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.

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.

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.

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.