Beating the Multiple Vendor Blues

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Commentary by Israel Rothman

RISMEDIA, June 24, 2008-Just as a more challenging market presents the opportunity to reevaluate traditional real estate practices, the same holds true for Internet initiatives. When you factor in all of the sites, people, and daily up-keep a successful Internet marketing strategy requires, it’s enough to make your head spin. So let’s take a step back and pinpoint what’s really needed and a solution to streamline your practices better.

To market real estate online you need:

- A registrar (domain)
- A host (a place to put my website)
- A designer (website builder/provider)
- A PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising consultant
- An organic search (search engine placement) consultant/SEO company
- Graphics (branding)
- Submission (introduction to many search engines, directories, link-building)
- Social Media Marketing (help getting the word out on MySpace, Facebook, Google video, YouTube, Technorati…)
- A plan for success (a 100 page technical book!)
- A PR budget

Sound intimidating? It should, as this is the problem-too many vendors that say that they can cater to too many of these requirements. In reality, they may only be really good at one or two, yet everything must work together to be effective, and no one wants to be responsible for the results because they cannot control all of these areas.

There is definitely a need for performance standards and standardized pricing and service models in this industry, but don’t expect that any time soon with the rate that things are changing.

Now that we have established the universal problem, here are some helpful hints for finding solutions:

- Use as few vendors as possible. If you use too many, you may experience them not getting along, or even worse, have conflicts of interest on your nickel.
- Get advice from someone who you can trust before buying. If you are not tech savvy, find an advisor, perhaps a family member with no fee to earn; or perhaps a successful co-worker or colleague to help you navigate through your options and evaluate what you are being told.
- Ask for examples of tangible, verifiable results within your industry, and check references.
- If it sounds too easy or too inexpensive compared to what others have told you-it probably is.

Israel Rothman is an Internet advertising consultant who writes for several online magazines. Rothman has been a pioneer in social media marketing as a method of intentional search engine placement for over 900 companies during the last 10 years. He is CEO and founder of SocialMediaSystems.com LLC.

For more information, visit www.socialmediasystems.com.

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