We have several writers that know pretty much everything about the broker market, technology, the web, websites, seo and everything you need to know to make it today. Our articles are meant to inform and help you understand the subject matter more and are not as a complete guide. Some might be short and sweet.
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Simply put, Constant Contact is amazing.
What do they do? Newsletter Management Service Software. They’re used by big and small companies alike, for example TicketsNow. And pretty much every large and small ticket broker in the nation.
Sure, there are other newsletter management services as well as software you can actually install on your own website. But why re-invent the wheel when it’s already been done, done well and made affordable.
With tiered pricing, where you pay depending on your email list size (how many email addresses in your database), they also have templates or you can actually create your own that you can use for the emails. They offer a form to put on your website that will allow you to collect more email addresses from business and customers. They also have tracking tools that will allow you to see who has opened your emails, clicked links in them and read them.
Constant Contact has gone through great lengths to make sure that when you send an email to your customer it will be delivered. They do this by contacting AOL, Google, etc and putting their IP addresses on their “white list” and then making sure none of their customers use spam or unauthorized email addresses. This feature alone makes it a pricless tool
If you have your own newsletter software or use another service, most likely you will get banned from sending email to aol, google, etc… not with Constant Contact. If you’re not currently using Constant Contact, I highly recommend you try them today. Email marketing can be one of the most valuable tools in your advertising tool chest. Just make sure that it’s an intelligent and useful email that you send to your customers. Via Constant Contact’s control panel you can even schedule newsletters to be sent out at certain dates and times and even to certain categories, like people only interested in new York Jets.
Don’t waste your time with other newsletter management services or even trying to do it yourself.
Tags: advertising, company review, constant contact, email marketing
EventInventory has long been the big dog in the market. In recent times many brokers have woke up and smelt the coffee and realized they could make it on another exchange…good move. Like with all companies, you have people that hate it and love it. A few things most people can agree with is that EventInventory has long been plagued by bad management. Need something that is so simple a trained monkey can do it; get in line and wait. Before Ticketmaster purchased Tnow/EI each and everything had to go through a long and drawn out “meeting” process, which with all likelihood meant forget about it until we find it important.
Many ticket brokers don’t even question or realize how bad EventInventory can be. When asked they quickly state that they never had any issues with EventInventory. Now of course I’m not saying EventInventory is the worst or even the best. This is simply pointing out what others and I have gone through over the years. Each company has it’s horrible, bad and good point.
Most ticket brokers keep up on the news and in recent news Ticketmaster purchased Tnow/EI and when they did most brokers went nuts and demanded to hear what was Ticketmaster’s objective. Ticketmaster told everyone not to worry and that they would be kind and help the secondary ticket market. Well in more recent news Ticketmaster has since stated they don’t hold any love for the secondary ticket market. (http://forum.songfacts.com/showtopic.php?tid/146362/)
What does this mean for ticket brokers who blindly stay with a company that claims they should make ticket resale illegal? Nothing? Maybe. Can you move your POS and website to another ticket exchange if something bad does happen. Sure, but at the same time 900 other last minute ticket brokers will be doing the same thing.
I have always been on all ticket exchanges and will remain. I enjoy the flexibility it offers me like the increased exposure. So while this review might sound all bad there is and always have been good points about EventInventory.
Good :
a. size of the exchange (it’s available tickets)
b. POS system (equal or better to other exchanges out there)
Bad :
a. pricing (they are the most expensive out there)
b. difficult on joining the exchange (they make you jump through hoops and they still have shitheads on their exchange)
c. compete with you (like all 3 exchanges, they are in DIRECT competition with you. Many people have said they think EI collects information from your site and uses it to help or even direct people to Tnow)
d. recent news (who knows what is going to happen, they already lied when Ticketmaster purchased them about helping ticket brokers, now they hate ticket brokers)
You will find all type’s people that swear by EventInventory and people who hate them. I would say more dislike, especially in recent times. Just make a informed decision and don’t base you whole company around one ticketing exchange.
Good luck~
Tags: ei, eventinventory
You may not know it but asking this questions is like asking the question what’s the difference in apples and oranges. To briefly describe the differences plug-in websites or xml website refer to the way the ticket data is pulled from the respective exchange (EventInventory, TicketNetwork TicketTechnology) and displated on your website.
Plug-in websites are beginner websites. It’s like living in a one-bedroom apartment. You will never see a plug-in website on the top of a hot keyword in search engines. Plug-in basically means the ticket listings and cart load on your site by pulling and/or displaying links and information from the respective exchange. The limitations and downfalls are endless. Just a few downfalls are search engines typically view your website as a link farm for spam site automatically. You can’t have your own shopping cart. Savy customers may realize that your website has just forwarded them to another domain and potentially not complete the sale. Then there’s one of the main reasons why plug-ins ruin your life; lack of customization! You will never be able to have a member’s panel, millions of dynmaic pages for every event, a custom shopping cart and much more. It irkes me to see a non–tech-savy ticket broker happy with one of those junk free plug-in websites that the 3 major exchange give out like bad candy. Those sites damage your domain on the web over time. For example, TicketNetwork’s “xml/plug-in” free website. You see one you’ve seen them all. The only thing that ever changes is the logo and a few bits of information here and there. Trust me the search engines feel the same. That’s what they do, they ahve to be able to find spam/clone websites and not offer those up to their users as number one results due to the possiblity of them being spam websites. Even if you’re a wholesale ticket broker, do not let a plug-in website be the face of your online business for all the reasons mentioned above and more. Just like a good store front, there can be upfront costs but in the end, it more than pays for itself. Take the time to create yourself a good xml website. There are service providers out there that can do this for a ticket broker at a reasonably low cost.
On to xml websites. If you search for any ticket broker keyword in the search engines and you will see an xml website. Besides the ability of getting your website on top through an xml website, they offer customization that is limitless. Member’s panels, dynamic seating charts, custom shopping cart, on-page ticket listings and so much more. Then there’s always the benefit that when a customer comes to your website, they see an amazing and unique looking website that doesn’t link to one of the three exchanges and builds your comany brand. How can you not want an xml website?
Tags: atbs, eventinventory, plug-in website, search engine optimization, sem, seo, ticketnetwork, ticketplatform, tickettechnology, xml website
Choosing a good domain name can be a big piece of your company. The first issue is that while you market and try to drive people to your website, they have to be able to easily spell and understand your domain name off a business card, sign or a phone call.
ticketwizzard.com
thepriceofticketstodayishigh.com
insaneticketdiscounters.com
These are just a few bad picks. Anything that that could be hard, confusing or potentially pass the wrong message is a bad domain name. A lot of knuckleheads try to pack SEO related keywords in their domain names, not a good idea. If you look at most of the top ticket brokerages in the country they don’t have really big domain names. Branding! SEO can be done on the site, no need to try to do it with the domain name.
So in short pick a domain name that is simple to remeber for a customer, easy to spell and short and sweet. A brand name, not a huge over grown domain name that you found one night at godaddy.com while you were drunk. Honestly it doesn’t even have to have to word tickets in it! You need to do all the SEO work to the site.
I use www.mywebdestiny.com – Instant dns changes, 24 support and cheap hosting, domain names and ssl certs!!
Tags: .com only, domain names, mywebdestiny.com
Hiring a web developer (tech) or technical staff (tech) has the potential for you to waste $20,000.00 to $35,000.00 a year as well as damages done to your business in lost sale conversions and SEO damage. It would be just as good if you took the money and maybe even your business and burned it. Why? Simple… if you hire someone who is not a truly experienced tech, they cannot justify the pay. In all my years experience in dealing with technical staff, I have seen all sorts.
A good tech is a self starter. A person who can figure out all technical aspects on their own. Someone that has live examples on the web of their SEO capabilities as well as their programming capabilities. You have to realize that most ticket brokers don’t have a technical bone in their body. This may or may not be the case for you, but if it is you can very easily be throwing your money away. If you are not technically inclined, a tech can do even the most mundane task that takes literally minutes and make it seem like it took hours or even days. What you don’t realize is even if they are stealing your money when it comes to the quality and quantity of work done, they can also do unlimited monetary damages to your business by developing a poorly designed website and search engine optimization for your business.
The best thing you can do is know how to hire an awsome tech but if it’s too late for that and you already hired a tech, it’s actually simple to determine if you’re wasting your money on him/her.
Micromanagement is typically thought to be a bad thing and in many cases it is but in a small business atmosphere when you have a tech, you have to stay on top of what he/she is doing. Because once the tech realizes that you have no idea what he is doing except the occasional adding of text or images to your website, he loses all interest and motivation for your business.
So here’s a simple check list I recommend you review before hiring tech
1. Is the tech proud they graduated a tech school such as ITT Tech, MTI or similar?
Tech schools do nothing more than take a know-nothing person into a call center jockey. In my 20 years of being in business I have have hired many techs and every single tech worth their weight has taught themselves the programming, how to work with computers, etc. Now I’m not saying colleges are useless to techs, I’m just saying tech schools are. Being a tech is something they have to love to be good at it because it means if something new comes along they are going to teach it to themselves.
2. Make sure they have live examples of websites that they have programmed and designed that you like as well as search engine optimization and placement that they have done for other websites.
Without live examples, don’t even call them in for an interview. How can they say they are going to help your business when they haven’t helped anyone else?
How can you tell if a live example of search engine placement is good? Have them show you a website and the correlating key word that pulls it up into Google and make sure that site ranks in the top 20 out of more than ten million results. If they show you a website that has top placement out of 100,000 results, it’s worthless because all ticket broker key words have millions of results for top placement.
3. Never hire foreign freelancers!
Why? Besides the fact that you will have a language barrier and time zone differences and they will never truely understand anything you say, they do not use th same standards of programming and it never seems to work right. So even though you may get them at a fraction of the price that american labor would cost, by the time you finally get past the language barrier and have them fix the issues they created you’ll end up paying them many times the price american labor would have originally cost. Many times in my past my fellow business owners have hired foreign freelancers and got the work started and maybe even got it completed but when they tried to make them finish it or fix it, the foreign tech disappeared. On top of all this, what if they just take your money and never do the work or complete it or even cause your business damage, what legal recourse do you have?
4. Ask the prospective tech what programming tools and languages they use.
Windows Operating Systems, Microsoft FrontPage or Dreamweaver are amatuer tools that high school kids use. If your prospective tech uses these tools do not hire them.
Mac, Coda, CSS Edit or hand coding are excellant and professional tools used by the pros.
PHP, MYSQL, CSS and JavaScript are key and most know languages.
.Net, ASP, ColdFusion, Python or any other languages are good to know but more of expensive programming languages to develop a full site in unless you have a lot of money to fund the project. Not to mention .NET/ASP run on Windows operating systems goes without saying are more expensive and full of security holes.
5. Ask the prospective tech what design skills they have.
While design/artist skills aren’t key it’s like the cherry on top of the cake and will help you in many ways. Keep in mind that it is alwasy easier to outsource design/artist work than it is programming work. A good tech will know how to find and help you freelance the design work.
How can you determine if your current tech is worth keeping or worth their current salary rate? Really just run through the above points and see if he or she fits into what makes a good tech. Obviously with any type of employment position, it’s never good to hire friends or family and don’t let loyalty make you waste money on someone who isn’t a good employee. If it came down to it and that employee was offered more money elsewhere, they’d leave you. Don’t waste your money if you’re not getting what you’re paying for.
Tags: atbs, employee, employment, freelancer, hire, search engine optimization, search engine placement, sem, seo, website, website design, website development
Search Engine Optimization(SEO)/Placement is as important to you and your business as air is to breathe. Much like air, you use it, thrive on it and live your life based upon it but may not fully understand it or even think about it. Not knowing about SEO can cause countless and endless damage to your business. Search engines consider bad SEO as society considers a bad reputation. The more bad SEO you do to your site or domain, the longer it will take to repair the damage.
Almost all SEO firms and SEO placement specialists are fraudulent. Some deliver these fancy reports to you, complete with screenshots of what you’re doing wrong and how they will fix it but nine times out of ten they just change the domain and send it to you. Not to mention the things they are telling you they will fix and the things you need to focus on are all bullcrap. While some of them may have something to do with your SEO standings, they aren’t the keys to SEO success. These firms are trying to deliver these easy to fix items to take your money and run. In other words, meta-tags are not the keys to SEO. If an SEO specialists comes to you claiming they can get you top placement and focus on meta-tags, they’re fraudulent. No one can guarantee you placement. If someone does, they are lying.
There is no magic bullet for SEO. It is a life-time of work. It does get easier after you get on top, but it’s not as simple as getting on top and then forgetting about it. It’s just like being the top TV station for viewers. Once you get there you have to constantly keep delivering good programming, resource building etc to remain the top TV station.
With all this said, how do you get on top of the search engines? How do you stay there? Why should you even care? SEO is a very simple concept, though it is a lot of work. The holy grail for SEO professionals is www.seochat.com. They have forums and literally millions of SEO related articles written by today’s top SEO professionals and best of all it’s free. Not learning about SEO and being a ticket broker today is should criminal. You’re hurting your business every day you don’t know about SEO. Even if you don’t want to use SEO yourself, it helps you become a better online ticket broker and also helps you to not get taken advantage of by SEO firms or even employees.
Many ticket brokers ask why they should care. They feel they’ll never be able to compete with the major ticket brokers that are on top today but that’s bullshit. As I said before they’re constantly working to stay there and if you start working SEO practices today, in time you will start appearing for certain keys words in the search engines. I myself, over the past 2 years, have worked the SEO practices have come up on top for key words like “concert tickets” or “new york giants tickets”. My orders have increased ten-fold but I busted my ass to get there. Now that I am there I don’t have to work as hard to SEO to stay there.
SEO is simple. The first thing you want to do is get rid of your plug-in website if you have one. I had an EventInventory ColdFusion plug-in website for 5 years and my SEO hurt the entire time. This goes for TicketNetwork or TicketTechnology plug-ins as well. Why do plug-in websites matter? If you asked this question, let me explain. With a plug-in website, your actual ticket inventory, cart and may other pages on your website link directly back to the provider’s domain name. Not to mention with most plug-in websites, for example EI’s ColdFusion website, all sites look identical except for a few color and logo changes. So when the search engines come and scan your website, they list them as spam/clone websites and over time decrease your site in the search engine standings and I’ve even seen some sites blacklisted (removed from search engines).
So after you get your self a nice XML website on one of the exchanges, you have to start working the following SEO practices.
a. good coding of the website with current W3C standards
b. content, content, content
c. inbound non-reciprocal link building
d. keeping your website up-to-date
a. Good coding: W3C coding standards change over the years and the search engines use their rules to regulate who should score higher. They obviously don’t want to show a website that was programmed in 1992 in the top ten under concert tickets. Also another thing to consider is not using dynamic links. Always use static, even with dynamic websites
(BAD: http://www.myticketwebsite.com/tickets.asp?264:gfhgr?venue?18:3923)
(GOOD: http://www.myticketwebsite.com/bonjovitickets.html)
Besides the fact that search engines want static links, it also allows you to pack some more key words in your URL structure so this really a no-brainer. A good design and layout is also another no-brainer. Obviously when considering how your new website will look, you have to choose something that will be aesthetically pleasing to your customers and spells out BUY FROM ME! No, nos include all black websites, small fonts, large pictures, flash websites, too many links etc.
b. Content: Google is what is known as a content search engine, not the retail search engine. Content is a very time consuming process. If you have in mind just to go to wikipedia or related website and take their content and put it on your website, it would be better if you had no content at all. Google has ways to find out if you stole content with their bots and you will pay. Always write up original, unique content in your won words for your website and make sure you put enough keywords in your paragraphs on each page that you want this page ranked under.
c. Non-reciprocal inbound links: This can be summed up in one word; popularity. If search engines gave their users non popular links, they’d be out of business pretty quick, meaning people would stop using them for their searches. How do they tell which website is popular without using spyware or related junk such as Alexa? Simple, by how many other websites link to your website. The more individual, related websites that link to your website, the higher your website will rank in search engines. Don’t try to be cute here and put 10, 000 links to your website on a single domain you won or try to use all your domain names to link to your website in a spammer method. Search engines look at the IP addresses on these domains and checks to see if these sites that are linking to you actually have content and aren’t just being used as link farms. Search engines also look to see if related sites are linking to your website and these count much higher. If a medical waste website is linking to your Britney Spears ticket page, obviously this won’t count as high as if a Britney Spears fan website is linking to this page. How do you get these websites to link to you? It’s as simple as having a nice website with good images and awesome content. Then these fan sites will WANT to link to you. The worst thing you could do for your business is just have a simple plain-jane, one in a billion ticket broker retail site. No one wants to link to that junk. Of course there are other methods to get people to link to you. You could pay them or go and request them to link to you. But keep in mind reciprocal links, meaning they link to your website but you’re also linking back to their website, doesn’t count as much as they linking to you but you not linking to them.
d. Keep your site up-to-date: If every time you used the search engines to search for something a website that was last updated 1995 came up, would you continue using that search engine? The same goes for a website that hasn’t been updated alll year. This is what search engines specialize in. They can actually tell when your website files were last updated and they keep copies of your website each and every time they come to it and check those against their most recent copy. Not updating your website is sabotaging your SEO chances. This doesn’t mean you ahve to spend more time working on your website than you do buying and selling your tickets. A simple couple hours a week will do wonders for your SEO. Change links on your homepage to the most recent shows, change some images and add some content to a few even pages that didn’t have content before or change some content that was already there.
Now that you know the basics of SEO, don’t stop here. Go to seochat.com and learn more. In this economy, help your business. Wholesale is great but retail is better. Sell more tickets and SEO is how to do it for free. PPC is not, don’t pay for advertisement when you could get it for free.
Tags: search engine optimization, search engine placement, sem, seo
I am a strong believer that all ticket brokers should be a member to and upload their inventory to all three major ticket exchanges. By switch I don’t mean leave EventInventory forever, rather switch using them as the backbone of your business.
EventInventory has long been the biggest and at times, the best ticket exchange. But in recent times poor management, decisions and press has put TicketsNow and EventInventory on people’s minds who never even knew they existed. EventInventory has always been a company that was hard to work with and over charge for their services. But now days, it’s impossible. You have to view your selected ticket exchange (EventInventory) as the foundation for your business. Do you really want them as your foundation now days? Who’s going to buy TicketsNow from TicketMaster? What does this mean to you? What if they are shut down? What if TicketMaster starts going after the secondary ticket market to win points with Congress? Some of these questions might seem absurd but if you had thought about what recently happened a year ago, you would have thought that what recently happened was absurd and could never have happened.
There are a few other excellent options as far as ticket exchanges go. Of course, speaking of TicketNetwork and TicketTechnology, each with it’s own good and bad attributes. They both offer comparable services and products. What you don’t know is that while EventInventory tries to force you to use their POS to upload your tickets to their exchange, you can still use another ticket exchange for your website and POS. There are 2 ways you can do this, one being just leave one computer in your office running their POS and the second if you have enough inventory or if you have a good enough working relationship with EventInventory simply negotiate the ability to have your inventory added without using their POS. Believe it or not, quite a few ticket brokers do this. It’s never too late
Hmm..I don’t know; just about everything.
Without a nice website, your business will hurt and you may not even know it. But there are many ticket brokers who know and feel there is something wrong with the market and that our industry is hurting. If these very same ticket brokers had a nice website, they wouldn’t be so bad off.
So what do I mean by “nice website”? Simply put, a nice website is a website that not only your customers enjoy, which reflects in your incoming online orders, but a website that gets you high in organic search engine listings.
It’s easier than you might think to have a nice website and what many don’t realize is while there may be an upfront cost, which could be considered high, it’s more than worth it. View it like while you may spend $5000 to $10,000 getting a “nice website”, it’s money that will last for many years to come. You could spend the same amount of money in one ad run on TV or in a magazine and piss it away or you could spend it on a nice website and have it for 5 to 10 years. During this entire time, you could enjoy a higher ROI. So don’t waste time anymore. Dump your crappy website and make today the first step towards having a nice website.
Tags: ads, advertise, atbs, ppc, ROI, seo, website design, website development, xml website
This is a topic that could literally fill the Library of Congress, but let me try to sum it up in a few paragraphs. First you need to understand what SEO (search engine optimization). This is best described in the post search engine optimization 101. In general SEO is much easier of a concept than you can possbily imagine. Many “SEO firms” or “SEO professionals” out there will lie to you to make a quick buck. They tell you to worry about meta-tags or some other simple task so they can maximize their billing and minimize their work. but in fact, getting your website on top of the search engines is a heavily work-intensive and time consuming process.
- Content building
- Inbound links
I can show you literally hundreds of websites on top of the search engines with no meta-tags and a very shabby design. And they did it simply by the 2 items listed above.
What is content building?
Simply put, typing up customized content for each of your pages that you want to get listed higher int he search engines. Do not pledgerize content. It would be better if you idn’t have any content at all than to copy or steal someone else’s.
What are inbound links?
You need to realize that with search engines, it is a popularity contest. How do the search engines rate your site’s popularity? By how many other websites link to your website without you linking to them.
How do you get inboud links? By having excellant content on your website and blogging. There are many different ways to get inbound links.
Tags: search engine optimization, seo
I was once considered to be one of the top 20 ticket brokers in the USA. I had everything going for me as far as the ticket broker industry went. Several employees, a store front, a great website and millions in profits each year. But that all ended in a blaze of glory due to my naive actions during one superbowl. Sure I made millions of profits each year, but as any ticket broker can tell you, that’s not all take-home. I had to pay employees, advertisement and marketing, buy the tickets and still pay many other bills.
So during this particular superbowl, I had a dream order come in. It was a six-figure order that when I received it I hardly believed it. I immediately called the customer and started going through the motions of getting their driver’s license and everything needed faxed to me and after a couple days of checking and researching and verifying this person wanted the order via phone calls, I finally processed the credit card and shipped the tickets.
The order was pretty close to the superbowl so after the superbowl it happened. Chargeback… My heart fell out of my chest when I saw my bank statement and received the chargeback letter from AMEX. I immediately got my lawyer and started the process of fighting it but to make a long story short it turned out the son used the father’s credit card and I lost fight. The six figures made all my credit cards start bouncing. All my orders out there, and I received many orders back in the day, failed. I had a shitload of brokers calling me. The exchange I was with blocked me and Iw as out of business.
So my warning would be, if at all possible, never run an order above $5000. And if you have to take an oder above your comfort zone, get a check, money order or certified bank check. Even if you do lose you can handle it.
Tags: Being a Ticket Broker Today, chargeback, failed ticket broker
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