It's a little past midnight...

Joanne has a pain in her lower back and can't sleep. She logs on to the Internet and looks for a chiropractor in Des Moines.

Ellen is frustrated by her teenager daughter's eating habits and mood swings. After the kids are in bed, she starts Googling - looking for a counselor, therapist or coach who specializes in adolescent girls with eating disorders.

Many small business owners feel overwhelmed when they face the daunting prospect of getting their online presence going. Everywhere you turn there's an "expert" trying to tell you what you ought to do.

As a coach and consultant to entrepreneurs, I've watched too many of you go astray, so I've assembled my Top Ten List of Mistakes so you can avoid them!

1.

When you join your family and friends for holiday gatherings, you'll be mingling two complete and distinct groups of people: those who are web-savvy with those who are not.

You know about this division. First, there's the Techies. You and all your relatives under 25 are using instant messaging, have social networking accounts, blog regularly.

I was recently sitting in an LAX airport departure lounge, waiting to fly to the annual International Coach Federation conference in Montreal. I was passing the time talking to Pamela McLean, head of the Hudson Institute, one of the top U.S. coaching schools. As colleagues in Southern California, Pamela and I knew each other professionally and were catching up.

When was the last time you changed anything on your professional marketing website?

If your answer is more than 30 days, you have got some work to do. When you invest time and money to get your site built, you can not just walk away once it is built. If you have not touched it since it was first published, you have missed the whole point of Internet marketing.

Remember Snoopy sitting atop his doghouse starting to write his novel? He types "It was a dark and stormy night." And then he stops, because he does not know what comes next. If only he had planned ahead!

When you sit down to tackle the job of writing the copy for your professional coaching website, you might feel Snoopy-like.

Make things simpler for yourself by focusing on what you really need to have on your starter website.

I love the Internet. I consider myself an early adopter and educate others on how to use the Internet to market their small businesses.

But nothing frustrates me more than small business owners who find themselves spending hours working on their websites, blogs, social networking, article publishing and email newsletters to the exclusion of doing other business-building activities.