My Many Levels of Seperation

I know that some of past content may of been critical of other automotive seo vendors I still stand behind many of my opinion as far as marketing style goes.  With that said it is time to move forward, we have had a meeting of the minds of sorts and have moved forward from there.  We now are looking for ways to play on each others strengths to help one another serve our clients.

Drivingsalesexecutivesummit

We had the opportunity share our experiences on stage at the Drivingsales Executive Summit.  It was a great experience for all that were involved. 

Today I was speaking with my contact at my Cincinnati Ford dealer and he wish he could of been there.  Hopefully he will be able to attend the next one.  There was a ton of great content shared there.

Today I update my automotive marketing site to show dealers "10 Things to Ask their Automotive SEO Firm" it is amazing I have already caught flack from anonymous people over that post.  The industry still ahs a long way to go until it matures.  Personally if  I disagree with something published online I don't have a problem commenting online in my name over it.  It is funny when adults are scared to do that.

I recently ran across a vox powered blog that was nothing more than a slam site where one dealer looks to be trying to generate traffic on another dealers name, by creating and republishing negative information.  As an Automotive SEO firm we were able to easily identify the purpose other than just slamming the offended dealer.

Here is a copy of a post that was done with the innocent and guilty names and the city names changed.

Nissan Spam

I am debating with a vendor who sells dealer micro sites on how little the value is for a dealer in Victoria Texas to have a microsite that ranks for Nissan delivers for national traffic  For starters if all of the traffic the site delivered was for car shoppers in the dealers market area the results are still less than optimal.

Barring one week of an average of 30 hits a day the traffic is almost nil now down to around 10 hits a day.  It just does not make very much sense for a dealer to waste money on a property like that.

Nissandelivers_keywords

If a dealer is going to spen the money to get a site that delivers relevant traffic for them they would be better off creating a marketing blog like the one a friend is working on targeted to New Jersey bad credit car loans.  Even when I have debated the value of sites that target Tulsa special finance and the low importance of owning keywords like that I have to concede that the localized terms even thugh vague are a better value.  Having the term owned for Tulsa special finance is a lot more valuable for a Tulsa Chevy dealer than a goofy limited time term for national traffic for a Nissan promotion.

A dealer would be a lot bettr off to have a page about the program mixed in with a bigger site.  It would provide the surfer and the dealer more value for the traffic.

I have been working with a Cincinnati used car dealer on his companies Internet marketing initiatives.  It is absolutely refreshing to work with a car guy that "gets it".  It appears that the site recommendations that I made to him are helping the customers get the information they want from it better.  So it is a win win for the dealership and their customers.  The dealership sells more cars and the customers get what they are looking for.

On he other hand this is the exception to the rule.  Most car dealers design their sites in a way that they think it should look or behave without regards to the user.  They think it looks cool so it must be right.  This is coming from people who cannot set up a pop delivery of email on outlook.  Or they listen to

Anther thing about the automotive industry the original idea is almost dead among the vendors in the segment.  Dealers are being lead around by vendors in their internet marketing initiatives who keep doing me too type products. 

Enough of a rant for today...

I have never been a heavy user of linkedin.com until recently.  Part of my new job at managing the blog community at www.drivingsales.com is to bring in new members and potential clients so I have been leveraging linkedin as part of this process.

I enabled the blog app, which brings in your blog and friends blog content to your profile, and added a link to my profile.  I was surprised after updating my profile that I had the opportunity to enter a drawing by Banana Republic.  I am not sure if linkedin uses this type of monetization regularly but I thought it was genius.

You get a new entry every time you update your profile through Nov 22nd for a $1000 shopping spree an BR.  This does two things.  It gives Bannana Republic some huge brand awareness marketing and potential sales now, you also get a discount coupon, it will also drive traffic back to linkedin.  You can only get 10 entries but if it gets their users updating their profile and driving traffic to their site it worked.

Not sure that I have ever been a real fan of Banana Republic but if they give me a grand for updating my profile at linkedin I am subject to become a raving fan of both.

On another note I have not been updating here as regulary as I used to but that will change.  I am going to devote a lot of time here adding content about Search Engine Reputation Management in the near future.

Lemon

For those you who do not know me well I have over a decade of experience in the Automotive Industry on the retail side of the business.  Now I am working on helping dealers expand their reach via the Internet,  I do things sometimes to help educate people that work for dealerships to show them easy ways to reach their customers via Search Engine Optimization and by creating multiple layers of content to build their story.

I made a page that shows up in Google when people search for terms relating to Tulsa Bad Credit Auto Financing.  Not a super competitive search term but nonetheless has value if you are a dealership that specializes in special finance in Tulsa, OK.

Today I had an Internet Sales Manager exchange quite a few lively emails with me today to take down the page.  His argument was that I have no business earning money in Tulsa, Ok when I am not in that market area.  I justified my maintaining one squidoo.com page that shows in his market is that I earn some income from in via affiliate marketing while at the same time helping consumers save money if they have bad credit by getting pre approved before they visit a dealership.

This is how he responded to this.

And why are you so bent on saving consumers money? I got to tell you that because of your views on saving consumers money and taking it out of the pockets of hard working sales people it does not work well for your own social marketing I assure you. - Name Withheld

It is statements like this that perpetuates the negative attitude that the general public displays towards car salespeople.  Sooner or later people in the automotive industry that still maintain this thought process will become dinosaurs and the industry and the buying public will be better served.

People in the car business need to realize that they are in the service industry.  Where really helping consumers get the most for their money while making a fair profit is what will win at the end of the day.

I cam to the vox community to learn from this network and because it offers another place to publish some of my content.  I really like the layout here and have not quite figured out how every thing works, like adding images to links.

I was hoping that I would find another level of connection among the community here and it seems like I may just be missing the boat.  I belong to several other networks and have a lot of interactions with people in the automotive industry as a result of social networking, but I can't seem to pick up the same levels of connection here.

It may be because I have not spent enough time here learning the nuances of the community and I am to blame for that.  I guess I will have to make my visits here more frequent and for longer periods of time.

I belong to two very popular automotive social networks.   I try to give practical advice every step of the way.  Not everyone will agree with what I have to say and I don't expect it  What is comical though there are certain things that I know that I know and people respond by being just plain idiots.

They try to take steps to assault credibility in subjects they do not know and take things way out of context to bolster their position.  It is childish behavior to say the least.  On person in discussing dealer micro sites was proud of the job he did to get his site to rank for a very non competitive search term, Special Auto Finance Tulsa, not many consumers look for cars by searching for those terms.

He is selling himself snake oil or drinking some very hard cool aid.  Not sure which, but needless to say it will be fun to watch him wiggle as I take away his keywords on step at a time.  When people try to contribute to the conversation to provide a different view of things and the people who do not agree with that view lash out like "rat bastards" I need to learn to calm down at times, but then again there is not much fun in that !!