Having dealt with various vendors over the last couple months the interactions are comical, but they really show how short sighted the dealers and vendors really are in the Internet Marketing Arena.

I have looked at adding micro sites to our online marketing portfolio and have investigated several different vendors in this arena and have found that none of them have a clue at providing a real service to dealers. With the current offerings on the market today they would fail in other niches except the automotive industry. For starters no one in any other niche would pay the fees these guys are asking for “hosting” and design for crappy html templated sites. The designs are only original to the extent that each provider has their own “footprint” that they use to structure the micro sites. Other than that they offer nothing original for the astronomical fees that they charge.

For the monthly fee that these vendors are charging I could have a site designed and host it for a year and if I wanted to be real crafty about it I could have one designed and just knock it off for the other keywords I wish to go after. It is not rocket science.

In a recent email exchange with a microsite provider I asked the direct question of “Do you do design work and allow me to host it myself?”

The reply was comical to say the least. I was informed that i could prepay the design but would have to pay them $65 for hosting and we would not own created property. It would remain in their control and they wanted a contract..
Another vendor wanted $200 per month per site and $2 per generated lead and we still did not own the property..

It then dawned on me why these people get away with this. It is the niche that they operate in. Car dealers accept this crap and pay for it and do not take ownership of their online marketing destiny. They rather pay vendors to take the fall if something does not work and also takes them away from the responsibility of managing it. Two very big screw ups if you wish to be successful marketing anything online.

This does not even touch on the fact that vendors do not structure their products to meet the clients needs. they structure the products to meet their needs and force the customer to accept it. If you are old enough to remember DOS based operating systems the leading edge word processing vendor. Word Perfect, would not adapt their product to work with windows until it was to late. Their customers left them as Microsoft developed windows and Microsoft Office. Even though the users of Word Perfect knew how to use the software and it was the preferred word processor of the day. Automobile vendors really could learn a lesson from this….

Oh well time to have my microsites designed by a free lance designer and sell the templates.