Brochure or Real Property: Making Money from Your Internet Business

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By Israel Rothman

RISMEDIA, May 20, 2008-When you invest in real estate, if you do it at the right time, in the right market, You may make as much as 10-20% per year from appreciation: then you need to deduct from that your time, fees, expenses, discounts, insurances, finance charges, the cost of the money…what you have left is your return on investment (ROI), or profit.

When you invest in an Internet-based asset, you may only have the cost of the website involved, and some of your time – and, if you are successful in generating income (perhaps from Google Adsense, Adbrite banners on your site) your Internet business is worth an average of 27 times the earnings of an acquisition or public offering.

I suggest that you think of your website marketing as an asset that you own, like real estate: indeed it is part of the value of your businesses.

If your Internet brand also returns a specific results when people ‘Google’ you (it is now a verb), or specific results when I search for, for instance: City, State, new homes on Google for your area; then your overall business and brand has more value.

Since you must advertise anyway, it is sensible that you maximize the value you receive in exchange for that investment by using at least part of your advertising budget to build a presence online, an asset that adds value to your business.

I am surprised at how often people do not realize the value of their exit traffic. The people and businesses that make money from the same customer as you, have advertising budgets to reach those clients. Your referral has value: when this concept is ported to Internet advertising, it translates into online communities that supply one-stop shopping to the consumer, providing a better whole than the sum of the parts, like an online mall community.

But people do not want to shop a directory, which is why Yahoo is no longer the biggest search engine: they prefer key-word-search. So an important consideration is organic search placement: the kind of viral marketing that can supply a community that grows on its own in more and more of the marketplace.

In new rocket-fast river of Internet advertising, blogging and social networks, RSS (really simple syndication) and video compression technology have contributed to an acceleration of the market, to where only dynamic websites with a lot of data can reach the market. Supplying that real data that is returned from a Google key word search is the future of online PR, marketing, and content syndication now known as social media marketing. Run a Google search for “social media marketing company,” “social media marketing agency,” “social media marketing system,” “real estate social media,” or just “social media website design” into Google and you will see what I mean.

And my advice is to avoid creating a simple brochure site because nobody will see it.

Israel Rothman is a very well-known Internet advertising consultant who writes for several online magazines. Mr. Rothman has been a pioneer in Social Media Marketing as a method of intentional search engine placement for over 800 companies during the last ten years. He is CEO and founder of SocialMediaSystems.com LLC.

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