Niche Marketing
Dec
Fresh Site in the Sandbox
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For the first time ever I think I have a fresh wordpress blog in the proverbial sandbox. The content is unique and has numberous post in place and it updates daily. I have a couple theory as to why it has not indexed yet.
- The Theme - While the theme came from a very well respected designer and I have used some of his other themes this one may not play well in the search engines. I have changed that out now.
- To Many Monetization Points - It is heavily weighted with affiliate offers, but that is the purpose of the site to capture bad credit car loan traffic and make money from it.
- My server is getting weighted - I have many sites are on the same DNS and IP address to try to max out a dedicated box. I have another Hosting Account I could move it to but probably will not.
- Karma - My plans are to build localized traffic and page rank then redirect the traffic later to people wanting traffic for the terms it ranks for. It is easily done and right now it is targeting specific local markets but will scale once nationwide once the traffic builds. The site is soley for the purpose of redirecting traffic to affiliate offers and making money with it later once it owns tons of search terms.
- Not many link and offsite optimization - This I hope is the biggest factor. It has not been submitted to any directories nor have I done a lot of the optimization techniques I use to build links.
- A shady domain name - www.anycreditcarloans.com enough said..
I will give it a few more days before directory submissions and a link building campaign. I really have enough other projects on my plate to really spend much time on this and this is really a low value experiment that I hoped would pay it’s own rent.
Now that I have just broken the cardinal rule of affiliate marketing and exposed a niche I am attacking via SEO I guess my regular readers will try to go after it as well. The good thing is I have other properties in the Automotive Finance Niche that are producing nice incomes and I have not thrown any or that link weight to this property yet. I do believe I could shut out anyone trying to attack my niches if I put my mind to it. Just ask Jacksonville Buy Here Pay Here Dealers of those that specialize in Tulsa Special Financing.
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Nov
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.
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Sep
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.
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Sep
The real power of squidoo
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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.
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Aug
When I was working as an Internet Sales Manager I made several lenses at Squidoo.com that ranked well for competitors names in my market area. That is one of the benefits of understanding how to present things to the search engines. I had a lens that got a lot of traffic when people searched for Golden Isles Nissan. I would sell every Nissan trade in that we got off of that lens. It was pure magic. It gave people what they were looking for a great deal on a Nissan car or truck.
I was still getting calls almost daily from it even though the cars that were featured there were no longer available. It was kind of comical actually. I even had the manager from Golden Isles Nissan complain to my former employer a few months before I left because he realized I was stealing some of his web traffic when people were looking for them online. What is going to be time consuming is changing all of these lenses I made while working at Carl Gregory Chrysler Dodge (<< another one needing to be edited) unless a dealer in my area wishes to take them over. $$ I am not actively seeking someone to buy them I will just turn them into affiliate lander and monetize the traffic that way.
I am making squidoo lenses for a dealer who sells a lot of Suzuki in Kansas City and am working on optimizing those lenses for him now. As we see how this project turns out I will be offering some content for Car Dealer Reputation Management and use squidoo as one of those levels. Please keep in mind the last thing that Suzuki of Wichita was worried about is reputation management. Scott Pitman and the gang stand out with their reputations online and other wise.
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Aug
A new direction - A new look
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Sorry for the lack of recent updates. As you will notice there is a new look here. It is because I am completely changing the direction of this blog. In the past most of the post were exclusively on the Make Money Niche of online marketing. For me I have succeeded there. I just don’t engage that niche. I am not a trainer per se. I will still provide value added content here. More so about automotive SEO, Automotive vendors and things people can do to increase their online viability.
How you chose to apply these things to your business is entirely up to you.
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May
I love doing things differently and using User Generated Content Sites to move a marketing message is high leverage if done effectively. I use several different UCG sites for different purposes.
Affiliate Marketing, Selling Cars, Branding - Personal and Business and Reaching out to families of children with a cleft lip and palate.
I do have one page that has caused me some mild amusement today. I have a squidoo lens that I list used Nissan Inventory on and it ranks well for a competitive car dealers name. Some unintentional optimization. Search for Golden Isles Nissan in the G and you will know what I mean.
The General Manager for Golden Isles Nissan did take the time to complain about it to my current employer but it fell on deft ears. 
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Apr
Marketing products and services online can be a very rewarding proposition if you can accurately target your customer. Many times people get confused on exactly who is the most profitable customer to attract. I am actively working as an Internet Sales Manager in the automotive industry in addition to my other online marketing activities and the automotive niche marketers really have it all wrong in my opinion.
The money that drives the automotive industry is from consumer who purchase cars from dealers. Bottom line all other aspects of the automotive niche rely on this transaction to drive all other aspects of the industry. If it were not for the main distribution channel of automobiles no other aspect of the auto industry could survive, however there are many sub niches inside of this large niche. From parts and service to transportation and fuel.
There are so many different sub niches that can be targeted inside of the auto industry it is unfathomable to attempt to cover them all. One thing I have noticed is that many of the online niche marketers in this segment are trying to cover every aspect of it and at the same time not doing really one segment of it well. That is taking advantage of the long tail but at what expense to the driving force of the industry?
Most of the automotive niche marketing is done at the expense of the dealers who fuel that economy. Amazing and profitable, but really why try to take away from your bread and butter?
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Mar
Some Niches Deserve Exploiting
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Due to some unforeseen reasons I had to take a “real job” again to help with the rising cost of my families health insurance. The premiums tripled!! I was able to go back to an old position of mine as an Internet Sales Manager at an automobile dealership. Having been a fulltime internet marketer for quites sometime it was a natural fit for me.
I have been empowered to make all decisions in relationship to the the dealerships online marketing efforts and discovered some amazing things. Large niches such as the car business really do not get online marketing at all. From the manufactures to the dealers to the vendors that service them it is comical.
I started looking at some Automotive Microsite Vendors to fill the void in lead volume and came to the conclusion that the automobile industry is about 10 years behind the times as far as acceptable standards and am now looking at developing a niche inside of the niche. Teaching car dealers to take responsibility for their own, online destiny. This one will be fun to watch and may let me afford $3000 a month health premiums.
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I provide Craigslist and SEO services to car dealers all over the country. I also own several affiliate properties. I am always looking for ways to help others and myself market themselves and companies online.
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