Commentary by Israel Rothman
RISMEDIA, Feb. 21, 2008-As a real estate professional, have you ever heard any of these familiar phrases?
“I can’t get in touch with my Web designer, who wants more money every time I want a simple edit; then he never gets it done.”
“My Website has disappeared because the domain was not renewed; I cannot renew the domain because my e-mail was not used to register it.”
“We don’t rank anywhere on the search engines and never get any hits; we paid $2,500 for SEO, and were ranked on Google for exactly one day.”
If any of this sounds familiar, you are not alone. The fact is that most of the best products and services on the Internet are either free, or so inexpensive that anybody can afford them. It’s the expertise to make it all come together to get results that is rare; it is a constantly changing target.
It is time for all of the do-it-yourselfers and self-proclaimed experts out there to admit that Internet marketing has become mainstream advertising. It is extremely competitive and can make or break your business. The marketplace is changing so quickly that only professionals can compete. Do-it-yourself advice will not help you; it will only waste your time and money.
The Internet marketing arena has finally matured enough to need consumer reports, rankings and ratings for the vendors, so that non-tech-savvy advertisers can determine who to believe, who can be relied upon, and who to buy from.
Standards of pricing, performance and reporting need to be established-a difficult task in a marketplace where Google changes the rules so often that the skills of the professors who teach the courses are outdated before they teach their next class.
Compounding the problem is the abundance of misinformation proliferated by amateurs and “experts” who can’t keep up.
My prediction: in the future, as in the past, it will be the reputation of the business-to-business vendor that determines who wins and loses in the new marketplace. Only a true team of professionals working together can keep up with the changes on behalf of their clientele.
Israel Rothman is CEO and founder of SocialMediaSystems.com LLC.
For more information, contact him at israel@socialmediasystems.com.
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