution, speed of connection etc etc. This is info can be really useful if you are running location based campaigns. The more technical is used a lot by web designers so they can design websites that can be viewed by the maximum amount of visitors.

3. Auto Responder

A auto responder is a automatic email marketing tool that is essential for your business, its job is to collect and manage the list of email addresses from your customers and prospects and automatically send out emails.

This can be used in two ways.

First for exiting customers. When a somebody buys one your products or services they are added to your list, this means you can send them emails on new products that would be relevant to them. How often do you get emails from Amazon and other internet giants.

Secondly for picking up prospects. When a new visitor comes to your site you need to capture their name and email address so that you can email them with product recommendations, newsletters etc. However the days of just putting a box on your website asking for details have long gone. You have to give something away to entice the visitor to join your list, you can give away a free ebook, report, mp3 audio, video etc. Essentially you have to give them something for nothing. The more you can give them the more likely the chances of buying your products.

These resources can be the backbone of your business and overtime can save you a lot of time and effort.