Use Faces Instead Of Vehicle Screen Shots, Your Views Will Rise. It's That Simple

On this blog post I will give you my results so far for the YouTube Channel for Park Auto Mall I made. As of today, here are some stats:

• The YouTube Channel is only 42 Days Old
• Our videos have been watched 5,193 times
• 2,212 of the views were local
• 27% of the views came from our channel
• 35% of the views came from an embedded player (our car blog and Facebook page) We do embed videos on our website, but we just started that 2 days ago.
• 5% came from a mobile device
• Only 7.1 % came from a YouTube search (let’s face it, people don’t go to YouTube to search for vehicles to purchase)
• Only .56 % came from a Google search. Too much competition in Tampa for YouTube

All of those stats can be found in your “insights” page when logged in to YouTube.

Now before I even started our YouTube Channel I looked all around Tampa Bay to see what other dealers were doing. Their views were unimpressive, so I knew we had to try something different. Here is what we do differently:

1) We make sure our freeze frame shot is a face, not a car. Whenever you upload a video to YouTube, you will have the option to pick a screenshot when the video is fully rendered. YouTube will only give you 3 choices, so if a face is available select it. People will be more prone to select a face than just a vehicle. See how it sticks out here?

2) Use proper tags when uploading. Be sure to fill in your tags, and make sure whichever tags you use are in your title and/or description. You will be surprised of the amount of local websites your video will automatically appear on when tagged properly.

3) Add Outtakes. We had our video guy make us a beginning and an end that we reuse on all of our videos. I added an outtake to the end of a video a few weeks ago, and play them after the close. People love them!

3) Hire Some Personality. Most people are self conscious about being themselves on a video, and it takes a little time for them to relax. Besides obvious reasons to hire somebody, we look for unique skills that they don’t even realize they have. We want our future customers to get to know us, and they will!

Our internet staff is so good, 40% of our customers give us a video testimonial! I know some vendors suggest to create a separate YouTube Channel for testimonials, but we decided not to. We mix them all together.

I know by now your thinking about time, cost and personnel. This is all it takes:

1. A Decent Digital Video Camera: $500.00
2. Video Editing Software: $500.00+ (I use Sony Vegas)
3. 2 People (1 to shoot, and one to demonstrate)
4. 10 Minutes Of Time To Shoot The Video (2 people)
5. 20 Minutes of time to edit the video (1 person). It used to take me longer, but it’s become so repetitive I’m a lot quicker. The video will take some time to render, but I can do other things while it’s rendering.

We have 86 videos so far, and you can expect more. I let each person pick the vehicle they want to do, that was they’ll have more to say. All of our employees have a unique way of doing the videos, but this one is our best yet:

If you have any YouTube Tips for car dealers please leave some feedback below. This is a dofollow blog, so you can earn yourself a nice backlink for each comment.

Just Put The Vin Number In, Click Search & All Fields Will Be Populated

This week Showroom logic launched an even faster way to put your new and used cars on Craigslist. There are many vendors out their offering a Craigslist tool, but each has a backend you have to log in to.

I’m tired of having too many different sites to log into, and if I wanted to hire someone to post for me I wouldn’t be comfortable giving them my user name and password for any website.

With Showroom Logic’s new Craigslist tool, the only site you will have to log into is Craigslist itself.

Your listing will include all photographs you currently have for the vehicle, along with clickable links to your main website’s vehicle detail page or a microsite.

Now you can have your entire staff post along with you, and you don’t have to give out sensitive passwords and user names.Watch how easy it is with this quick online demo:

Their new You Tube Channel is only a month old, but with a team of 6 in the BDC Department they manage to find plenty of time to make the videos. Internet Director and BDC Manager Mike Annable says it really doesn’t take that long.

“We currently make customer testimonial videos and car of the week videos”, Mike says. “The car of the week videos take about 10 minutes to shoot, and about 10 minutes to process. We try to have a bit of fun as well by lately adding little outtakes at the end of each video. We had our video guy make a beginning and an end for each video, and we take the middle and sew them together. We gave me a quick tutorial on how to edit the videos to make them a little bit professional looking. We learn as we go, and here’s an example”:

The customer testimonials can be a bit harder, only because many customers don’t want to be on video. “I would like to get at least one a day, and that would help me saturate the internet with over 300 videos a year”, he says. “Between the car of the week videos and the customer testimonials I can have over 600 videos in a years time. It’s important to note that you will not see thousands of vews for each video, but it adds up. Auto Trader, Cars.com and many other vendors are trying to sell us video, but I look at the views for their current customers and there are very few. Our videos are getting more views because we promote them on our blogs, our Facebook Fan Pages, plus we send the link to each participating customer and they usually send it to their friends.”

Of all the videos they did so far, the outakes video received the most views. It was really funny, and they plan on adding more. Mike says although they take this seriously, they like to have fun doing it. “When you have funny outakes, the staff alone sends them out to friends and family and posts them on their Facebook Wall”:

Take a look at this one:

Check back next week and you’ll see their new beginning and end for each testimonial video.

I made this entire blog last night. It took Me 3 Hours Total. I still kave to add content to it, but it's a good start. Click To See It Live

I am the internet director for a car dealership in Tampa Florida. We are proud to say that we are not vendor dependent, and we own the Tampa Bay area for car related internet searches. Here are some tips to get your car dealership in the right direction.

When setting up a new Wordpress Blog, the most important part of it is choosing the right plugins. There are some that you will actually need, and if you don’t you will have a blog with no traffic. It’s that simple.

Last night my boss asked me to set-up a new blog for his dealership, and I said no problem. Yes, I work for Park Automall in Pinellas Park Florida…so I did this an an employee.

When I started the project, I didn’t even have a domain name yet. The entire project took me 3 hours, and I’ll show you exactly what I did:

1) Domain Name:

Domain names are getting harder to buy because there are so many squatters that buy them with hopes of a resale for big dollars. After about 20 minutes, I found that tampacarblog.com was available., so I logged on to GoDaddy and purchased it for 3 years. The only thing I would recommend every buying from GoDaddy is a domain name. Never buy hosting or anything else, just say “no thanks” to all of the crap they try to sell you during the checkout process.

Now at this point I didn’t even have a hosting company yet, but I knew I was going with Bluehost. While I was still logged in to GoDaddy, I clicked “manage domains” and I changed my nameservers to ns1.bluehost.com and ns2.bluehost.com. This will make it easier when I set up my hosting account. That’s it, and I won’t have to log in to Go Daddy for three years.

2) Web Hosting

Bluehost.com offers hosting packages for less than $90.00 per year, and they have many great tools that makes life easier for us all. When signing up, the first thing they do is offer you a free domain name. Don’t even bother with that, because you will never own that domain name. Just tell them you already have one. When asked, put the domain name in the box when they asked you. Remember in the above step I changed my nameservers already? If I hadn’t, I would of had to log-in to Godaddy again and change them during this step. Why? Bluehost will verify that the domain is pointed to the right direction. A name server can be compared to a phone number. When someone calls your phone, your number will tell the phone where to ring to. the same goes to web hosting.

3) Setting Up Wordpress (You Won’t Believe How Easy This Is)

Now that you have your hosting account set up, it will take you about 30 seconds to set up Wordpress. Scroll down and find an icon called “Simple Scripts”. Click that and you will see a bunch of different software programs you can download and enable for free. Find the Wordpress Script and click it. The rest of the process is self explanatory. If you want to install it in a subfolder or subdomain you can with ease, but I would recommend not doing that. Just leave it as is and install.

4) Your Wordpress Blog Is Now Live

You now have a default installation of Wordpress installed. There are a few plugins and adjustments you should make now, not later. Let’s not be concerned with your template and content just yet. Check your email for a username and password that was emailed to you after you set it up. Click the link and log in to the backend of your Wordpress Blog.

5) Change your Permalink Setting

On your Wordpress back end, scroll down to the lower left and click “settings” then “permalinks”. This step will rewrite your url’s properly, and it will make your blog search engine friendly. Make yours look just like this:

Make your Permalink Settings Exactly Like This, Then Save

Now let’s install must have Plugins.

6) Enable Akismet

This is a spam comment fighter, and if you don’t enable this now you will get some serious comment spam. It will eventually light up your inbox. By default this should have came with your installation. Go to ‘Plugins”, then find Akismet and click enable. You may have to get a key if you don’t already have one. It’s free, so do it now so you don’t forget.

7) All In One SEO Pack

Go to the Plugin tab, then search for plugins by putting “All In One SEO Pack” in the search box. It should be the first one, just click it and install. If you want to play around with the settings, scroll down to the lower left. Click “Settings” then “All In One SEO Pack”. Don’t change a setting unless you know what you’re doing. If you want to learn, read the Wordpress Forums. Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about Wordpress is there, and if it’s not you can open up a new thread and ask a question. there are thousands of people that will help you for free.

Comment Luv

If you want more people to comment on your blogs, this plug in is the way to go. When somebody makes a comment that you approve, comment love will reward them with a keyword rich backlink to their website. If their blog or website has an RSS Feed, it will list their latest post as well.

9) Do Follow

This plugin will make all comment links dofollow, which will help you get more comments. It’s a perfect marriage with keywordluv. Be careful though, don’t just approve any comment. Be sure the website isn’t a “bad neighborhood” like porn or gambling. If you link to bad neighborhoods Google will hold it against you, and you can kiss your traffic goodbye.

The rest of the plugins available are luxuries, and by now you should be good at installing and activating plugins. Poke around and try some, but make sure you read the feedback first before you install any new plugin.

10) Choosing A Theme Template

There are thousands of free templates available out there, and most don’t have many options. Ever wonder why there are so many, and how the developers make their money? It’s simple, they put links in the footer of the blog, and sometimes 3 or 4. They make the templates for the SEO benefit of their own websites or a sponsor.

I would recommend buying a Premium Theme. I like Studio Press. For less than 200 bucks you can buy all of their templates, and you can remove any footer link with ease. Currently, I am using the Allure Theme for the blog I made last night.

If you’re a cheapskate, you can find free templates here. Remember though, these freebies don’t have many options. As Joe Dirt would say, “Maybe someday Unicef will get in the Free Worpress Template Business”.

Let’s Talk Widgets:

Proper widgets can make great call to actions. My philosophy for a blog is simple. Get traffic to the blog and funnel the viewer to your main website. Forget about purchasing inventory plugins for Wordpress, it’s a waste of time and money. We want these people off this blog and into our main website. This is where clickable call to action widgets come in. Here is a screenshot of what I did so far to the new blog I made last night:

So Far I Added 3 Widgets, and I'll explain what they are below. Click the photo to see the blog live in action.

The top widget is a simple html widget. I pasted my YouTube embed code in to a new text widget and changed the size in the code. If you look at the code, you will see a height and width number in pixels in 2 different spot. Simply change both to the size of your widget box. If you’re not sure about how to find out the width of your sidebar, check out this plugin from Firefox called MeasureIt.

The second widget is my favorite. It’s a Wowzio Widget, and you can read all about it and other cool Wordpress widgets here. All you need is an RSS Feed and you’re ready to go.

The Facebook Widget makes a create widget as well, and click the above link to learn more. When adding the code, you need to change the width number to whatever your widget width is. I think it’s 300 by default, and if you don’t make the change it will look funny.

Now that you set this blog up right, be sure to throw a link to it from another website with some authority. You want the search engines to find and index your new blog.

Don’t expect traffic overnight, and don’t forget about it either. Try to get some backlinks from blog commenting, Pligg Sites, etc. Facebook and Twitter won’t cut it. Those links are nofollow, and they will not pass any “link juice” to your website. It is also equally important to create a new blog post at least once a week. Finding content is easy for car dealers, just blog about one of your vehicles and link to it.

The term “build it and they will come” does not apply to websites or blogs. You must work hard for results.

A Squidoo Lens Can Help You Market Your Website

Squidoo has been around for years, and it has a lot of great tools to allow even the most novice user to build one. At first, it may seem intimidating. After a little practice you will get the hang of it.

The most important thing is to figure out the many different modules available. They are all free, and you can easily add Youtube Videos, Flicker Photos and more.

You can even make yourself some money by promoting Amazon.com and Google Adsense. You can donate it all to charity if you’d like, or keep a percentage of it.

This screenshot shown is a car dealer’s in Kissimmee Florida. I made a few different lenses for that dealership, and I didn’t make them expecting to make 10 extra sales a month either.

I made them to get backlinks to the dealer’s main website, which in turn will help the dealers website in free organic traffic. The best backlink you can get is one that comes from a website with relavant content. Once you have at least 5 modules on your lense, the links will be dofollow.

Check out the Squidoo Lense for car dealers I made. This lense will show you different options you can use for various calls to action you can enable.

My favorite one is the embedded RSS Feed. You can take your inventory and have it update automatically. Every time your dealer website is updated, this module will as well. Click the link above to see an example.

You can also mash your blog and inventory RSS Feed together using Yahoo Pipes. If you want to jazz up your feed further, you can send your Yahoo Pipe or regular RSS Feed to Feedburner. Feedburner is easy to set up, and you can use either feed to update Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites. This won’t cost you one dime, it’s all free.

You can even use a Feedburner feature called “Buzzboost”. You find this under your publicize tab. There are some great things you can do with this program, the software actually takes your RSS Feed and converts it into HTML. Check out what we used it for in this Tampa Car Dealers Blog.

Sometimes a regular RSS Feed supplied to you from your website vendor will not show the photos. If your RSS Feed appears to include photos, but they don’t show when you use it, try this. Just take your feed and run it through Yahoo Pipes. Sometimes this will fix the issue.

You can also use these RSS feeds to update your Facebook, like Napleton Orlando does.

So now, when you make your Squidoo Lense follow these simple instructions:

1) Be sure to utilze at least 5 modules to obtain maximum benefits.

2) Ask some friends to sign up for Squidoo and rate your lense, this will give some some credibility.

3) When your done, you need to get a few backlinks to it. If you have a blog, write a post about it and link to your public lense.

4) You will not obtain backlinks if you add it to Facebook or Twitter, but if you have many friends or fans they may help you promote it.

5) You will not see instant results, Squidoo makes you work for the backlinks.

Be sure to check out our live lens to see the possibilities.

One more thing about Feedburner

It will give you a code you can copy and paste on just about any website. This code will help get you more subscribers, like this one (go ahead and try it):

I think many of the other car companies like Chevrolet, Ford, Chrysler and Toyota (among others) still don’t really get it. They don’t help their dealers with used cars because they want the new sales. They should realize that more internet traffic can be obtained from a dealer’s used inventory. I good salesperson can flip a customer into a new car if they have some good incentives going on. Usually, it’s all about the payment right?

Subaru.com has a pagerank of 7, with over 94,000 links pointing to it. Obviously it is a trusted domain, so a dealer could rank on all the search engine within a couple of weeks if it’s done right.

I found this dealer in Orlando Florida using it: http://www.sport.subaru.com. It appears they have Dealer.com helping them, which is a good things.

I’ve been around for every shift in the industry since then. My main focus has always been SEO, and I’ve worked in several industries around the US.

I got involved in the car business a few years ago, and since then my philosophy changed. I still think SEO is important, but since Patrick developed our PPC tool for car dealers my mind has shifted.

Check out this video and hear me out:

Backlinks are very hard to get for car dealers. People will not naturally link to your dealer website. You can have the best optimized dealer website on the planet, but without backlinks from other websites you will never experience decent organic (free) traffic from Google, Yahoo and Bing.

The best backlinks to get is from websites that are relative to your websites content. Another words, you want backlinks from car and truck related websites.

When searching for your backlinks, be sure it is not a nofollow link. If you do not know what that is, read the Wiki Article here. Basically, a nofollow tag tells the search engine spiders not to pass any rank or authority to the website being linked to.

Authority is what you need, and because of all of the spammers this tag had to be utilized. Most everything is nofollow now, including Facebook, Twitter and most Wordpress Blogs.

When you start a Worpress Blog, it is nofollow by default. I utilize a dofollow plugin for this blog, which rewards all users who comment with a dofollow link. Obviously I approve all comments before they go live, and 95% of them are from spammers.

Anyway, after this week Pagerank update from Google I checked up on many of the new Pligg sites I’ve been watching. Many of them received a Pagerank of 2 or more, which isn’t bad. Pagerank means nothing for how well your site will do in searches, but it means everything when your obtaining backlinks.

I did some serious searching to find some car related Pligg Sites, but I found none. On Saturday, I took it upon myself to make my own Pligg Site here: Car Dealer News & Updates .

If you take the time and search for some Pligg Sites that are dofollow, you should get your links out there. I don’t mean spam it, but just add links to it every now and then.

Here are some great ways to get backlinks from Pligg Sites:

• If you have a dealer blog, submit your newest blog post to a few of them. Be sure your blog post is linking to your dealer website as well, this way your blog will pass some authority to that site too.
• Be sure to deep link your website as well. Check out this post I did for an Orlando Florida Dealer. I had the link go to their Dodge Ram page of a microsite they have.  When the URL is clicked from the Pligg Site, it goes to a page with all of their Dodge Rams listed. That page now has a pagerank of 2 just from a few links pointing to it. This is why they do will in the Orlando market for Dodge Ram related searches.
• To find Pligg site, Google this term: car dealer “powered by pligg” (You can change car dealer to whatever keyword you desire). Be sure the Pligg site is dofollow.

I use Firefox and a toolbar plugin called SEO Quake. This will show me what links are nofollow quickly, and it will even show the pagerank of each webpage when I do a Google, Yahoo or Bing search. I don’t even have to click it.

This is a great way to get free backlinks to your website. Another great source is paid directories, each costing $300.00 per year. The cost is well worth it because of the authority to passes on to your website:

1. Business.com: Business.com is a human edited directory, therefore only quality websites will be placed in there. Google knows this, and it will give your website authority.
2. Yahoo Directory: Same as Business.com, it’s human edited
3. Automotive Directory: This is a Showroom logic Directory. Here you will get a dofollow backlink with anchor text from your hubpage. Plus, you will get a link from every vehicle you have in inventory. This directory uses your inventory feed. Here is an example. This directory doesn’t only juice up your site, it gives you leads as well. Note: Facebook and Twitter tools come with directory listing.

Each directory listing is $300.00 a year.

Here is a screenshot of our live stats. As you can see this just happened.

Last month I blogged about how Dealer.com created 301 redirects when a vehicle was deleted from a car dealers inventory feed. Judging from the comments and emails I received, there are more companies doing just that.

Showroom Logic has been doing this for a while now, but we handle our sold cars a bit differently. We don’t create the 301 redirect for a certain amount of time.

What we do is simple, and I will show you some screen shots below. Just a few minutes ago, I was looking at my live stats for a car dealer I service in Orlando Florida.

I was shocked at the keyword we ranked on from a Yahoo Search. We ranked number 2 in the entire country for the term “used 2010 camaro ss“.  I thought it was cool because no local keywords were used, like “Orlando” or “Florida”.

This Visitor Just Arrived From Yahoo Using A Long Tailed Keyword Phrase

This particular car dealer is a Jeep Chrysler Dodge Dealer, and I knew they didn’t have any Camaros in stock. They did have one a couple of months ago, but it was sold very quickly.

I clicked the link and the below screenshot was the page I was presented with. This is one of our landing pages, and if you see it says that the vehicle has been sold in yellow on the top of the screen. The idea here is to show similar vehicles, but because this dealer doesn’t normally sell Camaros we had to show them something. If they had other Camaros they would of been listed on the right.

This Landing Page Is Now Marked As Sold

The great aspect of this is the fact that the car will not show up on the homepage of the miscrosite. Go ahead, see if you can find it: http://www.used-cars-orlando.com.

It is now only a landing page. Many times I blog about a particular vehicle and send a deep link to the car page. If we simply deleted the cars as they were sold I would not only have dead pages in the search engines, I would have a blog full of dead links.

Another words, I would never have received this visit if I didn’t properly handle my sold inventory. After a certain amount of time, we will remove this car. However, when we create our 301 redirect we will send it to the closest matching car.

The next time Napleton gets a Camaro in stock, that vehicle will get some good link juice!

Our Showroom Logic Microsites are custom coded, and we have so many features similar to this in our code. We love competition and we love technology, that is why our software and our efforts will propel your dealership to the top in your city.

White Labeling is available. Email mike@showroomlogic.com for more info.