He actually took this home in on trade. A man bought 2 cars with it, and he used his home as a trade-in. As soon he filled me with the details, a big devious smile came across my face and I said “man, this has viral written all over it”. Then he smiled and said “I’m glad you get it, this is what I’ve been trying to say!”

Now when I say viral, you’re probably thinking about Digg or Stumble Upon. Well I’m not, maybe 2 years ago I would of. unless you’re part of the Digg or Stumble Mafia I wouldn’t count on getting anything from there. Of course I still submit to those websites, but I don’t hold my breath waiting for results.

I go for “local viral”, meaning the news. About six months ago we submitted a professionally written press release to lure a local newspaper or TV station to pick up the story. At the time, Twitter was big news so we wrote about “how a car dealer is using social networking to help sell cars in troubled times”. I used a local woman who had connections to write and distribute the press release, and within 24 hours a TV news crew showed up at the dealership and did a story on them. It was broadcasted every hour for an entire 24 hour period on Bay News 9 in Tampa.

This Local Viral Campaign Brought Park Automall Huge Business. Click The Screenshot To Watch It

They have the news footage on their website, and he really should check it out here. This resulted in a huge spike of showroom traffic and sales.

Now we’ll go back to the house story. Stop thinking like a carguy or cargirl for a minute and think about it. This is news!

I wrote a simple blog post about it 3 days ago, and a local news station picked it up. Now I don’t want to jinx anything, but I will finish this blog post after it is aired.

Until then try to be creative in your area and think about a unique situation. You can hire a local press release writer to write and release a story idea for about $300.00.

Believe me when I tell you, it’ll be the best 300 dollars you’re ever spent.

ECar List Saves Izmo Cars

I love technology, and because of that I’ve never been a big fan of Izmo Cars. They do create really nice looking websites, but the way Izmo handled their inventory has always been poor. I knew there was no way to optimize their inventory pages, so I never even bothered to try.

One of my car dealer clients is in Orlando Florida, and a few months back I started helping them juice up their main website. At this time, I had no choice but to select their corporate dealer.com website.

I blogged before about how great dealer.com was, but since working with their corporate site for Napleton I was unimpressed. It wasn’t their fault, but the options available for such a basic website isn’t enough. No matter what you do to it, it looks tacky (like a Cobalt Website). I’m sure there are upgrades available, but Napleton already has a monster of a websites created by Izmo Cars.

A while ago they mentioned they were doing something with E-Carlist, and they were going to incorporate this into their Izmo site.

Today I was poking around, and I like what I see, and here is why:

ECar List Is Using Subdomains Instead Of SubFolders

In case you don’t know the difference, a subdomain is usedcars.napletoncjd.com. A subfolder would be napletoncjd.com/usedcars. If you don’t know the difference you can read the wiki article on subdomains here.

Most companies would use a subfolder because it’s easier to rank and pass along juice. I’m assuming ECarlist is forced to do this because if they did use subfolders, it could conflict with what the main Izmo website is doing.

We use subfolders creatively with our miscrosites, and it works out great with Yahoo & Bing. We can actually get 3 or 4 different pages of the same principal website to show up on page one searches. It’s a bit tougher with Google, but it is possible.

One of the biggest problems with subdomains is simple. A subdomain is treated as an entirely separate website, so it takes some extra work building links to it to obtain rankings.

Inventory RSS Feeds

Finally, somebody else is using inventory RSS Feeds. There are many cool things you do do with an RSS Feed, and here are just a few:

1. You can update your Facebook Automatically(get directions).
2. You Can Update Twitter. We have a licensed Twitter app that’s more flexible, but you can take your RSS Feed and update your Twitter with Feedburner. If you don’t use FeedBurner, try it out. Burn your feed then click the “socialize tab”.
3. Mash Your Blog & Inventory Together. If you already have a dealer blog, I would hope it has an RSS Feed. You can take that RSS Feed AND your inventory feed and mash them together using Yahoo Pipes. This will take 2 or more RSS Feeds and convert them into one. then, take you new RSS feed that Yahoo made you and burn that into Feedburner. You can used the mashed RSS to update your twitter and Facebook Via Feedburner as well.
4. Make your own little Smart Phone Application: All you need is an RSS Feed, and you can easily make your own Smart Phone Application here.
5. Update LinkedIn: I’m not a big fan of LinkedIn, but you can update LinkedIn just like Facebook and Twitter.
6. Deep Link your Inventory using Your Car Dealer Blog: Add an RSS Widget to your blog (for your inventory). This will help in getting your inventory crawled faster by the search engines. I added the RSS feed of Ecarlist to one of the Blogs Napleton has. Look on the right here (scroll down a little). You can also make that cool looking widget on that blog with an RSS Feed. That makes a great call to action. Note, the widget won’t pass authority. It does make a great call to action for humans, but be sure to have the regular feed as well for the bots. I added the widget to the top tight of this blog so you can check it out.
7. RSS Direrctories: There are tons of free and paid RSS Directories out there. Spend the time adding your RSS feed to these, it can create much needed backlinks.

Internet Saturation:

Now Napleton has an Izmo Site with 2 subdomains, so that counts as three websites. Plus, they have a corporate Dealer.com website and a Showroom Logic Microsite with a Wordpress Blog. So all together they have well over 2,000 web pages indexed on Google alone. The more pages you have indexed in Google, Yahoo and Bing; the more traffic you will get. It’s simple math really.

I am not sure if Izmo and Ecarlist have a working relationship or not, but in either case I hope Izmo appreciates what they did. You don’t see many companies work together like that. For me, it’s a perfect marriage. Let Izmo work on the design of the website, and let Ecarlist manage the technology.

Izmo should at least send the crew at E-Carlist some pizzas or something.

]]> http://www.showroomlogic.com/blog/how-ecar-list-is-saving-izmo-cars.html/feed 0 http://www.showroomlogic.com/blog/how-to-make-a-free-smart-phone-application-for-your-car-dealership.html http://www.showroomlogic.com/blog/how-to-make-a-free-smart-phone-application-for-your-car-dealership.html#comments Wed, 14 Apr 2010 20:26:11 +0000 admin http://www.showroomlogic.com/blog/?p=644

Get Your Own Free Dealer Smart Phone Application

Note: This can be used in any industry, but my niche is Car Dealers so the examples I use are for cars.

Car Dealers all over the US have been intrigued by the possibility of having their own Smart Phone Application. The problem is, many car dealers feel it’s too early to pay a developer to create an application. There are many unanswered questions like will people even download this?

I can tell just by looking at my stats that more and more people are using Smart Phones like the IPhone and the Google Droid.

This little application won’t cost you a dime, and it will allow you to present your latest new and/or used car inventory in a block of photographs. Each image is clickable to the actual inventory page. Every time your website inventory is updated, it will update your dealer app.

This could be a great tool for your sales force as well, allowing them to have their inventory information on the fly.

If you have a Smart Phone, follow these instructions to check out Frontier Motor’s Application in Pensacola Florida:

Open the url below in your iPhone’s Safari browser:

http://www.wowzio.com/m/gallery/68208 (If you’re on a PC you can click that to see what it looks like live)

Then, ‘Add to Home Screen’ by clicking on the ‘+’ button.

Pretty cool huh? Now I will give you some simple instructions on how to set it up:

1. Go to Wowzio and get your app. For now, you have to email them and ask if you can use it. They do this to avoid porn and other undesirable websites to use it. You will get your approval within 24 hours if you ask them nicely.
2. You will have the opportunity to make many different widgets. Simply copy and paste your inventory RSS Feed url into the box, and follow the instructions.
3. Now you will have a few layout opportunities. You can use each as a blog, website and/or Smart Phone Widget. You can choose any one:

A Few Different Smart Phone Apps. Pick One, and it's FREE!

If you do not have an RSS Feed for your inventory, you really should get one. Check with your website vendor, you may have one and not realize it. Showroom Logic will give you an RSS Feed with a directory listing here.

Once you have an inventory RSS Feed, you can:

1. Update Your Facebook Automatically With Inventory
2. Update Twitter Automatically. (Directory users can use Showroom Logic’s Twitter App for Free)
3. Submit your RSS Feed to directories, which will automate by itself.
4. Do many cool things with Feedburner (too many to list)
5. Update LinkedIn
6. And now, you can have your own Smart Phone Application

Here is an example of what an inventory RSS Feed will look like:

http://www.tampa-used-cars.com/feed.php

Note: Technically this is a widget that is displayed on a webpage, but it functions just like an app. This will work with I-Pads too!

If you have any questions or comments, please comment below.

My Favorite RSS Widget. Click it to see it in action, along with other widgets mentioned on this post.

Depending on your niche, each and every widget can serve a great purpose. I have always been a widget guy, and I’m always looking for new ones to try. I have a bunch of blogs, and I’ve always felt that widgets can make a nice call to action. My niche is car dealers, and I’ve been looking for a good RSS to photo widget for months now. Last night I found one that’s perfect!

The problem with widgets is you have to figure out which ones to put above the page fold. Some will convert, and some won’t.

My Favorite Wordpress Widgets:

BLVD Status Block Party Widget:

BLVD Status is a live stats program. I use this software more than any other program I have. On a weekly or monthly level I use Google Analytics, but the BLVD lets me know what’s happening on my website right now. For example, when I add vehicles to Craigslist I want to know when is the best time to do this. I’ve figured out that after 10:00PM is the best time for the Orlando Craigslist. How did I do this? Simple…the BLVD tells me where my visitors are coming from live. I not only use Craigslist as an advertising method, my main goal is to get the user off of Craiglsist and on to my website. This is why we make our miscrosites look like a third party website.

Not only does this software show me live stats, they also keep track of keyword rankings on Google, Bing and Yahoo. It helps me identify what my hot keywords are, and it will let me know if I’m losing or gaining rank. For example, if my best keyword was “Ford Mustang” it would keep track of what position I’m in from all three search engine. If I lose my rankings it will tell me, even if I just drop one spot. If there is a keyword I am trying to rank on, I can set an alert where it will notify me when I do rank.

For my Orlando Dealer, this is how I learned the term “Used Cars Orlando” was not a good keyword to go after. The BLVD helped me identify better keywords that convert. Yes, the BLVD can track conversion as well.

Anyway, last week they launched a new widget called the BLVD Block Party. It shows what articles are being read now, and where the social media traffic came from.

There are many other widgets out there, but the problem is you don’t want to add too many. Simple observations will show you which ones work best. Last night, I found a widget I’ve been searching for:

Wowzio RSS Image Widget

According to the Wowzio Website, they currently have 3,556,195,800 live widgets. If you want a widget from them, you have to ask. I applied late last night and I had an invitation in my email inbox this morning. Why do they do that? They want to stay clean, and they don’t want their widgets showing up on porn sites and such. Here is what it looks like:

Anyway, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for. It automatically reads my RSS Feed and displays the images in a widget. I use it for my microsite RSS Feed. It shows my 10 newest vehicles added to inventory, with photos. The great thing is the automation, when the new inventory feed rolls in this will update automatically. Each photo is clickable to the actual vehicle, and the design and layout is awesome! There are some other widgets out there, but none look professional. Even Feedburner offers something similar, and it’s called Buzzboost. The problem is it doesn’t look very well, and it ends up being too tall. The widget space above the pagefold is valuable real estate, and I don’t want one widget taking up all of the space. Wowzio displays a widget of 8 small photos. The photos are sized perfectly, and they allow the possibility of the next widget to show above the pagefold. I elected to have 8 photos show because I want to observe. I can always change it to 6 or 4 to allow the Facebook Widget to protrude more. Wowzio offers more widget styles than that, and you can see them all on their website at wowzio.com. I’m trying another one of their widgets on this blog. You can see it on the right up a little bit. I like where they’re going with this one. People love seeing and clicking photos, and this can be a great tool for car dealers. I’m really excited to see results from this widget.

Facebook Widget:

The Facebook Widget is a great call to action, but it depends on how you use your Fan Page. If you link to other websites on your Facebook Fan Page, you may send your visitors away. When a dealer put their inventory on their wall, that’s when it becomes a great call to action. People like to look at photos, and they can scroll down and see the newest inventory. I also like the potential of obtaining new fans.

Twitter Widget:

I used to have my Twitter Widget on the top. Looking at my stats, it does make a great call to action. Basically, it scrolls and shows a car dealer’s newest inventory tweets. Whenever a visitors clicked one of the bit.ly links it would bring them right to the vehicle’s page.

Regular RSS Feed Widget:

This is a must have for all blogs. If you are a car dealers and you have an RSS feed for your inventory, be sure to add this. It’s not a great call to action, but it’s a great way for your new inventory to get crawled and indexed quicker in Google, Yahoo and Bing. Normally it will just be text links, and the photos won’t show. Again, I do this only for search engines. The RSS Feed will change automatically every time your inventory is updated. This means Googebot and Yahoo Slurp will see fresh content when it visits your blog or website to look for changes, which will make them visit more often.

Funnel Traffic To Your Main Website Widget:

About 5 years ago I attended a Yahoo! seminar in Boston. One of the speakers was talking about traditional advertising verse internet advertising, and she mentioned using people in your ads is still the way to go. Think about it, the big corporations who market use people most of the time right?

Many car dealers have such a high turnaround in their internet department, so you won’t see them use this method. Last month I added Dani Lunsford’s Photo to Napleton Orlando’s blog. Since then I have observed a 50% increase in visitors clicking to their main dealer website.

This is why I think this widget is important. It’s a simple clickable image that even a novice can do. Just make a new text widget in your Wordpress Blog and add you own code:

HTML Code for your Widget

The above code will make a clickable image just like this

If you don’t know simple HTML, you can use this Free Online HTML Editor to generate your code. When you create your clickable ad, be sure to size it accordingly so it will fit tight on your blog. If you’re a Firefox user, check out this free extension called Measureit. You must also upload your image somewhere, so the easiest way is to go to “Media” in your backend and upload it that way. Then click “view image” and copy and paste the url. That will be your image location. If you don’t have image editing software like Photoshop, try Gimp. It’s open source and FREE.

Recent Comment Widget

I use the recent comment widget to reward my readers who comment on my blog posts. This is a dofollow blog, and I have the widget so the commentor will be rewarded with a dofollow link to their website directly from my homepage. Obviously I won’t approve spam comments, but genuine comments will be rewarded. If you want more participation on your blog, I suggest you follow suit. I even go one step further and send each comment to Twitter and my Facebook FanPage.

Why Are My Blogs So White?

Remember, the main reason to have a blog is to drive traffic somewhere. You will not get a lead from somebody reading your blog, and if you do it will be a rare occurrence. I blog about a dealers inventory. Once a week I will look at their newest inventory and I’ll simply pick a car like this. I prefer more text than images, because this is how I get the traffic from searchers. The search engines love text, and they gobble it up like candy.

If you look at that post, you will see that I linked to the category page of the Dodge Challenger, plus I sent a deep link to an actual Dodge Challenger listing. It’s really simple. Did you know you can have a self hosted Wordpress Blog for less than $100.00 per year?

This is a dofollow comment blog, and educated responses will be rewarded with a nice link from our homepage comment widget.

Look At Your Dealer Stats:

You may be proud that your bounce rate is at 20%. I don’t want to rain on your parade, but look at your top 10 keywords. I would bet that most of them contain your dealer name right? This searches are looking for you, so you can be assured they will not become a bounce. I’m sorry to inform you, but you cannot really credit that with your internet department. These are people driving by your dealership, or perhaps someone who saw your TV ad and forgot what your domain name was. Now I would hope that you rank first on all of your dealership’s queries, but you really can’t count that as seo. That’s a gimme.

The more organic traffic you get, the higher your bounce rate will be:

Here’s the problem. Yourself or a good SEO company will obviously optimize your website or misrosite for local traffic, using city and state related keywords. It wouldn’t make sense to target the word “Chevrolet Dealership”. Not only would it be costly, but why would you want Alaska traffic going to your website if you’re located in Miami Florida? If it was an easy keyword to rank on, I’d say go for it. That would be a great Google Map Phrase to advertise with the local business center, but to rank on that keyword phrase in searches would cost 10’s of thousands of dollars.

The reason why your bounce rate goes up is simple. The more you optimize your website, the more organic traffic you get by accident. This morning, my Orlando Dealer got a visit from a user that searched for light blue toyota sienna 2009 on Google. There was no mention of the word “Orlando”, or “Florida”. Here is another example:

The odds that this click was from the Florida area is pretty slim, therefore this will be a sure bounce. The more of these impressionsyou get, the higher your bounce rate will be. This unique long-tailed search term was number one on Google out of 3/4 of a million websites.

This was an accidental visit, and the odds of that person being located near Florida is pretty slim. That keyword phrase even shows up in Google’s UK Servers. So the odds of this visitor becoming a bounce is favorable.

How a bounce is calculated?

“A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs. There is no industry-standard minimum or maximum time by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur. Rather, this is determined by the session timeout of the analytics tracking software.” – Says Wikipedia

This makes it obvious that you have to be careful which stats program to use. Never trust stats that a vendor gives you. Always use a third party program like Google Analytics. If you use a vendors stats, they can set their bounce rate to be “anyone who enters and stays for more than 2 second will not be a bounce”. I have also found that many stats programs count spiders as visits. That is so wrong! You know how many spiders are out there crawling around? Some shady SEO Companies can write bot codes to crawl your site too, to make it look like human traffic.

This is what Google says about their bounce rate:

“Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.” —Says Google

Now if you were selling CD’s which could be shipped anywhere, this wouldn’t be applicable to you, but you are selling a high dollar items. Cars that many people just won’t buy without kicking the tires, or seeing it in person. Why would somebody from California buy a car in Miami Florida? Unless it’s Jay Leno, I don’t see it happening.

There are factors in other niches as well:

“While bounce rate is a useful tool for e-commerce sites, it is of more questionable value for sites such as news and information, where many visitors go to scan headlines and conduct research, and can find what they want immediately on the entry page. Indeed, for any kind of informational site, sophisticated users are likely to bookmark a page within the site, which then becomes their personal entry page, check it (e.g., for sports scores, the price of pork bellies etc.), then bounce right off. The page will have done its job, but might still have a bounce rate above 80%, bringing up the average for the whole site. For such sites, metrics such as returning visitors vs. new visitors might be more informative and should be used to understand the overall picture better.” —-Says Wikipedia

Read more about Bounce Rates on Wikipedia here.

The recent Toyota recalls have certainly garnered a lot of attention in the media. And, why not? It makes for great drama, and drama sells. Toyota has had a long standing reputation of making reliable, safe vehicles that hold their value well.

As a long time, highly satisfied Toyota owner, I became very curious as to whether or not the media hype was an accurate reflection of the recall situation. Like many current Toyota owners, this could easily be the deciding factor whether or not I will purchase another Toyota again in the future.

Cat Ellis Of Showroom Logic Defends The Toyota Recalls

One of the biggest selling points for Toyota cars and trucks has historically been how well they hold their resale value. Toyota vehicles have traditionally required very little in the way of maintenance costs over the life of the vehicle. Where most new vehicles suffer massive depreciation, the initial depreciation associated with purchasing a new Toyota has been mild in comparison. When Toyota owners have traded in or sold their used car or truck, they have been able to recoup much more of their initial cost.

For those buying a used Toyota, one could reasonably expect the vehicle to last a long time without a major repair, and continue to hold its value better than other used cars and trucks. Potential repair costs are usually the biggest concern for used car shoppers. Toyota has proven to be a predictable, low-cost-to-own choice in used cars for people all over the world for decades. It takes a long time to build up that kind of reputation.

These recalls involved over 8 million vehicles worldwide. (That does not mean that all the vehicles recalled had experienced problems.) On the surface, this sounds alarming, however when one takes a look at exactly what was involved and the numbers associated with each recall, a different picture begins to emerge

Now, here come the recalls in question. Recalls involving floor mats, sticky accelerators, and ABS braking software have been in the news since 2007. These recalls involved over 8 million vehicles worldwide. (That does not mean that all the vehicles recalled had experienced problems.) On the surface, this sounds alarming, however when one takes a look at exactly what was involved and the numbers associated with each recall, a different picture begins to emerge.

The initial recall involving floor mats was the result of optional all-weather mats and unsecured mats intended for SUVs that ended up in other models. The recall involved just under 4 million vehicles worldwide, representing approximately half of all vehicles affected by all three recalls combined. Another point to consider is that there was nothing with the Toyota vehicles themselves. The issue was with the floor mats. The fix required nothing more than removing the mats.

This recall was ultimately amended to involve sticking accelerator pedals. This expanded recall involved all the same vehicles as the first. What was expanded were the precautions taken to prevent accelerator pedals from being caught by the inappropriate floor mat or floor mat installation. The amended recall provided for a reshaped pedal to avoid entanglement with floor mats, a brake override system, a newly designed floor mat, the removal of the old mat, and a reimbursement to the owner if they did not want the new floor mat. Again, there was nothing wrong with the vehicle itself, but was a precautionary measure.

The second recall involved sticking accelerator pedals that had nothing to do with floor mats. Certainly, a vehicle accelerating suddenly and not responding to the brake would be enough to rattle anyone. However, when tests were performed on affected models, independent sources like Car and Driver and Edmunds.com were able to slow and stop the Toyota vehicles in question.

The third recall involved a much smaller numbers of the newer 2010 Toyota Prius. The ABS braking software caused braking malfunctions, leading to the recall and rewrite of the software. The response time for this recall and solution was very quick, just a matter of days.

While the sticking accelerator recall did not include the Prius, some Prius owners have claimed that their vehicle suddenly accelerated. However, the Prius has a unique feature, something akin to a “black box”. Information from these devices have been checked by third-party and government inspectors, and have come to the conclusion that driver error is to blame. According to the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA), the information is more consistent with having the accelerator fully engaged, rather than the brake. In other words, the driver had their foot on the wrong pedal.

Pressing the accelerator instead of the brake has been a common driver error for as long as folks have been driving. The question is, how many of the problems reported that prompted the sticking accelerator recall were also driver error? Unfortunately, Event Data Recorders (black boxes) are not currently standard on most vehicles, though that will be changing in 2012.

While many media outlets speculated that these recalls would result in a massive drop in Toyota sales, this has not proven to be the case. Based on interviews with US auto owners conducted by marketing research firm TRC, Toyota’s solid history of designing and manufacturing quality, safe cars and trucks is winning out over media hype. The interviews revealed that most people still perceive Toyota as a safe, reliable automaker based on the product’s historical performance. This bodes well for Toyota maintaining their reputation of manufacturing vehicles that hold their value, and keeping Toyota at the top of the pack for reliable used cars and trucks.

My own experience as a Toyota owner has been a good one. I have owned both a Corolla and a Camry. They have both been economical to own, needing only routine maintenance that would be required of any other vehicle. Both were purchased as used Toyotas, and both have lasted over a decade. My Corolla made it to over 210,000 miles, and my Camry is still riding like new at around 150,000 miles. Both vehicles have been very inexpensive to operate, even with rising gas prices. After looking at all the information, I would absolutely purchase another Toyota.

After looking at all the information, I would absolutely purchase another Toyota

For those looking to buy a safe, reliable car or truck, Menlove Toyota Scion in Bountiful, Utah has a large inventory of both new and used Toyotas. Menlove Toyota Scion also has their own financing, as well as Service and Part Center for your convenience. Their Toyota Dealer web site,  provides Bountiful-area car shoppers with details about Menlove’s inventory, hours, and current new and pre-owned specials. Utah auto shoppers would do well to check them out.

I was just looking at the live stats for one of my dealers websites. This particular website has Google Adsense Installed, and one of our ads popped up.

The customer clicked it and was brought to my site. I saw that the url had a session ID on it, so I clicked it.

There was all of the womans information filled in. You should all make sure you are not using sessions ID’s like this:

When I Clicked This URL, All Of the Womans Info was on there (still). I blacked out her info

This Dirty Little Tool Will Flag Any Post You Want

Craigslist is a great way for an aggressive internet sales manager to get some decent leads. Last week, one of the dealers I service was complaining about getting flagged. He thought it was odd because he was getting flagged so fast.

Craigslist never has told us how many different people it takes to have a listing flagged, but many people feel it’s between 8 and 11. The flagging needs to come from all different IP addresses. This dealer was getting flagged in minutes, and there was no way that 8 to 11 people were sitting around waiting for him to post just so they could flag his listings.

Even with semi automatic posting tools, it still takes some time to post your listings. It can be very frustrating if you spend a better part of your morning posting your new or used inventory online only to get flagged later on.

The problem is there is now software available to have anyone flagged you wish. This software will hide behind a proxy so all of your flags will come from a different ip address, so it will look genuine to Craigslist. I blurred out the name of the software just because I think it’s garbage. If you look at the screen shot, you simply copy and paste all of the url’s you want to flag.

This is a dirty trick, and I would never endorse such a black hat method. If you see this happening toyou, lay low for a while. I post many times for many different dealers, and I don’t get flagged. Here are a couple of tips to prevent flagging:

1) Do not post a whole bunch of cars at once. This annoys people, and you will only catch the attention of the rogue dealer and the genuine people who will flag you for real.

2) Post no more than 5 vehicles a day, and do it either early in the morning or later on at night. I usually wait until after 10:00PM because the other dealers are sleeping. My best results come from posting on a Saturday night. Many people browse the car listings on a Sunday morning because they are bored. How do I know this? We use live stats, and it will tell me when somebody visited out website from a Craigslist posting.

Watch Your Traffic Come In Live. These are only the people that clicked through to our website. This doesn't count the hundreds of people who just clicked the ad.

One Craiglsist posting will stay live for 90 days, and it’s important to realize that. Craigslist has a keyword search tool, so one post will get 90 days of traffic. If you posted a 2008 Ford Mustang anyone who searches for that term will see your ad. It’s also important to remember that Craigslist posts show up in Google searches.

If you post 5 vehicles a day, that’s 150 cars a month. If you use a posting tool, be sure it includes multiple links to your website. What you really want is to get the user off of Craigslist and send them to your website. That’s what our tool is designed for, and it works.

For one of my dealers in Florida, I average about 300 visitors to their website a month from Craigslist alone. Showroom Logic also tracks impressions. You can easily do this as well if you host the image on your own server. Let’s say you post a 2007 Dodge Ram. The Ram will have it’s own image name, and you can look at your weblog to see how many hits it received.

One of my dealers has a 2007 Jeep Wrangler that received 3,000 hits so far, so that goes to show you how many people are looking. Some states like Utah don’t really use Craigslist, but Orlando Florida is one of the hottest markets in the country for Craigslist.

If your dealership doesn’t have a good Craigslist tool than I recommend you sign up for Showroom Logic. For only $300.00 a year, your live inventory can be added to our network of websites and you will have unlimited use of our Craigslist tool.

Send mike@showroomlogic.com an email to get started. We currently service any car dealership (new or used) in the United States.

]]> http://www.showroomlogic.com/blog/car-dealers-getting-flagged-on-craigslist-from-other-rogue-car-dealers.html/feed 3 http://www.showroomlogic.com/blog/my-opinion-dealer-com-is-the-best-website-a-car-dealer-should-be-using.html http://www.showroomlogic.com/blog/my-opinion-dealer-com-is-the-best-website-a-car-dealer-should-be-using.html#comments Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:03:29 +0000 admin http://www.showroomlogic.com/blog/?p=447 Showroom Logic does not build car dealer websites, so I am able to give my opinion openly about the best and the worst websites for car dealers. Although it may appear that we do, we simply don’t. We build microsites to work in conjunction with the main website a car dealer uses, and our microsites appear to be a simple classified listing. We do not brand the dealership at all, we brand their cars.

Showroom Logic is a consulting and a car dealer SEO Company, it’s that simple. When we sign up a dealer our results are so great that they call us back to see what else we can do.

I’ve been wanting to write this article for a while now, but this morning I saw a cool thing that Dealer.com does with their urls.

While servicing one of our newest car dealers, I was looking at my live stats to see how their microsite was doing. I noticed that we just got a visit from a VIN search.

I was suprise to even see that because we do not target VIN numbers for searches. Anyway, we came up second on a Google search (Car Fax was 1).

I noticed the third listing was a dealer website, and I could tell by looking at the url that it was an actual vehicle listing on a car dealer’s website. I went ahead an clicked it and POOF, I was redirected to the homepage of the dealership.

Do you know what a 301 redirect is?

Think about this. You have a car dealership that typically sells 100 cars a month. When those vehicles get sold, the listings are eventually deleted. You must realize that all of your inventory will be indexed in Google, Yahoo and Bing. Even if it only ranks on page 50, it’s still indexed. So what happens when the Google Bot or Yahoo Slurp comes back and spiders your website to find new listings to index?

I’ll tell you what happens. They find broken links and 404 errors. Search Engines hate that! Dealer.com appears to create a 301 redirect back to the homepage. Another words, when a user clicks the link that is no longer there, the 301 tells the search engines that “this vehicle moved here” and it redirects it.

We’ve been using this technology for a long time, but it’s cool to see someone else doing it (Especially a dealer website provider). We handle our redirects a bit differently, but I cannot say what we do because that’s out little secret.

There are other things a like about Dealer.com websites, but the one other thing worth mentioning is their automated Google Adwords tool. It’s great to see a dealer website provider offering this, and it can save you thousands of dollars a month from marketing company fees to manage and run these campaigns.

Showroom Logic has a tool like that, and we can use it with any dealer website, so if you are stuck in a contract with one of those other website providers you can contact us and we’ll set you up.

I wish there was another website provider that I could compare to Dealer.com, but there isn’t one. Here is my opinions on the others:

• Cobalt: They haven’t changed a thing in over 2 years. Same old templates, nothing new to mention. If you want to stay ahead in this business you need to constantly make changes and roll them out to everybody. One of the largest volume car dealerships in Florida uses Cobalt, and they are so naive they love it. I have been doing extensive keyword research in my area and they are nowhere to be found. I feel they could be selling another 50 – 75 cars a month if they tried something new. My dealer in Tampa Bay sold over 120 used cars alone in the Tampa Market, and I am proud to say that. If you are a Dealer.com rep in Central Florida, contact me and I’ll tell you who they are.
• Izmo Cars: They make great looking websites, but they don’t rank for inventory listings. Until they make a massive change in their coding, they never will. One of my dealers uses Izmo for their main website, and I was shocked to learn they don’t even have a backend to log on to and make changes. You have to call your rep every time, in INDIA!! I am doing some SEO work for a car dealer that uses Izmo for their main site. Last month I found a microsite they were using that was a Dealer.com site. I switched all backlinks to that website instead of their main Izmo site because I know I could juice that one up better.
• BZ Results: I worked for a dealership that used them about 2 years ago. They were stuck in a very expensive 3 year contract, and it was by far the worst possible website provider out their. Needless to say, the 3 rooftop dealership went out of business about 4 months ago. Whoever sold that contract made a killing. They put $150,000.00 down and had to pay $8,000.00 a month for three years.

I did see some new companies at the NADA Convention in Orlando, but I haven’t found anyone using them.

Did I miss anyone? Leave a comment and let me know.

If anyone represents any of the website providers above, I would love to debate. Everything I said is my opinion, and I don’t pretend to know everything. But…I’ve been doing this since 1994. I’ve been around to see how everything evolved in many different industries. I’ve sold printing online, seafood and cars. Now I only work with car dealers.

Private debates are welcome. Email mike@showroomlogic.com

Search Marketing For Service Departments

Last week Patrick and I were approached by a car dealer in Orlando Florida. They are already an existing customer of ours, using our Orlando Microsite to sell more new and used cars online.

Anyway, they wanted us to help them market their service department online because they are very happy with the results we’ve given them so far.

This dealer has 3 separate websites. The first is their main site, which is operated by Izmo Cars. The second is a macrosite provided by Showroom Logic. The third website is a microsite by dealer.com which attempts to target the Orlando Florida market.

The campaign we agreed upon will be Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing using Google Adwords.

For the SEO Aspect we felt it would be best to develop and maintain a blog for their service department. This will give us more flexibility to optimize the website for keywords. The reason we decided not to use any of their existing websites is because of the lack of technology available for creating new pages.

Their Izmo Cars website doesn’t have a log-in where you can add or edit a webpage. They have to be contacted for each change and they will do it. The problem is I do not wish to wait when I need something changed.

The Dealer.com website is much better than Izmo, but it still lacks flexibility. I could of created a new page for their service department, but I wouldn’t have access to change the title tags.

This is why we chose the blog, and it’s actually like having an additional website for our customer. Counting our used car blog, they now have 5 websites:

• Orlando Used Car Classified  Microsite This website shows up better than any of their websites for organic (free) searches on Google, Bing and Yahoo. We do not market their brand or franchise. We market their inventory, new and used. We also use our Google Adwords Software to promote their vehicles within a 40 mile radius of their dealership.
• Orlando Car Blog This blog helps to rank all of their other websites in search engines. Weekly blog posts are done about their new inventory as it comes in. Whenever a blog post is published, the system “pings” Google, and the article is crawled and indexed within a couple of minutes. A couple of months ago they acquired over 10 used Corvettes. I made the Corvette keyword a main focus during one week, and since then all of the Corvettes have been sold.
• Service Department Blog: This blog provides the same as above, only the traffic is funneled to either their lead management tool or their existing main dealer website service pages. It also blends in social networking accounts like Twitter and Facebook.
• Main Napleton Website: This website is their main dealer website, operated by Izmo Cars. It obtains most of it’s traffic by drive-by’s, newspaper and TV advertising.
• Corporate Website: This website is provided by Chrysler and it has backlinks from corporate Jeep, Chrysler and Dodge websites. It also offers more flexibilitythan their main dealer website.

This is why Napleton is a leader in internet sales in the Orlando area. They have a large internet presence consisting of 5 different websites and they blast their inventory daily to Twitter, Facebook and Craigslist using our automated tools.

We can only service one dealership per city, so it’s first come first serve. If you would like more information regarding our services, please email mike@showroomlogic.com.