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Pulling in localized traffic for car dealers or any business can be accomplished using wordpress as a CMS.  Currently I have a wordpress them being designed to use as an alternate dealer marketing site.  Not to be confused with auto dealer micro sites.  The philosophy behind micro sites as a search marketing tool with one or two page landers provides the smallest value to a dealer.

Using a CMS style mini site to push promotions or specific models and tying all of those levels of content together and having the ability to archive contnet will provide far greater value for long term SEO benefit and relevence.

Because most models and more specifically year models of vehicles come and go.  Where as a well optimized page on a domain with other layers of content can give your mini site a permanent shelf life.  For example I created a simple landing page targeting buyers in looking for a 2009 Mustang Shelby in Brunswick that has multiple calls to action and is tied in with other content about Brunswick car dealers.

The site itself is not designed specifically for a particular dealer.  It is geared towards affiliate conversions but once the traffic is monitored for a period of time it will show how well a multiple page mini site can benefit for local search traffic versus a simple one or two page automotive micro site.

Single landing page sites can be accomplished using other platforms or at very low cost.  Where as a multifaceted CMS system can be designed for set up for client management or direct marketing management at a cost that provides greater roi for the dealer.

Shooting for terms like Nissan delivers (<Click there if you are a consumer this will bore you) or Tulsa special finance with simple one or two page dealer micro sites with little optimization for other terms really makes very little sense for the keyword “Nissan delivers” it is a time sensitive promotion that lasted for a month.

After reviewing the traffic stats for a site that is number one for Nissan delivers in google it really shows how little value there is for a Nissan dealer in Victoria Texas to have this property. They would be better served to have a site set up on something like wordpress that can create multiple landing pages and go after a larger range of keywords such as local search terms in addition to promotions.

Graph showing how worthless the Nissan delivers search term is for a Nissan dealer in Victoria Texas.

The goal is noble but useless. If you notice the spike during the second week of the month it looks like there was some other promotion that drove traffic via the search engines and then it tapers off to around 10 hits a day. I am not sure what the purpose of the site will be when the current promotion ends but it looks like it only had a one week life span.

Chances are this post will get in the serps for Nissan delivers search terms and really shows the power of wordpress for a dealer micro sites. I am working on developing a theme that will allow dealers to leverage its power.

Tonight I had a long conversation with Randy Charach through an incidental contact via a squidoo page I made about automotive marketing. The conversation lead down many paths and we discussed domain portfolios. While the real purpose of our contact was about harnessing the power of Squidoo and blogs as marketing properties.

Blog marketing and squidoo marketing are my stronger skill sets. A vice of mine is collecting domain names. What is even worse is I buy them with good intentions and really do not have the time to optimize them for affiliate marketing or establishing them for creating an Internet presence.

I have over 500 domains in my portfolio that I need to do something with or sell. I have a few real good ones like USVisaCards.com and onlinecarpricing.com that are sitting idle doing nothing. So I will take a closer look at some of the domain parking services and the resell market if nothing more than to cover my renewal cost.

Thanks Randy for taking the time to reach out to me.  You have inspired me to try to put some of these domains to good use.

When I originally started this blog my intention was to use it to help others that were getting started with affiliate marketing stop from making mistakes.  While my current endevors have made affiliate marketing more of an after thought than a primary income source for me.  I still make some decent cash from properties I own but the income is in the range of my husehold expenses with not much left over.

That has not stopped me from maintaining some relationships with people who I have helped over the last couple of years and more importantly one individual who is doing some work for me.  Her and I spoke on the phone today because she was thoroughly excited about some of the income levels she is obtaining using some bum marketing techniques.

I put her on a very soft geographic automotive niche to target mostly for terms like bad credit car dealers and now she is getting national traffic on these terms from natural search.  Most all of it from long tail terms.  Not he sharp pointed long tails that dealership sites are optimized for.

Seeing the traffic stats from her efforts just goes to show that dealers need to concentrate on having multiple marketing properties to drive traffic to their offers and to build their story.  Unfortunately with the economic turmoil the industry is in now dealer are not being very proactive in their marketing efforts.

This gives salespeople and ISM’s the opportunity to build their own portfolio of properties that are completely transportable.  I am witnessing this phenomenon in some of the most competitive markets now.  A real good example is a blog that I saw that focuses on New Jersey used car loans.

Using some basic techniques to get infront of car shoppers is easy and until you build these properties it will be impossible to find the converting keywords that bring buyers through the door.

To often do I see sites, especially in the automotive industry, where the user experience is completely ignored in lieu of what the site owner thinks is the right thing to do.  Usually these types of decisions are made by people who really do not have a clue about internet marketing, including the website vendors.

Just recently I made a suggestion to a Cincinnati used car dealer to remove the pop up from the home page and their conversion ratio jumped dramatically and decreased the bounce rate on the site.  It is simple things like this that can make a site successful versus just being a waste of bandwidth.

To often businesses forget that their website is an extention of their brick and mortar business.  A pop up on the home page shows that you do not value the visitors trust that they placed in you by visiting your site.  If you don’t greet cutomers by jumping in their face when you visit your store why would you do it when they visit your website?

Spending your marketing budget on an inefficient website is akin to advertising in a paper 150 miles from your location.  You may get a call or two but was it really worth the effort?  Probably not!

Successful marketers will realize the opportunities that this down economy presents and execute on them.  It does not matter if it simple things like creating a dealership blog or using sites like squidoo to leverage traffic on terms like buy here pay here to generate credit leads.

Please leave any suggestions you may have to improve website conversions below.

Digg.com has started banning the users that has made their site successful.  It appears that they go through cycles where this happens.  Nothing new to habitual diggers.  This in turn causes an uproar of sorts among them and they start revolts.

This behavior is pure marketing genius by digg.com.  It causes the people who have not been banned to place more value on their digg profiles and to talk about them, digg, across the blogoshpere.  I even got sucked into it, otherwise I never write blog post about digg.com.

The thing is this is a group of intelligent individuals who have helped digg raise the value of their site and they don’t even realize that the bannings is digg.com’s way of manipulating them to help digg users self moderate and promote their site.

Digg is the biggest player in the social media space and their bannings are pure marketing genius.  Kevin Rose knows this.  Digg’s marketing department knows this.  I just wonder if the users that are whining do?

Concerns have been raised raised by individuals worrying that blogging about this phenomenon that they will lose their digg account.  That is allowing a site that does not contribute to their bottom line occupy more space in their mind than is healthy by any means.  They just need to understand, digg is happy that they are getting post like this and allowing a single site they have no control over to control their thoughts and actions is taking away time better spent doing a multiple of things, like building their< business.

The bannings at Digg.com Will Continue

Get over it, spend your time on things that bring you value not someone else’s business model.  You will be glad you did.  I have better things to do as well, like working on DrivingSales and my personal online marketing properties.  Digg be damned, they don’t control my business model.

Lately I have come under scrutiny by certain automotive vendors based on some of the properties I own.  My point is I provide value to the consumers.  Their point is I take away from the value of their services or individual dealers. What is even more comical is that some of these properties also use the same marketing strategy that the vendors use themselves.  I just provide a stronger call to action for conversion.  They all push affiliate programs or contextual advertising to consumers who visit their sites. Some vendors also try to capitalize on search for their competitors names using guerrilla spammy video optimization.  It is t-decoration accepted apparently.  The biggest vendor to try to create a ruckus for me over this has also partnered in the past with a training vendor who uses the spammy video optimization.  (see this event) I wonder if he thought about this before he got in bed with them as he was sending the emails trying to run me in the ground.

At the end of the day it does not matter what these bottom tier vendors think say or do.  It has also helped me to establish my personal marketing paradigm for the future.  I will not stop providing content that will help dealers reach wider in their online marketing mix and it will educate them on things they can do, while at the same time if people are not willing to do some of their own leg work to figure things out I probably will not waste much time on them any longer. People want advice and help all the time.  The problem is they are not willing to pay for it or they recognize the value and want it delivered for free.  No more mooches is my new philosophy.

What brought about this epiphany was conversations I had recently with two individuals.

One was with my old GM.  He was whining about me taking away traffic from the search term “Carl Gregory Hyundai” and claimed I was hurting his business and I needed to change my content to benefit him.  While at the same time he is unwilling to pay for it.  So I will use that traffic to generate the most income for me.  This is the same person who thought it was great that I sold every Nissan trade in we got because I took traffic away from “Golden Isles Nissan” and converted it to sales for the store.

The second conversation took place with my brother who is an Atlanta website designer.  He was explaining the problem with having clients that do not understand the value of something or how things work.  One of his lowest value clients keeps emailing him about use for different products like MS Outlook and using a feed reader.  He is showing more patience than I would after he forwarded me his email exchanges.  But it also helped me understand that not every client, contact or customer has the same value in the automotive digital marketing space.

People want free help on marketing their business which puts money in their pocket but the operative word is FREE.  There is a great website that will give you all the free information that you can handle, visit it here, there are plenty of resources to be found there.  That does not mean I am going to stop giving free tips and opinions it just means that I am not going to spend a lot of time on low value activities.

Time is not a commodity I have an abundance of.

Automotive Digital Marketing is a buzz word created by consultants in the niche to sell online marketing ideas and products that fit a traditional frame of mind.  Tacky intersituals, pop up coupons, dealer micro sites are some of the crappy techniques that are being pushed by the gurus.

When you call them out about bad they are getting it wrong they respond in ways that do more to damage their search engine reputation that you can possibly imagine.  The biggest crowd to suffer from watching these people in action are the old school second generation plus car dealers.   They are so used to being told the right way to do things by they forefathers and gurus, who proclaim a wealth of knowledge, when they dont really have a clue about online marketing themselves.

Online marketing is not just about capturing leads and the processes used to follow up with them, it is way more than that.  I often get criticized for my views of online marketing and that is ok I have very thick skin, but what is amazing when people realize you are onto a better way of reaching a target audience they try to cannibalize the idea as their own, when they do not have a clue about delivery.

Car dealers sell widgets that people can buy anywhere from anyone, within reason.  People using he internet to research cars will submit leads to dealers and third parties but more and more these are below the fold consumers.  They are ones needing help with special finance, buried in trade ins and price whore shopping, not saying these consumers are not valuable, which cause more work for the people working these leads.

Why not go after the best customers in a way that will harness the power of attraction versus the power of promotion?  Dealer rating sites claim that this is the wave of the future when actually it is a past tense thought on web 2.0.  Dealer review sites actually take away from the dealer one of their most highly trafficked search terms that bring buyers to their website, their name.

Just as explained at another automotive marketing blog.  Car dealers are not selling a unique product and to pay to have reviews of their dealership solicited by third parties is really ignorant, especially when part of that pitch is to dominate search traffic for their dealership name and their peoples name.  Those are terms that the dealer should control on their own and make it impossible for other sites to enter their primary search terms.

If you want to display testimonials from customers you should control the property that they are displayed on, unless you are selling a a unique product.  Then third party validation is worth something.  But when people are comparing where to buy a Ford from, you need to give them the reason to do business with you, not pay someone else to solicit your customers for them to have access to your database and monetize traffic for your name.

There are plenty of sites that you can use for free and solicit your own customers to give you a review, without them being encouraged to submit leads to third party lead providers for your widget.

People going online to look for car dealers by name are already sure they probably want to do business with you or to see if you have what they want.  Why confuse the matter by sending them to a third party for information about you?

*****Disclaimer for people who are going to be pissed about this post:  The thoughts and opinions expressed here are those of Paul Rushing and have not been expressly endorsed or encouraged by any affiliation he holds in the automotive industry.  If you have a problem with it feel free to leave a comment or to contact me directly.

Many of you know I am a real fond of squidoo.com it allows you to create a page about anything to market your products, to sell affiliate products, donate to charity and to get your ideas out there.  With it’s internal linking srtucture every page there links to every other page and leverages all of the link juice brought in by people who use the platform as their only income source.

Here are some amazing facts about Squidoo:

• As of this writing it has an Alex rank of 428 which places it in the top .01% of all websites.
• There are over 11 Million inbound links to the site.
• It has over 460 Thousand Indexed Pages.

With Google’s push for universal search it some other amazing things on how Squidoo shows in the search results.  Seeing how we are in an election year you would thing that terms like Sarah Palin would be untouchable, a  squidoo lens is outranking the New York Times for that search query!!

I have used squidoo to rank for some competitive and long tail search terms in the automotive industry.  One even caused the manager for Golden Isles Nissan to come and try to cause me problems because I was ranking number two for their name and selling all of our used Nissan inventory from it, the rankings have slipped some because I have not worked on maximizing that account as much because I am no longer a dealership employee.

Another good exampl of taping competitive search terms is when I made a lens for a dealer tha was trying to get some of the search traffic for Kansas City Suzuki Dealer, it now ranks very well for KC Suzuki dealer and is just a matter of time before it rises on the Kansas City Search term.

Squidoo coupled with other sources of user generated content can help a car dealership or any business control the SERPs for their money terms.  As an example I created a lens about bad credit car financing in Tulsa Ok that ranks really well for “Special Finance Tulsa” I am not sure how valuable that keyword is but it does show the power of the platform.

Ok enough ranting about the platform time to get back to things that pay the bills, like working on a Car Dealer Social Network.

User generated content are forms of social engagement.  You can use various platform to increase competency, meet other like mided people, SEO puropses and even affiliate marketing.  Right now I am having to change some of the user generted content that I have created away from generating leads to sell cars to over to affiliate marketing because I have not found anyone who wants to take over some of these properties yet.

Just today I moved a squidoo lens I made to merchadise used Toyota cars and truck over to the affiliate side.  It will give people some valuable tips when looking to buy from a Brunswick Toyota Dealer, increase my competency in using the platform for different things, engage others and provide valuable SEO benefit to people who wish to engage me to help them build landing pages there.

I will go over each use of squidoo in future post…