New List Of Must Have Worpress Widgets For Your Blog
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.
Better Car Dealer Blog Themes Launched For Better Results
New Car Dealer Blog Format (Click to see live version)
Showroom Logic recently made some changes how we display the blogs for our car dealers. Although our organic search results were amazing, we felt we could do better by launching themes that show more text and less pictures.
Our new theme is perfect because it allows us to show small thumbnail photographs that will help the page load faster. The faster the page loads and the more text you have on your homepage the better it will perform on search engines.
Blogs are an important part of our strategy. Our car dealers get a entire website AND a blog, all tied into one website. We take care of the actual blogging, and our dealers are free to post on their own as well. Most don’t because they lack the proper tools like Adobe Photoshop, and knowing how to deep link.
Blogging is definitely a science, and our dealers are happy with the results we provide. There is only one way to get more internet leads, and that is to get more traffic. The car dealers that use our blog packages obtain 50% more traffic then they did before.
The powerful keyword rich backlinks we provide back to the dealer’s website also gives them an advantage to whatever keywords they’re bidding on. They will move up on all terms.
The great thing about Showroom Logic is their software runs on it’s own. A car dealer doesn’t have to switch website providers. Basically it’s an entirely different website that gets it’s own leads.
Some call them microsites, we call them macrosites. Showroom Logic will blog about a dealer’s inventory and place keyword rich links pointing to the dealers actual inventory. Every now and then we’ll blog about the service or parts department for a dealer. Basically, we work for them so what they want we’ll do.
You want to sell 30 more cars a month? You may think I’m joking, but I’m dead serious. Call Mike at (863) 666-0130 and I can show you what I can do for you, or send an email to mike@showroomlogic.com.
Internet Sales Managers For Car Dealers Should Learn Wordpress Blogs
One of the best ways to get more traffic to your dealer website is from a Wordpress Blog. If you’re an Internet Sales Manager for a car dealership my advice to you in get your own.
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!
Car Dealers Are Finally Starting To Realize The Power Of The Auto Blog
Blogs have been around for years, and many people like myself have used blogs to gain traffic and juice up another site.
Car Dealers spend a lot of money on their existing websites, and they usually establish a relationship of trust with their provider. This is becoming a problem.
Two of my biggest clients were talked into a dealer blog from their website providers. The problem is the blogs provided to them are not real blogs, it’s just an extension of their websites.
I could write for days about what should be done, but I’ll keep it simple. If you have a dealer blog, go to your last blog post. Copy and paste the title into a Google Search. Then, go to “more” and “blogs” (on the top left). Now search again and if needed, sort the results by date on the upper right.
If you have a blog that is respected by Google, your post should be listed. A proper blog will “ping” Google every time a blog post is written, and within 5 minutes of publishing your blog post should be there.
A simple self hosted Wordpress blog will suffice for any car dealer, and the cost is minimal. You can get a Free Wordpress blog from Wordpress themselves, but I wouldn’t recommend that because you will never own it. Even Matt Cutts from Google recently commented about the power of a Wordpress blog.
This Dealer Utilizes A Blog with Every Widget You Can Imagine: Orlando Car Blog
Spend the $96.00 a year and get your own hosting. The hosting company I recommend has self installers. Once you sign up there is a program called “Simple Scripts” that will automatically install your blog (including a data base). The hosting company will even provide you with a free domain name. For info on how to sign up, visit this page.
After setting it up, you will have plenty of time to play around with it. Make some posts, delete some posts. Change templates and add widgets. Once you feel it’s ready, add a link to it from your current dealer website.
Within a day or 2 it will be crawled and indexed in search engines.
Now add some widgets to the sidebar. You can add your Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds or whatever else you want.
Be sure to blog at least twice a week, and write unique content. Don’t be tempted to copy someone elses work, that’s known as “duplicate content” and the search engines hate that.
In time you will have a powerful blog and you can start asking for link exchanges with area auto bloggers. Give them a link from your blog for a link to your dealer website in return. Be sure to link to it from your site, or you will have a blog that will never be found organically.
One of my clients had 8 identical special edition Corvettes. There were only 500 made so they asked me if I could help them unload them. I did a carefully planned “keyword” blog post and within 2 days they actual ranked nationally on Google searches. When I see visits like this come in, it gives me satisfaction because this is why I do it.
For more information on setting up your own blog, read this article.