Website? I don’t need no stinking website!

It pretty much goes without saying that almost every ticket broker today has a website. But what you don’t know will hurt you. All websites are not created equal. Just because you have a website, doesn’t mean it will help your business in any way. In fact, it can actually be doing damage each and every day it is live on the internet.

What do I mean?
There are many factors about websites that play a role in where you are placed in search engines, if your domain name gets black-listed or damaged over time in these search engines and even if a customer sees validity in you as a business. In this day and age, your customers are becoming more web savvy than ever. Before they call the ad they see on the side of the freeway or in a magazine, they will go to your web address and your website has a lot to live up to in their minds. In many ways, not knowing this is almost like owning airline and not knowing the first thing about a jet or how to maintain one.

There is good news!
There are so many options available for very low costs to you. Some exchanges, such as Event Inventory, Ticket Technology and Ticket Network, will even provide you with a free website. But buyer beware, just because it’s free doesn’t always make it good.

In this article, I’ll give you a brief description of each available option you have in the market today.

EventInventory’s free website
Besides the fact that EventInventory offers every individual a different deal, meaning some receive the website for “free” and some have to pay for it, this website is a killer. And I don’t mean that in any good way! In SEO, when your website closely mirrors another, and in this case, literally hundreds to thousands of cookie-cutter or clone websites, it would be better for your business to not even have a website. That’s just the tip of the ice berg in what is evil about this website. From the fact that you have to email Event Inventory ever time you want to make the simplest of changes to the way there is no search engine optimization done to the site, STAY AWAY FROM THIS OPTION.

TicketNetworks’s XML website
This option follows many of the basic aspects of Event Inventory’s free website. Any time your website looks and shares multiple attributes of other websites, search engines can penalize and even black lint your website out of the index completely. Once again, in this case your website is sharing almost all it’s attributes with thousands of other clone-like websites. Most search engines out there will penalize or black list your domain and when they do this it’s like you’ve earned a bad reputation for your domain and just like earning yourself a bad reputation in real life it doesn’t go away overnight even if you correct the issues. Search engines don’t look at the fact that you have a different logo or different coloring. When search engines view your website, they’re looking at the coding and that’s where these websites share almost all the same attributes.

BEWARE, the above options make your website appear to be huge spam/link farms for Event Inventory and TicketNetwork. Why, you ask? Because every link links to eventinventory.com and for the ticketnetwork websites, everything dumps into ticketnetwork’s shopping cart. Notice they are smart enough to not link it to the actual ticketnetwork domain. This shows that at least TicketNetwork has more brains when it comes to SEO than EventInventory but these methods do your business damage.

Ticket Technology’s plug-in website
This is one of the better options available if you have to go with a cheap, run of the mill website. They do allow more customization options and unlike Event Inventory’s plug in option, you don’t have to use the second scroll bar to view the tickets in an inline frame or send your clients off to the www.eventinventory.com domain name.

Automated Ticket Broker Solutions
Custom websites are always the best options and ATBS is one of the few companies out there that develop custom websites for ticket brokers. The more unique you can get your website, the better. Any time your website is using what as referred to in the industry as a plug-in, you are damaging your business even if you have a custom plug-in website. ATBS specializes in custom XML websites using one of the 3 top exchanges that comes with just about every feature you could possibly imagine or need for your business. Just a few to mention are a full admin panel with a cms (content management system), custom shopping cart and member’s panel. Get familiar with the term XML feed. Simply put, XML allow you to take the ticket listings and embed them on your pages just like ticketsnow.com, ticketmaster.com or stubhub.com. Not to mention, you get your own custom shopping cart. Every aspect of your website is now on your website. Nothing links back to the exchange but all your orders still flow into your POS system just as they do on the plug-in solutions. Notice how all the top listed ticket brokers in search engines do not use the plug-in options offered by these exchanges. The benefits of using an XML feed are endless. Now of course, there is a cost associated with custom websites but if you did a cost analysis on how much potential damage you have done to your website over the years on a cookie-cutter website, and not to mention the increased confidence your customs will have, the cost it close to null.

TicketPlatform
This company basically offers you a minimally upgraded TicketNetwork xml/plug-in website. If you look at their examples, there are so many similarities that this falls back into the cookie-cutter.close websites. Now they do offer an upgraded TicketNetwork xml/plug-in website that does have more options and a CMS(content management system), but this goes under the same statement that not everything free or cheap is a good deal for you.

Freelance/In-House custom website
This is the best optoin there is available if you have the technical knowledge and SEO understanding of what you need. Nothing beats completely custom. But if you don’t have the knowledge that it takes, this can be just like being over building a skyscraper and not knowing what you’re doing. It can have potentially catastrophic consequences and costs. The benefits of a ticket broker custom website design firm like the 2 mentioned above are the best route if you don’t have the needed knowledge.

By sharing this information about websites and how it affects your business, you can’t help but act. Don’t let your domain name and your online presence go on if it’s damaging your business. Many ticket brokers believe because they make good money with wholesale, they don’t need retail or just because there are so many top ticket brokers websites in the search engines under different key words that it’s hopeless. But I’m here to tell you that it’s never hopeless and in future articles I’ll explain why it’s not hopeless and how you can be on top in the search engines.