Normally you have no idea how the competition is doing digitally, but we were shocked when we looked at these numbers. We were able to see all statistics only to realize why this rooftop needed a new GM. This is a classic example of old school General Managers running dealerships while spending most of their budget on television, print and mailers and neglecting their digital presence.

The first thing we did was look at the backend of dealer.com to see what kind of leads and traffic they were getting. The number wasn’t good at all, and here are some screenshots to prove my case:

This Store Only Received 78 Leads This Month

Our store received 391 leads so far. A Huge Difference

As far as traffic goes, we use a unique combination of SEO, Google PPC, Blogs with Unique Content and “social signals” from websites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to obtain the most relevant visitors possible. We were very excited to see the difference in traffic as well:

This website only received 1,569 visitors this month.

Compared To The Other Numbers This Website Saturates & Dominates Their Market

Now I’m not going to tell you exactly how I do it, but I’ll give you something to think about. I’ll also show you what we do different and maybe you can figure it out, but it’s obvious it makes a difference.

First I want to show you how strong this Hyundai Dealership’s website is by showing you a few examples. I could search all day with West Palm Beach Hyundai keywords, but I’m not going to go that route. That would be way too easy.

Note: Before I perform any of these searches, I clear my cache and delete all cookies so the results aren’t biased. Always do this when checking rankings. I also use a browser I don’t normally use, like Safari.

The first search I did I kept my location where I am now, which is in Miami. I did this just to show this search has nothing to do with my location. Not only are we number one for that search, Google gave us sitelinks. Very rarely will you see a car dealer get sitelinks unless it’s their dealer name. Sitelinks issued from Google is the ultimate pat on the back.

I went ahead and did another search flipping the keywords around and look, still number one and more sitelinks. This time I changed my zip code to West Palm Beach so I could show you our AdLogic Google Adword’s  Tool in action.

I flipped the keyword phrases, yet we're still first and we still have sitelinks. You can also see our adlogic tool in action.

Now I’ll start with a long tail keyword search, but I’m not going to make the easy West Palm Beach searches, I’ll make it harder by including “Florida” instead of “West Palm Beach”. This Hyundai Dealership sells a lot of Hyundai Genesis’, but they are aggressive and they want even more sales. They asked us to emphasis on Hyundai Genesis related keywords, which we did:

Thanks To YouTube, SEO and AdLogic We Dominate The Page 4 Times

Before Microsites were killed off by Google, we used to use the Hyundai Genesis website shown towards the bottom to help with sales. A while ago we decided to put our resources elsewhere, yet it still shows up on good searches like this.

Here is a tougher keyword phrases:

This is a great keyword phrase to rank on, and we're there 3 different times

So here is one more, then I’ll show you a little of how we do this:

Here is a good ranking for another Hyundai 2012 Model. Notice the YouTube Video again? That's our very own Danielle from Showroom Logic

Our formula consists of a unique blend of old school Dealer SEO and some modern methods:

1. Backlinks: In today’s internet world, backlinks still play a key role in search engine placement. Dofollow links are definitely the best, but I’ve seen nofollow links help as well. It’s really hard to find good juicy backlinks for car dealers, but they’re out there.
2. Social Signals: Think of a social signal almost the same as a backlink, only they are coming from social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. All of these links are nofollow, but Google crawls the heck out of them and find these links pointing to your website. That is why we have our Twitter and Facebook Tool, and it helps out a lot. Our Facebook inventory app goes directly to the vehicle detail page of every vehicle, and all of the search engines crawl them.
3. YouTube Videos: Besides the social signals you can get from YouTube, you must remember that more people search YouTube than Yahoo or Bing. It is the second largest search engine in the world. I’ll be the first to say that robo videos don’t work, but if you do them yourself with a real person your YouTube Channel will take it’s course. A good way to judge a dealer’s YouTube channel is video views, but what makes it truly successful is having people favorite, like and comment on your videos. How often does someone like or comment on your robo video? Robo videos are spam, and Google knows it. People don’t want to see commercials on there either. I know a dealer that spends $2,000.00 a month on these spammy commercials that target long tail keyword searches that nobody searches for.

Just so you know I’m not blowing smoke about the videos, look at this report. This is just the past 30 days:

More People Watched These Videos Than Visited The Dealers Website

Last week Napleton’s West Palm Beach Hyundai asked us what we could do to help push 3 different Hyundai Models: The 2012 Hyundai Genesis, 2012 Hyndai Elantra and a 2012 Hyundai Sonata. Considering they’re already one of our clients, we arranged to fly Danielle in for a day and shoot some videos.

I was pretty impressed with how fast the views went up on the three videos. The 2012 Hyundai Sonata Video alone is getting 100 views a day:

Besides the views I was impressed with how fast these videos outranked the current “robo videos” they have. I didn’t want to add them to any spam video channels they may have, so I was lucky to a YouTube Account they rarely used (It’s better than having to start a new YouTube  Channel).

This is what I got this morning, and I cleared my cache and all cookies so it would be a true non-biased search page:

Most Of The Pages Shown Have This Same Video Embedded In It

2012 Hyundai Sonata Palm Beach Google Search

2012 Hyundai Genesis Palm Beach Google Search

Now for the tougher ones to rank on, here are a few state searches:

2012 Hyundai Elantra Florida Google Search

2012 Hyundai Sonata Florida Google Search

2012 Hyundai Genesis Florida Google Search

When you use real people you’ll be surprised how many people click and view the video. If you look at any YouTube or Daily motion channel of a robo video vendor you will see very few views.

We have a dealer in Tampa who gets as many daily video views as they do traffic to their website. Click here and scroll down to the bottom right. It will show you all of the views so far.

I’ve mentioned this to a few dealers, and they insisted on trying it themselves. It just simply didn’t work. Finding the right person is the hardest part. As easy at it sounds, when the average person gets a video camera rolling in their face they tend to get self conscious.

To make your own videos, you need:

• The right person
• The right camera
• The right software to edit
• To learn how to tag videos properly
• To learn which sites you should upload your videos to

Videos like these also make a great update on your Facebook Fan Page. Showroom Logic can either make the videos for you or we can train your staff in as little as 2 days. Contact us for more information.

Car Dealer Video Blog

Last week I felt I was maxxed out on the internet as far as Tampa Florida went. We’ve been consulting for Park Auto Mall for over a year now, and we are now at the point of dominance. Now that they have that, they can spend more money on other advertising sources like TV, Radio and mailers.

Being one of only a few dealers in the country that actually take the time to make their own videos, I figured I’d make them a video blog. We already have 3 different blogs, so why not make a 4th? Last week I did just that. I made the blog and added all the right plugins. I added the xml sitemap to Google Webmaster tools and added 1 backlink to get the site crawled and indexed.

Normally a new website is put in the sandbox for a couple three months, but this blog seems to have overcome all obstacles. It is already showing up on Google searches with all of their other websites and blogs.

I was doing this search this morning and I couldn’t believe it was already there:

Click To Enlarge

This video blog is simply compiled of embedded YouTube videos with the proper tags and a few paragraphs of text. I’m excited to see the monthly reports from Google analytics for this blog.

Now that they truly dominate the Tampa Bay market, they have the opportunity to fine tune their other advertising methods. For me, good SEO is the most important part of it. There comes a time when a dealer maxes out, and this is happening in Tampa.

As far as the internet goes, there isn’t much more they can do. There are hundreds of other vendors out there trying to sell automotive advertising, but there are 6 places you must be:

1) The SERPS (Search Engine Results Page)

Sure, it is a long process. Once it kicks in, you reap the benefits 24 hours a day. We use our own formula, and it pays off. We take a dealer website, blogs, microsites and YouTube Videos and strategically link them together using all white hat methods. Look at this Google search and you’ll see what I mean:

This Long Tailed Keyword Search Gives us 5 Different Spots On Page On (above the page fold) Click To Enlarge

2) Google Pay Per Click

We like to use the search and content network. You will not get the amount of impressions for the price anywhere. We use a combination of text ads and image ads, and they show up on the largest websites in the United States like the New York Times, YouTube, Motor Trand and more. Red more here. To replicate our campaigns, you would have to hire 2 or more skilled full-time employees to manage the account. Our fee is only $499.00 per month.

3) AutoTrader

Every vendor tries to discredit AutoTrader, but they do get a lot of traffic and provide leads. I’m not a big fan of the partnership banner ads, but a simple listing is usually sufficient. Especially if you have good internet prices.

4) Cars.com

Cars.com is quickly becoming a favorite of mine. While Autotrader is too busy buying up companies like Kelly Blue Book and Homenet, Cars.com is paying special attention to the latest trends. I like the way they let us add our YouTube Videos to the listings. Thanks to this feature, Park Auto Mall now sells high end used cars out of state. Home made videos give them the chance to demo the vehicle 24 hours a day. Auto trader won’t let us embed videos, they’re to busy trying to promote their own video software.

5) Home Made YouTube Videos

Google, Yahoo & Bing love videos, and YouTube is the 3rd most popular website in the world. Forget about those robo vidoes that move your vehicle photos around with a voice over. Nobody watches them, and it wouldn’t surprise me if these YouTube Channels get banned in the near future. If you get your sales people involved, you can make fun watchable videos.

Here is a perfect example. This dealer has 42,000 video views in about 6 months. This channel is about the same age but only has 1,300 views.

Besides making and uploading videos, you should be embedding them in blogs and on your website (you YouTube Chanel needs backlinks too).

6) Social Networking (Facebook & Twitter)

Forget about hiring a company to manage your social networking. If you have no friends between yourself and all your other employees, you will not succeed at social networking. It’s that simple.

Start a fan page and post your videos on there, even if it’s only once a week. You will find that the people in the videos will share them with there friends on their personal Facebook Account. That’s where you want to be. Send a tweet to your Twitter followers as well with your new videos.

We include our Facebook Car Inventory Tool and Twitter tool with any of our services (no upsell).

Notice I didn’t mention Craigslist? Spamming Craigslist is against their terms of service. Your dealership and your posting agents will be liable for $100.00 for every post you make. If your posting agent is posting 100 cars a week for you, be prepared to shell out 40K for every month you do it. It’s not worth the risk to me.

So what do we do now? Now is the time to spend other money on Newspaper, mailers and TV.

Mike Annable can be reached at mike@showroomlogic.com. Your comments and opinions are welcomed!

Chicago Area Honda Dealer

This week we picked up another Chicago Honda dealer in the same week. Normally we wouldn’t take on the same type of dealer in the same city, but they are both owned by Ed Napleton. We plan on helping them take full advantage of the current traffic available in the Chicago area.

They currently operate one of the largest Honda Dealerships in the greater Chicagoland area, and we look forward to helping them out. We will be helping them with some unique internet marketing, some classified listings and a large microsite that will have the inventory of all 3 dealerships called used cars Chicago.

Unfortunately it is still in beta, but we were able to get access relatively quick. All you have to do is befriend them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter and you will get an invite to use it, which is broken off to a beta subdomain.

I can see already that this will become by new toy, and I’m excited that I wont have to use Yahoo Site Explorer anymore to check backlinks and other important SEO Data. If you look at the screenshot above, i simply did a search for a car dealer that I know.

After the search, click the SEO Tab for some great SEO tools.

Shaded in yellow you can see my favorite tool (SEO), and you can also see the links tab which is common sense. When you first click the SEO tab, this is what you are presented with:

This even gives you at a glance geographical information about backlinks

Besides the obvious on this page, I will now go ahead and click the crawl stats tab:

Crawl Stats

The bad news is this search engine is new and still in beta, so we can’t really use this particular tool just yet. Why? If you look when this website was last crawled, it was 6 months ago. The list of cohosted websites is cool too, but again; that info is 6 months old. They switched hosting companies about 4 months ago, and I don’t see any of the new info listed.

Easily Compare Websites In A Second

I can’t wait until I can use the compare tool. I guess we have to be patient and wait for them to crawl on a regular basis before we jump in, but you have to admit..it sounds cool doesn’t it?

Duplicate Content

This screen shot shows their duplicate content tab, and eventually it will be a quick and easy way for us to find content thieves and deal with them accordingly.

Can anyone else point out what this can be used for? All educated answer will get a dofollow backlink!

If you want to gain a little knowledge, read this:

The last straw was yesterday when the regional manager from cars.com came in because she felt her reps didn’t do a good job the day before. After a few minutes of chatting, she told me “you know, having Youtube videos will increase your website’s ranking on the search engines…..”

After letting her finish, I told her that wasn’t true. If the links from YouTube were clean (which they are not), it would be beneficial. But, the links we are allowed to place in the comment section of your YouTube video will posses the “nofollow” tag.

What Is The Nofollow Tag?

I found the best definition of the nofollow tag on Wikipedia:

nofollow is a HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring. – Wikipedia

Now some might argue that the nofollow tag will help “a little bit”. Take a minute to watch this video from Matt Cutts, who is an Engineer at Google and he is the head of the spam team.

The only clean backlink I can find from YouTube is the link allowed on my YouTube Chanel Page. By looking at the code, there isn’t a nofollow tag present. This could possibly be a sole backlink, but I highly doubt it. Perhaps YouTube instructs each Chanel page via htaccess not to follow it? If that’s the case, we will never know.

If you right click and view source, you can find out of a link is no follow. This is a screen shot from our YouTube Source showing the nofollow

If it is a clean link it will automatically get discounted anyway because it will be considered a link exchange, unless you are not linking to your YouTube Channel. If you’re not linking to your YouTube Channel in any way, shape or form you will not have any authority because of the lack of backlinks.

Ever notice there aren’t many spammers on YouTube?

Sure, you will get email spam from YouTube Members. But you will not see many spammy, crappy videos on YouTube unless you dig deep. Why do you think that is? I’ll tell you why, it’s because the links are nofollow! Even spammers will not waste their time.

YouTube can be a great source of branding for your car dealership, and that’s about it. Our Youtube videos were viewed over 8,000 times since the launch a couple of months ago. I can assure you, these videos do not come from Google searches. Out of the 8,000 views, only 49 of them came from a Google Search.

This Screen Shot from my YouTube Insight Shows That It's Not Google Searches That's Getting My Video Views. It's simply our hard work and proper use of keyword tags (Click To Enlarge)

If you are a car dealer and your videos are getting found on Google search, that just means that your area lacks SEO for whichever terms they’re showing up on. Go ahead, find a video show up on a good Google search and leave a comment below. I challenge you!

If you want to have a successful YouTube Channel it takes some effort, but it can be fun as well. Although YouTube in the 3rd most popular website on the planet (below Google & Facebook), people will not go to YouTube and search for a car to buy. That is why I love YouTube for branding purposes. People will find us by accident and learn more about us.

I also love the embed feature for Youtube. I sling our videos everywhere including testimonial videos on our website, Car of the week videos on our Blog and our Facebook Fan Page.

So there, I said it. YouTube has no SEO Value To Your Website! It can help you get more traffic, but it won’t comes from searches. It will come from Google clicks.

I love a good debate, so if you agree or disagree you will be rewarded with a nice backlink using keyword love from this blog if you leave a comment.

I am going to end this post with this one sentence:

There is no such thing as video SEO!!

Each Colored Folder Represents A Page View. This happens Live

place, and it takes many vendors to keep it that way. We have a decorating company come out once a month and put balloons and other eye candy around, we have a woman who comes by often to water the flowers. We have a nightly cleaning crew, we have a car detailing department and another company that comes out and power washes our vehicles every so often.

All this time and money spent, yet our virtual showroom was once neglected. It’s unacceptable to launch a website and just throw an inventory feed on there. It’s unacceptable to have an outdated staff page or a bunch of empty pages on your website.

I watch my virtual showroom like a hawk. I watch my visitors behavior patterns live as they browse my website. I watch as customers come from our blog, YouTube and Facebook. I watch as my traffic comes from search engines, and I pay close attention to what keywords convert.

The sales managers up at the tower will have Reynolds & Reynolds desk log loaded, and they will be able to see all appointments for the day and what’s going on with the current deals in progress. It’s their job to do this, but it’s my job to get the leads and appointments.

My virtual showroom version of their desktop manager is Piwik Live Stats. It’s a free, open source traffic analytics program that I installed on our own server. I have a decent hosting account for our self hosted WordPress Blog, so I installed it on that server.

Now I always use Google Analytics to run reports on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. However, Google does not offer live stats. For this reason, I use Piwik to monitor my website as it happens.

Although it does many things, my favorite is the live stats. If you look at the screenshot to your right you will see what I mean. Each colored folder represents a pageview by the potential customer. I can even hover over each to get the url of the page they viewed.

The best way I utilize this program is by monitoring the phones. We have 6 full time employees in our BDC, and when the phone rings I listen. Most of our calls come from our website, so just by listening I can pinpoint the actual visitor  to the phone call. If they are calling about a particular vehicle I can easily find out which one is them.

Now I can properly update my lead to view the actual source. Sure, it came from our website…but where were they before? Did they come from a Google Search? Was it a tower ad on Auto Trader? Was it a PPC click? Direct visitor maybe?

The next image shows my keywords. This snapshot was for a Sunday morning. Not a bad start, and as you can see we get some nice organic traffic. We already had traffic from 54 different keyword phrases.

Piwik Allows Me To Keep An Eye On My Keywords

I also like the instant data for my conversions, bounce rate etc…

These Sunday morning stats are great so far, and I love seeing this.

Most of our traffic comes from organic searches, and to see a bounce rate of only 20.74% for today (so far) makes me content.

I’m also impressed with the 13.1 pageviews per visitor, so for today I don’t have much to be concerned about.

My conversion rate is great so far as well, and I love the way I can look at all of this data live.

As I said before, I will always run reports on Google Analytics for my main research, but Piwik is great for the live action on my website. I particularly like it when I send out an email blast.

Last week I sent out an email to over 10,000 people. About 20 minutes later, the phone rang and a woman asked for me. Her niece was looking for a car, and she was heading down to a Hyundai dealership that day. This woman was a previous lead of ours, who didn’t even buy a car from us. However, she liked the way she was treated here. She told me her source, but if she hadn’t I would of figured it out quickly by looking at the live stats.

Instant Live Conversion Performance Data

If you want to get valuable data for your internet department, check out this free open source software. I highly recommend It.

Free Live Stats

Best Layout For Dealer SEO

Patrick Bennett and I have been consulting for Park Auto Mall in the Tampa Bay Florida area for the past year. Since we took over, Park Auto Mall has a dominating presence in the Tampa Bay area.

A couple of months ago the dealership had some problems with their internet director, so I had to step in and regain control. Everything was hijacked by the former employee, including their Google Map Listings (which phone number rang to his personal cell phone), and their Google PPC account.

It only took about a week to regain control, then I stayed on board because of the savvy owner. Thanks to him, I have a virtual playground with full control of his internet department. Including myself, we have an internet team of 7 full time employees.

Since then, we have opened new channels including our YouTube Channel and Facebook Fan Page. During the past year, the owner constantly asked me if they should change website providers. He had a local guy build and maintain his website. Last year I suggested he stop using I-frames, and he did. After seeing a decent traffic spike, I figured we’d let a sleeping dog lie.

About 60 days ago the General Manager asked me to listen to a vendor pitch. It was from a company called AutoXLoo. I never heard of them, but anyone who actually comes by the dealership will always get my time.

I brought them into my office, and Joe pulled up a sample website. Not even 5 minutes into it, I told him to stop. I totally got what they were doing. They had everything I would have wanted in a dealer websites, including the side widgets. I told him a had to get him a meeting in front of the owner, and I did a few days later.

Fred was also very impressed with it, and I had explained to him why I liked it before the meeting. Here is what I really liked about it:

1. Most Searched Text Link Widget -  Obviously the longer you have a vehicle in inventory the less money you will make on it. As time goes by, your older inventory will always have more impressions than your new. This module will help your older inventory show up in searches by providing a direct text link from your homepage.
2. Newly Added Inventory – This widget will allow your new inventory to get crawled and indexed in all search engines in a day. Plus, with both of these modules your website will be forever changing in the eyes of the search engines. This means the Google Bot, Yahoo Slurp and others will come back more often. You will see that your page cache will update more frequently. Park Auto Mall’s former site was the same every single time a spider visited it, but now things are better (see stats below).
3. Inventory On Home Page – I want inventory to show up on the homepage, and this allows me to select not only how many to show, but it lets me decide which ones. I can either have it display newest inventory, a random list or I can pick them all. I chose a random pull because I already have the new ones linked to from the side widget. This will allow my other inventory to stay strong in the searches. If you look at Park Auto Mall’s website, you will see 12 vehicles come up. If you refresh (control & F5) you will see new cars. Now, every time a search engine bot stops by the page will be different every time. They love that, and they will give you more authority.
4. More Control – I have the ability to add whatever I want on top, bottom, left or right of every page. I can embed videos, clickable images to other pages, widgets and more. I can now engage our visitors. That is why we have average pageviews of over 6 pages per user. That may not sound like much, but when you’re getting close to 400 visitors a days it is. Our bounce rate since the launch is only 22%.
5. Vehicle Detail Page Videos – By default, AutoXLoo makes a video for every vehicle in our inventory. It displays a video tab on every vehicle page. We make our own videos, but we don’t have the time to make a video for every car. When we do make a new video, we can easily add it to our vehicle detail page and it will show up instead of the default video. You can see this Corvette listing as an example. (Click the video tab).
6. Mobile Phone Website – I’m sure all of us are aware of the increasing number of people that view our websites using mobile devices like Blackberries, Droids and I-Phones. Although smart phones are fully capable of viewing normal websites, they simply take too long to load. CarXLoo provides a mobile website with the main website. Their code automatically recognizes a smart phone visitor, and will redirect it to the mobile site (automatically). You can view the mobile site on a pc by going to m.parkautomall.com. It may not look like much on a PC, but it’s simply perfect on a smart phone.

I could keep going, but I want to get to the numbers. I have been working the internet since 1994, and I’ve launched and relaunched websites in a variety of industries including seafood, printing and the car business. Typically when a website gets a major overhaul it will usually take a dip for a couple of weeks. Lucky for me I have some strong backlinks going to parkautomall.com, so the dip only lasted a couple of days.

Since the launch a week and a half ago, I have already observed a 25% increase in website traffic. I use 2 different web analytics programs, Google Analytics  (of course) and Piwik Live stats. Piwik is a free open source program that you can use for free. We have a self hosted WordPress Blog, so I installed it on that server. This software gives me a wealth of information, and I use that on a daily basis. Matter of fact, I have it up all of the time. I can track each visitor as they navigate. I can even figure out where a visitor came from when a customer calls. I can see exactly what page they’re on, and were they came from. When I find out, I will select the appropriate source in Reynolds & Reynolds so I can have accurate reports. I only log into Google Analytics weekly to run reports. I even added a live visitor widget to our car blog (below right).

Here are some screen shots:

This screenshot is from my Piwik Live stats, and you can see the jump in traffic since the launch. I even excluded all visits from our buidling's IP address so we are not counting our own visits.

This Screenshot From Google Analytics Shows The Last 4 Days. It has only been 4 days since I installed it.

Between those numbers and our Tampa microsite, we’re getting over 600 unique visitors a day. Plus our YouTube videos have resulted in almost 7,000 video views so far. Not bad considering it’s only 42 days old. You want to see how we do it, check out this awesome vehicle video by Danielle or this one by Tiffany (there’s some funny outtakes at the end of Tiffany’s video of me trying to show her how to drive a standard).

Things will only get better as I juice up both websites, so check back in a couple of months to see more results.

Our Microsite Nets 175 - 275 additional visitors every day

Learn more about AutoXLoo here.

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.