5 Internet Marketing Mistakes Small Businesses Should Avoid

When a new business opens up, it always has to start small. And usually, there's not much margin for error, because being the rookie or the under-dog means handling challenges better than what's expected. For any business, start-up or otherwise, the online presence part is very important, and usually involves a lot of work, from setting up social profiles to producing great content and then promotions, aka Internet Marketing. Such start-ups usually don't know much about the process, and hence end up making mistakes that should not be made. Some of these mistakes could hurt the initial phases of the business. Here are the 5 most inconvenient mistakes that should be avoided.

Domain and website set-up

Obviously, the most important first-step that needs to be taken. Small businesses often start up no sub-domain blogs. Not only is it unprofessional and not-recommended, it also could cause much serious problems. The internet is ravaged by people who'd do anything to earn some money. And usually, what they do is, when they spot a start-up that doesn't have its own domain, they buy that particular domain for themselves and the business then has to buy it from them at a much steeper rate. Imagine (just for argument's sake) www.microsoft.com being owned by someone other than Microsoft itself. In such a case, Microsoft will have to buy off that domain at a price dictated by the seller.

The same goes for social media profiles (vanity URLs). For start-ups, it might also pay off to buy a professional theme or template (if using WordPress or Blogger etc) rather than using a free template. Free templates are un-professional, and run the risk of being hacked. It might pay off here to hire a web-developer to do the development.

Saving money

Most businesses usually don't have much money at start-up, or perhaps are unwilling to spend it. But there's one thing to always remember. Investment is the most important thing in a  business, and can be the best thing that ever happened to it. For example, website owners should try to invest in things like premium plugins, premium mailsoftware, hiring contributors, editors, etc. It might look like too much too fast, but it'll all make sense once your audience or customers go up.

Not making it simple

Another very important step is making the website simple and effective. There should be an obvious call to action in the visible area, and visitors should easily be able to find their way around. User-friendliness is the one thing most people online are looking for. And this is what many businesses overlook.

Ignoring analytics data

Analytics data gives you insights into how well a business is performing. But many business don't go beyond the casual number of page-views check daily. And most won't set up Google Analytics from day one. Well, monitoring user data is one of the most important step in marketing, without which no business can succeed.

Seeking help?

Business owners usually think they have it all figured out, and can do fine on their own. Well, getting professional help could never hurt. And in all likelihood, they are not experts in every field, and there are many aspects on Internet Marketing. So just to make sure you're on the safe side, you should get professional help (albeit paid) if you're running your own business.

Avoiding these mistakes could help put your start-up business at the right track. If you have further questions, do let us know about them! All the best :)

Source : mybloggertricks[dot]com

Difference - HTML and XHTML

When inserting codes into the Blogger template, page element, or blog post, you may have seen error messages that the code could not be parsed, was not well-formed, was broken, or that the elements were not closed properly. These errors can be corrected if you understand the rules that must be adhered to in XHTML documents. Blogger templates use the XHTML 1.0 Strict Document Type. In this article, we shall explain some of the XHTML syntax or rules, so that you may troubleshoot and resolve the problems if these error messages should occur.

XML, HTML and XHTML

We shall keep this short. Just so as you understand what we said about document type, view the Page Source or Source of your Blogger blog. You should see this document type declaration at the very top:-

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

The terms – XML, HTML and XHTML - refer to the markup language used to write the web pages. Many of us would have heard of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), invented by Tim Berners-Lee, and used since the early days of internet. XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a meta-language, used to create other markup languages. The traditional HTML was later recast to use the rules of XML and that resulted in a new XML application, called XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language). Because XHTML rules are strict and unforgiving, not conforming to them when attempting to modify the template would result in error messages. So, what are these rules that Bloggers like us should take note of?

Basic Rules of XHTML

1. Codes to be in lowercase

Since XML is case sensitive, all the element keywords and attribute names used in XHTML should be in the lowercase. For example, the template code is not this:-

<TITLE>Tips for New Bloggers</TITLE>

but this:-

<title>Tips for New Bloggers</title>

If you have noticed, the elements and attribute names between the lesser than (<) and greater than (>) signs have to be in the lowercase. However, the value, which in this case is “Tips for New Bloggers”, can be in the uppercase, lowercase, or mixed case.

2. Attribute values to be in quotation marks

All the attribute values have to be enclosed either in single or double quotation marks. The following examples are not accepted by XHTML:-

<div id=header-wrapper> <a href=http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com>Text Link</a> <img src=photo.jpg/> <table width=200 border=0 cellpadding=2>

Instead, they should be written as such:-

<div > <a href="http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com">Text Link</a> <img src="photo.jpg"/> <table width="200" border="0" cellpadding="2">

3. Container elements must have closing tags

This is not correct:-

<p>A paragraph.

In XHTML, there must be a closing tag with a forward slash (/) at the end:-

<p>A paragraph.</p>

Examples of the many non-empty elements that have opening and corresponding closing tags are:-

<ul> ... </ul> <li> ... </li> <table> ... </table> <h2> ... </h2> <div> ... </div> <span> ... </span> <dt> ... </dt> <dd> ... </dd> <a href> ... </a>

4. Standalone elements to be closed

Some of the elements are empty or standalone. They do not have associated closing tags. Common examples are:-

<br> <img> <input> <frame> <hr> <meta> <link>

Nonetheless, in XHTML, these elements must be terminated or closed. There are two ways to do that. One way to terminate the element is to put a forward slash (/) at the end like this:-

<br/> <img/> <input/> <frame/> <hr/> <meta/> <link/>

The second way is to add a corresponding closing tag like this:-

<br> ... </br> <img> ... </img> <input> ... </input> <frame> ... </frame> <hr> ... </hr> <meta> ... </meta> <link> ... </link>

5. Elements to be properly nested

This means that elements must be closed in the reverse order. For example, this code is not accepted in XHTML:-

<form> <table> ... </form> </table>

It is improperly nested because the form was created first followed by the table. To close them in the proper order, the table must be closed before the form, like this:-

<form> <table> ... </table></form>

6. Document to have only one root element

In the XHTML document, you will see that except for the document type declaration, all the codes are nested between <html> and </html>. This is the root element and all other elements or sub elements are in between. The document structure will look like this:-

<html> <head> ... </head> <body> ... </body> </html>

7. Attribute minimization is not allowed

In XHTML, all attributes should be in the form name="value". Even if the value is the same as the name, it cannot be minimized to one word. Hence, in our Add Text Box and Textarea article, the textarea code is not this:-

<textarea readonly>Hyperlink Code</textarea>

but this:-

<textarea readonly="readonly">Hyperlink Code</textarea>

XHTML Character Entities

Quite a number of readers had asked why they were unable to display HTML codes in their blog posts or why their codes were not well-parsed when inserted into the template. If you have noticed by now, the codes are wrapped in the lesser than (<) and greater than (>) signs. The moment these are posted, they will be interpreted as codes and will trigger an action by the browser. Should you want to display these as part of the text, use their character entities instead.

"	"
&	&
<	<
>	>

The next time you see an error message to the effect that the code is not well formed, not well parsed, not properly closed, etc., take a look at this guide, troubleshoot the problem and try out the possible solutions.

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Source : tips-for-new-bloggers[dot]blogspot[dot]com