Good Things Can Come from Perceived Negatives - re Dealer.com

A few days ago I blogged here about my interaction with dealer.com and over the weekend finally made contact with one of their executives. He reached out to me and we had a meeting of the minds sort of. It was relatively a short conversation but now there is a different level of respect I believe.

I was invited to visit their office in Vermont and offered a demo of their search marketing platform. I am looking forward to the demo of their product and it was expressed that they wanted feedback on the pros and cons of it.

Currently I manage $15,000 a month in pay per click advertising budget for dealer clients and affiliate arbitrage and use a myriad of keyword research tools and competition spy tools that dealers and consultants should use if they are serious about using pay per click to market a car dealership. So I would be interested to see what value their tool provides to dealers that use it.

I believe they have a genuine interest in providing value for their dealers and understand that automotive seo is not a set it and forget process or free. Maybe they will want to take advantage of my white label seo solution (<< site is intentionally sandboxed and not finished, clients come first over personal marketing) or request my services to consult their seo department.

It was quite easy to show that SEO does not take ages and my example actually did better than I imagined beating out dealer.com for their product description. I figured my site would come in second or thrid given that it is on a crappy .info domain and has ZERO authority. This shows that the dealer.com site needs seo help as well. A web vendor should never be able to lose their name and product description searches.

Chances are the post about the dealer.com seo challenge may loose it's rankings because I have better things to do with my time than keep a post ranked to prove a point, the point was made and delivered. Providing value to my clients comes first, even though that post did open the door with a large dealer group (22 rooftops) to help them drive more online traffic to their stores.

Humility in the auto industry is almost unheard of. Sure I love to pound my chest because I pwned a big corporate vendor just as they like to claim they are the best with the products they offer and pound thiers. Online interactions should be give and take and pave the way for mutual fulfillment of goals and that requires humility from all parties. That is the biggest lesson learned here.

There is tons of room for growth in this regards in the auto industry, at all levels, and using education as a marketing tool will win if the education you are providing is accurate. We all have to learn to be brutally honest about our own products and services. Misguiding potential or current clients in the education process is a recipe for disaster. Even worse than that is believing what you are preaching is gospel without really knowing the facts yourself.

Garbage creates more garbage

I am working real hard to build my brand and to try to keep things that may seem negative to others out of my personal content publishing. Some things I have not been doing real well is giving links to others in my content. Usually when I blog about something I reference my own content and not do a good job of attributing others.

So I have set a new goal for myself. Every time I reference my own content I will make sure I reference two other sources if it is on properties that I control. This will accomplish a couple of things.

• notify other blogs and individuals that I am referencing their content and help increase traffic to my properties
• increase the search engine trust my properties have
• bring better value to those who view my content
• better establish "My Brand"

What does this have to do with "Garbage"? Well it means when I see garbage and blog about it for now on I will link to it, regardless. I just have not figured out a way to call out BS from car guys in such a way as they can save face and not appear hyper critical. I just have to make a choice on providing real value vs playing my cards close to my chest and getting people to pay for the knowledge.

garbage content, paul rushing, building a brand,

Networking in the Car Business - Fun Stuff

I really enjoy networking and have become fairly out spoken in viewing my opinion of proper protocol at various automotive social networking to the point that some do not even like for me to enter conversations.

I have been dubbed the king of blog debates by some and people will go out of their way to assault my credentials when I try to contribute to the conversation. It has happened more than once. here and here are two good example. If you visit those links though you really need to look at the whole threads tough.

It has helped me build my brand to the point of almost being highly respected in the industry in certain aspects of online marketing. I will be the first one to admit there are areas that I am not the most knowledgeable in, process being one of them, automotive inventory management being another. On the inventory management side of it though I can draw from enough experience from the manufactured home industry to probably make solid calls in that regard if given enough data.

What I find funny though is some of the people who like to try and take stabs at me will also call me for advice and opinions. So I guess it is not a bad thing. It just goes to show if you have an opinion it does not hurt to give it even if it does not fall into the status quo.

Be Credible in Your Message

As you may well know I a am an Internet Sales Manager at Carl Gregory and building my brand is the most important part of my online marketing message. One thing I do not do is tell customers something to appease them. I am brutally honest even if it not what the customer wants to hear.

Today I inquired with a company that sells Internet Lead Management Tools and asked about a trade out or reduced rate of their services in exchange for advertising on two automotive blogs that I author. The response I received was incredible.

Please understand I do not mind being told no. That is not my gripe. I do mind being told no when no one even took the time to explore the sites in question. To me that just destroys any credibility in the denial of the request. Maybe it was just a salesperson no wanting to take a reduced commission due to reduced revenue or maybe it is the fact that the company in question is so wrapped up in themselves and think that their product cant be touched. I think it is the former but then again now the commission for the sale they will never get is $0.