Moving from Typead to Wordpress

We just recently worked with an Omaha Nebraska Chevy dealer and moved their typepad blog to wordpress.  The move was easy but we made one mistake.   We changed the url structure and it created some confusion in the search engines eyes.  We should of left the url structure the same.

This is a learning curve that we did not figure we would have to go through as most car dealers do not even have a blog to start with.  The move was easy  I am just not sure why there was confusion like there was.  It was not something that should of happened.

I really feel like we should of paid more attention.

Taking Inventory of Assets

While we have moved away from traffic arbitrage as a income source and more towards that of a SEO empire there comes a point when you have to take inventory of your assets.  We maintain several sites for clients and out own use very rarely do we take the time to properly identify everything that we have in stock so to speak.

Today I was taking inventory of our assets and found some real gems that have been ignored.  One of them is a blog about Digital Dealer Marketing set up on blogger, like this one.  It was set up to prove a point and to blog experiences from the digital dealer conference, but my desire to maintain industry relations curbed that urge.

We have several hundred websites in our portfolio and now is the time to put everything to good use.  As I move away from hands own product delivery to more of a marketing and managing position in my business it will be great to watch these assets receive full value.

Technorati Tags: digital dealer, assets, propeties

Chasing the tail with blogs

Long tail seo is one of the easiest ways to drive traffic to a website.  By creating well written content you will pick up an enormous amount of traffic on search terms that you did not know even existed.  When working with our dealer clients we use a network of blogs to help us identify golden opportunities for clients pick up additional traffic from the search engines.

Using this strategy we were able to determine some trending searches for our automotive seo clients.  You can do this yourself by creating a high quality blog and publishing articles relevant to your market area and news about your business.  A good example of this is what a NC Chevy dealer we work with bought a Ford dealership in Tarboro, NC this will allow them another entry in the search engines for Chevrolet and Ford terms tied to their market area.

The key is to be consistent in publishing your articles and watch your analytics so you can identify your trends in search and capitalize on that traffic that your competition is missing.

Technorati Tags: automotive seo, dealership blogs

Forcasting Traffic Trends - 2011 Ford Ranger

One of the good things about running an automotive blog network is that we can use that data to predict future demand and look for ways to help our automotive seo clients get a leg up on the competition.  A good example of this is the amount of traffic that we are getting on the 2011 Ford Ranger has been phenomenal. 

The stats show that we need to work to be well optimized for that term when the time is right for our customers.  It would not do a Cincinnati Ford dealer much good to receive inbound inquiries for this model yet.  Just as it would not do much good for a NC Chevy dealer to be ranked for the 2010 Chevy Silverado when they still have many 2009's in inventory.

You can use this long tail data to help build up high converting landing pages for affiliate offers and to market your business.  You just need to make sure your data is from a reliable source and you don't wait to long to capitalize on it.

Buy Low Sell High - CPC Revenue

The basic premise of traffic arbitrage is to buy traffic and resell it for more than it cost you.  Sounds pretty simple.  For most just starting out in affiliate marketing setting up a PPC campaign can be a daunting task.  My company does automotive seo for car dealers and now we are in full force creating assets to buy traffic to.  This does two things for us.  It allows us to drive traffic to their properties like we do for a Ford dealer in Cincinnati, we create an asset using their inventory that would otherwise go to an Ohio auto auction.

We buy this traffic by using our time to optimize the sites in the search engines.  Time has a monetary value so in essence we are trading time to generate traffic.  Just like we are doing on the Texas direct auto auctions.  Once the listings are indexed then the site gets a life of its own and creates immediate attention from the search engines and draws in a continuous stream of traffic.

Technorati Tags: automotive seo, auto auctions, ford dealers

Selling Services Using SEO

My firm is an automotive seo provider. We pretty much have moved completely away from affiliate marketing. Now our properties are driving plenty of leads from out optimization and networking efforts. I just published a post about "Dynamic SEO" that will probably cause me some flack.

The thing is the auto industry is so competitive and it usually means the vendor with the biggest marketing budget usually wins. Through our organic growth and providing stellar service to our clients it looks like our business will be able to survive any future economic downturns. Our business was built in one of the weirdest times to be involved in the auto industry and many would of told us we were crazy for entering that vertical.

I will be converting the content more away from traffic arbitrage to more on how to build a services business using the web as your only marketing tool.  Stay tuned.Technorati Tags: dynamic seo, auto industry

Stacking Content for Traffic

With the changes that are happening in search it is going to take a ton of content that can pass link equity to money sites to stay competitive.  From monitoring traffic stats we can see that long tail traffic is converting better every day.  The question lies on how to build up link equity to help take advantage of these long tail searches.

A project that we are working on will allow us to push links with great content, to other great content to money sites.  A good example of one of the sites in development now is The Automotive Nexus, where we will push traffic to affiliate offers and back to clients money site while insuring that the visitor receives value for their click.  Meaning they can find their answer when they get there.

This is part of a large automotive seo project that will be able to deliver link equity on demand, a very task oriented undertaking.  It requires more work than many are willing to under take.  Feel free to ask any questions you may have in the comment form belowTechnorati Tags: automotive seo, automotive marketing, link equity

What do you do when this happens?

I do very little out bound marketing for my business.  Over the last week I started reaching out to car dealers in my local market.  A dealer that is real close to my office has never returned phone call so I stopped by their store.  I was treated very unprofessionally by one of their managers when I stopped by their store.  The real sad part is I service my vehicle there and will never do that again.  (Why I will never service my vehicle at Bennett Chrysler Dodge in Kingsland again.)

I just have a hard time dealing with these interactions.  I know it has nothing to do with traffic arbitrage but it just gripes me when people in the car business are less than professional in their interactions.  I was wanting to offer them the ability to reach the local markets and beyond their market area like I have done for a Cincinnati Ford dealer and a Greenville Chevy Dealer.

I was actually going to give them a super deal on my Car Dealer Craigslist Posting service.  Guess they missed out on that and I will look for another local Dodge dealer who wishes to pull customers from Camden county..

Driving Traffic on Competitive Terms

I have been real busy and have not had time to really update this blog much lately.  I have been working on some things that will help drive SEO traffic.  This has already proven very successful for a Cincinnati Ford Dealer and now we are working with a Greenville Chevy dealer and a Rocky Mount Chevy Dealer to do the same thing.

The things we are doing to help facilitate this are creating very content rich landing pages that push traffic back to the dealers main website.  This is the next level of Automotive SEO that will provide immense value to our clients. 

Its to bad that many vendors in the automobile industry really do not have a clue on how to drive traffic or SEO.  Right now I am working on a white paper that will deal with Dealer.com's Social Media Fail an on how it could negatively affect all of their clients.

Technorati Tags: automotive seo, dealer.com social media, traffic arbitrage

Picking Targets - Pick off easy competition

Building a mound of content to push lead generation is a solid principal to use. Especially if your search terms are very localized. It is not exactly rocket science. The question comes how much time and effort can you devote to online marketing in this capacity?

One thing as an affiliate marketer that you can do to help find markets that are worth attacking is finding markets that companies are spending money in to lock down.  It does two things for you.

• Gives you a target that is easy to identify.  When a company tries to monopolize local search terms they have realized the value of these terms and are spending money to own them.  This means revenues streams such as adsense will have some value.
• Advertising opportunities or client hijacking.  While I would never create properties in markets then go after the client but I will create properties in market areas then wait for them to contact me for advertising or engagement.

A good example of this is what I am doing with NJ used Infiniti properties and New Jersey Infiniti price quote properties.  The targeted market area Infiniti dealers may never contact me but in the mean time I will enjoy the rewards for some very passive income from lead conversions.  With automotive seo being almost childs play and with dealers not making a concerted effort to own their market areas opportunities abound!!

Technorati Tags: automotive seo, nj infiniti dealer, affiliate marketing

How Supporting Properties Help

Building supporting properties to your main money makers will help drive traffic and search engine relevance.  Right now I am in the process of building up a net work of sites with complete evergreen content.

This task is not one that is easy but at the same time each "supporting" property needs to carry it's own weight.  So each of those will be monetized in such a way to cover the cost of the effort while at the same time helping push traffic and link relevance to my money makers and clients sites.

You can use a variety of assets to do this.  For example I have one site that is a Hyundai buying tips property.  Which is used to help push up other sites in the search engines like this page about used Infiniti New Jersey.

One thing I must stress is that these properties have all original content not scrapped content like Pasch Consulting Group uses.  This company really does nothing more than stalk other peoples efforts and tries to claim them as their own original idea. 

At the end of the day ethical service to dclients and the search engines is what will win.



Technorati Tags: pasch consulting group, automotive seo, supporting properties

The wordpress SEO experiement

I have been in the process of launching a sea of dealer microsites for a Cincinnati Ford dealer and now we are pulling in some great search traffic on a multitude of long tail search terms.  The type of traffic is slow converting traffic while at the same time high traffic offsets low conversion rations,

The goal for this dealer will to make it impossible for someone looking for a Cincinnati Ford dealer online to miss them.  I am sure that the Cincinnati Chevy dealers will also wonder about how to execute the same type of strategy. 

The best thing they could do is contact me to inquire about my Automotive SEO services and we can help set them on the right path to market domination.  It is a great thing to do if you are seeking non competitive localized terms.

Technorati Tags: automotive seo, dealer micro sites, dealer microsites

Time to prove a point.... Again

Not long ago a dealer.com executive made a comment about seo taking ages that looked like a back end way to market shoddy automotive search engine marketing software.  This was in an attempt to down play a comment I made about seo for him to look authoritative.

Within 4 hours I was ranking very well for dealer.com seo and many other derivatives of their name and product descriptions and still am.  When the article was first published another executive called me to "educate" me in automotive seo.  I will let you draw your on conclusions on who got schooled.

Now there is another automotive seo "expert" who makes plenty of automotive seo mistakes.  The biggest one is publishing content about very non competitive keywords and how well his clients are ranking for them.  Because he lays out his clients "game plan".

Now I am going to lay out my game plan to show how easy it will be to pwn these keywords in local and national markets by creating tons of affiliate lead sites.  The good thing is my clients will even benefit from these properties. 

To bad none are Infiniti dealers yet...

Technorati Tags: automotive seo, dealer.com

Using Supporting Properties to Make Some Jingle

I just set up a new "supporting property".  It will be for helping buyers find many dealers websites and providing valuable information on new domestic cars and trucks. While it will have some built in forms of monetization that is not the main purpose of the site.  My goal is to build an authority site about domestic vehicles.

This will give me an asset in my inventory that will help my clients and their clients.  This really has nothing to do with traffic arbitrage but it will be a valuable tool to use for automotive SEO.  I have a few other domains I will be using this strategy on as well. To exploit some automotive seo mistakes that other consultant in the niche make.

Chances are these sites will not cover the cost of the direct content or maintenance cost but that is ok for now.  Hopefully they will become good link bait which can be transfered to my customers who need it.  Mostly those needing search engine reputation management.

Utilizing Different Platforms for Traffic

If you want to leverage exisiting traffic to other websites you really need to take a close look at squidoo.  Squidoo is one of the top traffic sites on the web today and you can leverage this traffic by making lading pages for affiliate products or even brick and mortar business promotion.

Here is an example of or a page I made for a Cincinnati Ford dealer.  What is good about using squidoo is you can also find some great long tail terms that people are looking for online when searching for information about your business. 

So if you find a term that people use frequently then you can create other landing pages around those terms targeting in on those queries.  You landing pages should target the terms as close as possible as the traffic being delivered to them.

This is one thing that is missed in automotive marketing.  I have noticed increased conversions by tailoring landing pages in this fashion.  Automotive SEO has a lot of room to improve in this regards.



Technorati Tags: automotive seo, automotive marketing, cincinnati ford dealer

Making money twice

One thing that my craigslist service for car dealers does is give me access to tons of Cincinnati used car dealers inventory.  What is really cool about this service is that the listings also produce an rss feed.

So I can take those listings and repurpose then at places like squidoo, here is a lens I made for New Jersey used cars.  This gives the client an extra benefit.  They get an additional level of exposure and I get paid for the traffic the lens generates.  This is a huge win win.

Technorati Tags: cincinnati used cars, new jersey used cars, craigslist

Automotive Lead Arbitrage

As many of my readers know I do work in the Automotive Industry helping dealers in their online marketing efforts.  One of my new projects helping an Ohio Ford Dealer set up lead gen sites is actually been very rewarding in the sense it has inspired me to get back in the lead arbitrage game.

We made them a site to help them generate inquiries from people looking for a Ford F-150 in Cincinnati.  We used wordpress to create the site, but I see many more applications for this type of layout to generate automotive leads and sell them on lead exchanges.

Automotive SEO is fairly weak so it will be easy to to have site similar to the one above to capture local market traffic using search engine traffic  Fight now I have one site that is ranking nationally for the 2009 Shelby Mustang and is generating a lead a day.  This does not sound like much but consider this:

30 leads per month x $12.00 = $360 per month on a page I created over 3 months ago.  Now to just extrapolate that into thousands of pages.  :P

Playing with Squidoo Again

My business that provides Craigslist for Car Dealers is really taking off.  One thing this does is give me access to dealers used car inventory.  So now my VA is helping promote their inventory even more by using squidoo.com.

Here is an example of a lens she made for Brunswick Used Car Dealers, you will notice that it has an RSS feed of a dealers inventory and really is not designed for affiliate conversion other than a banner after the inventory.  That not the primary purpose of the lens in of itself.  It is designed to get people to call a dealer and view their inventory.

Chances are we will also create another property very similar to the one we found for a New Jersey used car dealer to help get more eyes on their inventory and increase phone calls to the dealership with some affiliate monetization in place as well.  This is what the big classified providers do such as Cox Auto Trader.  The difference is I do not charge thousands of dollars per month to distribute their inventory.

Eventually this type of Automotive SEO will help my customers get an even greater bank for thier buck.

Technorati Tags: automotive SEO, craigslist for car dealers, brunswick used car dealers, new jersey used car dealers

Technorati as a SEO tool?

Recently I have been helping a friend of mine on a couple of projects and have been optimizing some blogs in the different search aggregation services like Technorati.com and notice that my blog about Automotive SEO has lost all of its technorati authority.

This is really puzzling because it has has over 100 blog reactions, but I have noticed that the service seems to be going through some pains as of late.  It shows my last three post as being added three days ago and they finally have the right preview image up after over a year of waiting.

Hopefully it is an algorithm change they are going through and things will pick back up over time.  Technorati is almost wikipediaish but it just really puzzles me that this has happened.  I just hope that it does not hurt my site long term.

Reviving Old Properties for SEO

I have several old properties that do get a little bit of traffic and have not been update for quite sometime.  So now I am reviving a sleeping giant of a blog network mostly to help clients get traffic to their sites like my Hyundai blog.

What is cool this is stepping me up to be a thought leader in Automotive SEO as may follow my content around and try to duplicate what I am doing.  What they fail to understand my process is more than just dropping a few links every now and then.

Unfortunately I have to work on some laundering for this network to revive properly and it will take some time.




Technorati Tags: hyundai dealer blogs, automotive seo