User Generated Content
Nov
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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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Sep
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…
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Aug
I have just started trying Google’s Knol product. It does look like it is their answer to Squidoo.com. I have created my first real page there titled Car Dealer Search Engine Reputation Management. I will be randomly searching to see how long it takes for it to index and it’s position in the search engine. It may actually become a good tool in Online Reputation Management in the near future. But just like anything associated with Google.com it could be hit or miss.
One thing is for sure it will probably never get slapped like Squidoo.com by googles algorithms. I am a huge fan of Squidoo and don’s see Knol as a replacement but as a more of an article database and wikipedia.com combined.
For someone who likes to create content it can also provide an additional revenue stream as you do have some options for including your google adsense code as well. This will be interesting to watch to see how well it competes with other user generated content style sites.
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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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