Increase Your Sales With Videos

create videos with the “robo voice”.

I sincerely hope YouTube puts an end to those vendors polluting YouTube. During the past year, hundreds of thousands of these videos have been published to YouTube. Luckily for us YouTube, lets us know how many people view the videos. The views aren’t very impressive, and it’s obvious people don’t want to see them.

If you want to start a successful video campaign at your dealership it’s very easy to do, and it only takes 2 people. Avoid these 9 common mistakes and you will see an increase of sales if you do it properly.

This is not a sales pitch, but simply a guide on how you can do it yourself.

1) Those Aren’t Videos, They’re Moving Pictures:

YouTube is around thanks to videos. Do you really think people will be impressed with your dealership with a simple video slideshow that has a voice over? Those same pictures can be viewed on your website. I found a website that uses a robo voice, and you can see it here. Now really folks? Here is the same truck made from scratch:

2) No Staff Involvement:

If you don’t involve your staff you will not be able to utilize social networking properly. Let’s face it, every dealer has a Facebook Fanpage. What you must understand is your video needs to float around personal Facebook pages. The only way to accomplish this is to make the videos memorable enough for the person in the video to share it on their Facebook page. Remember, most people have hundreds of friends on Facebook. When they share a video, hundreds of people see it. Park Auto Mall has 4 different sales people involved, and they each share every video they make with their friends and family. Plus, these videos give your potential customers a chance to meet your salespeople before they even come in. It makes your dealership memorable, and you will stand out from the crowd. *Note, they add outtakes to their videos after the closing (watch the last half of the above video to see). Many people don’t realize it, but when they find out (usually by accident) they tend to look at more videos out of curiosity. This also makes the videos more apt to be shared.

Share videos on Facebook

3) No People Screenshots, No Views

After you upload a video to YouTube it will take a few minutes (or hours sometimes) to fully render. When it’s done, go to edit the video again. If you scroll down and look to the left you will have 3 different screen-shots to

choose from. Find one with a person and select that. You will get more views, it’s that simple. People like people. If your screen-shot consists of a steering wheel or car shot you will not get many views.

This search is a perfect example. I did a search on YouTube for “2006 Ford Mustang GT Tampa”. If you look at what came up, Park Auto Mall has the first 2 spots from 2 different Mustangs.

The first video shown has 647 views, and it’s only 4 weeks old. The second video is 3 months old and it has 191 views. (Note the difference in the titles. They were going after a Tampa audience in one, and a Pinellas park in another. That’s why title are important – read more about title below).

Now let’s look at the rest. 15 views and 9 views after 4 months. It’s obvious that people won’t click a steering wheel or instrument panel.

People Will Not Click A Steering Wheel

4) You Have A Silly Robo Voice On your Videos:

Come on now. A robo voice? Talk about laziness. People aren’t dumb, you need to add a little bit of effort. I really don’t think I have to explain this any further.

5) You’re Not Meeting Your Audience Half-Way:

If you think it’s as simple as uploading videos to YouTube you’re wrong. You have to take these videos and (besides reason 2) add them to your blog, your Facebook Fanpage, Twitter, Metacafe.com and other mediums. You’ll be surprised where you videos will show up on Google searches. It takes seconds do add embed a YouTube video on a blog. Another great way is by adding them to Cars.com. I love this feature, and it works well. Forget about Autotrader, they dropped the ball on video. You have to upload each video to AutoTrader and wait 24 hours before you can do anything to it. Plus they ruin the quality of the video and don’t constrain the proportion. They squeeze it, making it look lousy.

Park Auto mall puts all of their videos on a blog. This search showed their video blog post at number one, and it also showed their YouTube Video

6) You’re Not Personalizing Your Videos:

Videos not only give you the opportunity to show off your vehicles, but they give you the unique opportunity to introduce your employees as well. When Park Auto Mall makes their videos, they invite the participant to endorse themselves. Like “if you want to test drive this baby, come and and ask for Tiffany”.

Last week one of the salesguys approached a customer out in the parking lot kicking tires. He was looking at a Mustang, but the potential customer stopped him short and asked for Tiffany (who was inside). The salesman still tried by saying “I can help you”, but the guy cut him off again and said “It said on the video to ask for Tiffany”.

You can see many of Park Auto Mall’s customers pointing at the girls as they walk by, saying they some her in a video.

7) You’re Not Tagging Your Videos Properly

Properly Tag Your Videos for Maximum Exposure

If you’ve upload 3 different Mustangs you should tag each one differently. Like above, you will see that they chose to tag one video for “Tampa” and the other for “Pinellas Park”. You have to saturate your surrounding areas. Look at the tags they used for this video on the left.

Plus you want to add your address or zip code so you show up on the bottom of every YouTube Search Page. This can easily be done by editing your video again, and you will see the boxes on the lower right.

Park Auto Mall goes a step further with their customer testimonials (see more below). When they tag each customer testimonial they use the zip code of whatever town or city the customer came from.

If you look at Park Auto Mall’s YouTube Page, the customer testimonial videos have more views than many car dealers have for their vehicle videos.

Properly Tagging your Videos Will Help You Show At The Bottom Of YouTube Search Pages

Your Videos Are Boring:

I see some dealers giving some effort to make videos, and I respect that. Unfortunately many people don’t want to watch a sales pitch by some sales guy wearing a nice watch and a bunch of rings. If you simply add a personal touch to your videos people will come, believe me. With the right digital camera and software like Sony Vegas you can easily create fun videos if you have the right people. It takes 10 minutes to research a car for a video, 10 minutes to film it and about 10 minutes to put it together with the software. Using 2 people you can easily do this instead of hanging out outside smoking butts.

Sometimes it gets too busy to make a video because you can’t get a second person to help you. That’s when you make blooper videos, like this one:

People seem to like to watch things like that, even if it’s a little dumb.

9) You Don’t Give Your Customer A Reason To Pass Your Videos Around:

I used to visit the Digital Dealer Website often, but I got tired of all of the vendors pretending they were an expert on everything. The last post I read was talking about YouTube Channels for videos, and a particular vendor commented “A dealer should have 2 separate YouTube accounts, one for your inventory and one for your customer testimonials”.

That was simply bad advice from a “know it all” trying to drum up his own business as a consultant. Park Auto Mall tries to get as many video testimonials as possible, and they put them all on the same YouTube Channel as their inventory videos.

Every time a sale is made, they tell their CRM to schedule an activity for each salesperson to email their customer a link to the YouTube Video or their Facebook Fan Page. If the customer didn’t make one the activity gets canceled. They found that these customers will pass the video around to their friends and family. Every video testimonial Park Auto Mall makes will be put on YouTube, their blog, their website and their Facebook Fanpage.

You won’t get hundreds of views, but you’ll get 20 or so. The reason why I feel that these should be mixed with your regular videos is simple, we want people to look at them after they see their friend on YouTube.

The Postive Effects Of Videos:

Park Auto Mall created their YouTube Chanel on May 26th of this year. In only 4 1/2 months they have received 24,243 video views so far. They have uploaded 256 videos, and the more videos they add the more views they get.

Use this advice to help your dealership sell more cars, and you will not need a vendor. This can be done by just about anyone..with a little effort.

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.

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.

You can do this with personal pages as well. For fan pages, you must have at least 20 fans before Facebook will allow you to do this.

1) Click http://www.facebook.com/username (or type that in your address bar and hit enter)

2) The first screen will let you change your personal page (you must be logged in). I already changed mine, so now it will show me my other pages by clicking “set a username for your pages”.

Click "Set A Username". You must be an admin of the fan page to do this

3) If you’re an admin of more then one page like I am, simply select your page from the drop down menu. Now add your Keywords. Note: You cannot undo this, so put some thought into it. Consider a keyword domain like:

http://www.facebook.com/napleton.orlando or http://www.facebook.com/used.cars.tampa

You must use periods instaed of dashes. When you done, click "check availability"

Remember, Facebook recently changed it’s privacy settings. Fan Pages will now show up on Google, Yahoo and Bing searches a lot easier. That is why you should consider a keyword domain if you don’t plan on promoting your fanpage with newspaper, radio or TV ads. If you want both, find a happy medium and just make it easy to remember.

It's that simple. Now Click Confirm and You Are Done

Better Tip For A Friendlier Domain Name:

Go to Godaddy.com and buy a domain name for 10 bucks. Once you create it, log in to your domain manager and redirect it to your Facebook Fan Page URL.

Here’s an example: NapletonFans.com This will make it easy for them to get fans when they start their newspaper campaign they are planning.

Having your own car blog will not only help your dealership, it will help you. It’s no secret that an Internet Sales Manager position in the car business can be short lived. If you had your own blog you could bring it to your next job, and change everything to where you are.

WordPress Blogs are free, and it takes about 60 days to start ranking. Do not get a “Free” hosted blog from WordPress, spend the $90.00 a year and have it self hosted. You will get more traffic this way and you will own it.

Easily Make $300.00 A Month, and get your Dealership more leads at the same time.

Did you know once you get traffic you can sign up for Google Adsense? Currently car dealers and other third party companies pay over $3.00 a click. Google will pay you half of that. I have an old printing blog that I converted into car related keywords, and I make about $300.00 a month from Google.

I simply blog about once a week, and Google sends me a check every month. Yes, Google makes my car payment!

Here are the steps to get started:

1) Buy A Domain Name

Be sure to buy a domain name with keywords in it. If you live in Florida try to find a good one like floridacarblog.com, or carblogflorida.com. If you plan on staying in your current city, buy one with your city name in it. Be sure to buy it for at least 3 years! If you only buy it for one you will be a suspected spammer.

2) Get Hosting

I recommend Bluehost. I’ve been using them for years. They make it as easy as possible to setup your car blog using a program called Simplescripts. Check them out here.

3) Choose A Theme

WordPress has thousands of free themes. Check them out here. Find a good one and install it. Don’t worry, you can easily change your theme as often as you’d like.

4) Set Up General Settings

Name your blog with keywords, and make sure everything looks right first. Now is the time to tinker around, because your blog is so new nobody will ever find it.

5) Start Blogging

Be sure to blog about your inventory, not what every other dealer blogs about. The idea is, you want to drive traffic to your dealer website. Blog about your inventory. Check out what we do for Napleton Jeep Chrysler Dodge: Orlando Florida Car Blog

6) Set Up Widgets

I hope you’re already on Facebook and Twitter. Check out these must have widgets for car dealers.

Showroom Logic offers SEO for Car Dealers, and this is one of the services we offer. If you think it’s out of your league, email mike@showroomlogic.com for more information.

Our dealer sell more cars every month from a 30% increase in daily internet traffic. There is only one way to get more leads, and that’s more traffic!