AutoTraders Trade In Market Place A Great Way To Get Leads And Quality Cars

One of the dealers I service signed up for Autotraders Guaranteed Trade-In Marketplace last month. They wanted my help in promoting in for the Orlando Florida area.

I currently run 2 blogs for them, plus a microsite. Each blog post I do performs well in the search engines, plus each post is sent out as Facebook and Twitter Updates.

I was a bit skeptical at first, because I felt it was AutoTrader’s way of getting backlinks from many dealers to further juice up their website. Lately, Autotrader has been getting their butts kicked in the serps from companies like Cars.com and LemonFree.com.

Before I did anything I checked out where the affiliate link would go. I was relieved to discover that it went to a page with no external links or internal links pointing to AutoTrader.com. On the second page of the process there were some links, but they were using Java Script so I wasn’t worried about giving them any link love.

If they were doing this to get backlinks, I would of included the “nofollow” tag. For now, everything seems legit…but they can always change it later on.

After adding it to their car blog and a few other places, I noticed some decent traffic from the keywords I selected. Last week when I was talking with the internet sales director, I expressed my concern about “due credit”.

If I am going to flow traffic to this program, I hope AutoTrader isn’t going to get all of the credit. I sincerely hope that AutoTrader monitors where these leads actually come from, and offers the data to each dealer.

So far, it seems like a great program. They’ve received some quality leads and purchased some decent vehicles from the public. I think it’s a great idea, for two reasons:

1. Autotrader will guarantee the amount to the dealers if there is a miscalculation.
2. The prospect doesn’t have to trade in the vehicle, they can just sell it outright if they wish.

I would definitely recommend this program. At a cost of a bit more than a G a month, I see big potential in this. I would love to see some comments or concerns from others about this program.