For lack of a better way to say it, there are 7 hats that you’ll need to wear when you bring your company online. You may need to wear more than 1 hat at a time, or you may only need to wear 1 at a time, but regardless these roles are essential to your successful online business venture.

Without further ado, here are the 7 things:

1. Marketing Strategist When you are in this role, you need to understand and communicate the overall objective of the web campaign to all of the members of the team, if you have a team. You need to know and communicate your marketing plan and strategy in order to be effective in this role.
2. User Experience Specialist For this role, you need to look at your website from your visitor’s standpoint and figure out what their user experience is like, then improve it. You need to make sure that the visitor is lead down a clear path to perform the specific action that you want them to perform.
3. SEO Specialist SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In this role, you need to understand what keywords people are typing into the search engines to find your site and/ or the sites that you are competing against. The main purpose for this role is so you can out rank your competition in the search engine results pages.
4. Copywriter Like it implies, you need to write the copy, or the text, that is on your website. Whether the site is a blog, a squeeze page or a long form sales letter, you need copy for the page in order to guide your customer to the action that you want them to take.
5. Web Developer As the web developer, you’ll have to figure out a way to implement the actions that you as the SEO specialist and the user specialist devised.
6. Web Administrator When you wear this hat, your function is to make sure that your site is up and it is searchable by the search engines. As the administrator, all you have to do is make sure that the site is functional.
7. Web Analytics Manager As this person, you need to implement various tracking strategies to ensure that your efforts are as effective as possible. You should track your visitor stats (where they come from, what keywords are they finding you under, etc.) and run reports on those metrics as well as on your various link building campaigns etc.

Bonus #8: Paid Campaign Specialist. If you have any paid campaigns, or if you plan on implementing any pay-per-click campaigns you need to also become knowledgeable about how PPC campaigns work and how they can easily empty out your bank account if you’re not careful.

Bonus #9: Social Media Strategist. Yes, I said it, if you plan on implementing any social media campaigns, you need to familiarize yourself with what Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and other sites are. You also need to learn what the proper etiquette is on each site and learn how to not be mistaken for a spammer.

Fortunately, most if not all, of these functions can be outsourced. So, you don’t need to know everything that there is to know about web development or copy writing etc.

The unfortunate part about outsourcing, is that it can get very expensive, very quickly.

Plus, you’ll still need to know what function you’re looking for and know enough to be able to vet the person that you’re talking to and know whether they’re a poser or a real expert. You don’t want a Texas Senator incident on your hands.