Amateur Night on the Internet is Over

As the Internet grows up Amateur Night is over. Businesses are getting serious about marketing and selling on the World Wide Web with professional support.

As the Internet is growing up, the cost of reaching qualified buyers is going up. There is no longer space for amateurs in this highly competitive environment for ranking and conversion. While trying to pack up almost 19 years of doing business in the West Indian islands, a strange thing is happening to my brother and me. Business People who used to think our marketing services were too expensive are knocking on our door asking for advice on how to grow their business on the Internet. Thom and I went to a party on Saturday night where a lot of local business people showed up. We’ve known them for years on business and social levels. They were well aware of the fact that we have a two week window to move our operation up to Amelia Island with hardly any time to do anything else but pack and ship. Yet we walked out of the party with the feeling we had been involuntarily baited into reversed sales calls.

These men, who previously opted for cheaper “solutions” regarding their internet marketing, were now willing to accept that if we would take on the projects they pitched at us it would have to be long distance because we knew we could never finish them before our deadline of September 23. On Monday morning meetings were scheduled, projects were outlined and deposits were paid. This was quite a difference from the previous interactions with these same men who once rejected our pricing for marketing campaigns and web presence building. They have come to realize that Amateur Night on the Internet is over. And it had cost them a lot of money without results. Their Web sites were built by the stereo typical “cousins of the secretary’s first husband” who had acquired the basic knowledge of building an html or flash website in high school. Nothing wrong with the cousin who is trying to make an extra buck, but it’s like putting fishnet stockings on Mother Theresa and telling her to go out and hustle.

Many business owners have found out that their web presence is not doing anything for them beyond having a little billboard hidden in an immense jungle of hundreds of millions other sites and 30 billion web pages. They even found out that they often don’t own their own domain name (the cousin conveniently registered the domain to himself) and have absolutely no access to the back end of the Web site, allowing them to update or change content. When they are ready to change something it turns out that the secretary’s ex-cousin has moved on and the Web site is doing nothing but gather dust. Pretty much the same scenario I remember from the days that clients ordered 100,000 brochures because it saved on the print run, yet not spending a dime on the distribution strategy. The result: five years later the new office manager finds dozens of boxes with brochures in the back of the storeroom or in the attic. Money wasted, trees cut for nothing.

Selling on the Internet is not extremely hard, but it is a professional job. An internet professional is someone who spent years on learning the basics, who understands the interactions, who is up to date on platforms and software options and can adjust the course as technological and software challenges demand action. And we’re not even talking about the “secrets” of social media marketing like Twitter, Facebook and so on.

As on most of Amelia Island’s Web sites that we researched, Web sites here on St. Maarten were built on a static platform. The business owners’ expectations were high at the launch of the site, but tapered off as years of non-performance passed. In the new global economy they now want a piece of the pie. Just who gets a piece is often decided by their Internet presence. They understand the abbreviation GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out). They would never think of facing a legal battle or a serious tax issue without the services of a good attorney or accountant. They are starting to understand that Amateur Night on the Internet has become a thing of the past. Internet presence requires professionals if you intend to sell your products and services.

It’s a new world out there and you can’t blame us for smiling a little when we sit with these same businessmen that for years ignored our advice and rejected our pricing. We’ve been at it for almost 15 years now and we’re just happy that the business world is catching on. We paid our dues while struggling to learn, absorb and put into practice anything and everything this new Cyberspace world has put in front of us. SearchAmelia has 4 people fulltime working daily on the site, and when I say daily I mean 10-15 hours a day…. each, in addition to six part time contributors.

We are proud for what we have accomplished by taking SearchAmelia in a little over a year to the top 0.5% of all websites on the global Internet. If you want to help us reaching the coveted price of becoming part of the top 100,000 Web sites in the world by December 31, 2009, drop me a note at publisher@searchamelia.com. You will learn and we all will benefit.