Archive for Online Marketing
Automotive Affiliate Sites – Let the Fun Begin
Posted by: | CommentsI do automotive seo for a few select dealers direct and as a service provider for a couple of other firms I still enjoy affiliate marketing. I have already produced a few very profitable affiliate landing pages using squidoo but now I wish to step it up a notch.
Right now I am working on implementing a huge blog network and have hired content writers to help manage it. The network in of itself will be used as assets to help seo client’s websites but they will also pay their on weight as well. What this means is the content cost, hosting and domain cost will be covered by the onsite advertising and CPA offers.
The primary mechanisms for the income will be affiliate networks and adsense. Not a real novel idea but that is how it is done.
The network will cover 50 blogs to start with all pushing links to clients sites and affiliate landing pages for localized traffic in select markets and national traffic. The network in of itself can actually make zero dollars and I will be happy as long as the affiliate properties cover the weight.
One of the landing pages that was just created is actually quite ugly but the goal is for a high bounce rate with conversion on the ads or cpa offers. You can see the one I created targeting New Jersey G37 Infiniti. Eventually this site will rank really well for all models of Infiniti cars targeting used car traffic and local Infiniti dealer terms in select markets. This is just one example of 200 of these type properties in the works.
The roll out will be slow because the network needs to be in place first to help support this many properties where as the small network I have now really is used specifically for clients. An example of these network sites will be like Domestic Auto Report.
My talk with Randy Charach – Domain Portfolios
Posted by: | CommentsTonight 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.
The real value of the longtail in Automotive Marketing
Posted by: | CommentsWhen 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.
Bannings by Digg = Pure Marketing Genius
Posted by: | CommentsDigg.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.
Automotive Digital Marketing – An epiphany of sorts..
Posted by: | CommentsLately 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.
The real power of squidoo
Posted by: | CommentsMany 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.
Realigning Online Properties – Lots of Work
Posted by: | CommentsWhen 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.
A new direction – A new look
Posted by: | CommentsSorry 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.
Whose Brand are You Building?
Posted by: | CommentsAs an internet marketer I feel that it is critical to build YOUR BRAND and not the brands of others. While it is apparent if you are going to market products and offers via SEO sometime content has to be geared towards the product you are marketing leaving you out of the equation or does it?
Having reentered the “workforce” as an Internet Sales Manger for Carl Gregory in Brunswick I have started creating multiple levels of content geared to generate leads to sell cars using “bum marketing” techniques. The nice thing about using this method it allows me to not only build a search engine presense for the products we sell at the dealership it also allows me to have a personal branding message to the prospects that find this content. Selling high ticket items such as cars does require a level of personal interaction that is not experienced in a true online marketing environment.
Each piece of content generated has a call to action for people to contact me directly to purchase their next vehicle. While some of the content generated may directly attempt to brand the store it always contains a way for people to get in contact with me while at the same time building search engine reputation management for myself and the dealership in the process. Also this content is transportable if I find myself in another situation or wish to turn some of the content into affiliate marketing pieces at a later time or use strictly for SEO purposes.
Some of the tools I am using to build my brand also have a level of monetization tied into them that add to the many streams of online income that I dearly love. This is taking online marketing to a level that many ignore and others do not want you to know about. The process is easy for me and in the near future I will be releasing a subscriber based manual on how to use these techniques to build your brand.