According to reports, bing.com is primarily focused on 4 sectors of search:

1. planning a trip
2. finding a local business
3. researching a health condition
4. making a purchase decision

You find when using bing.com some peculiar similarities with Google search such as the font and color display of listings and their basic construct. What’s different however is the left sidebar which automatically displays sets of similar phrases to what you just searched, much like a tagging system. Also different, and most notably so, is that bing.com does not mix multi-media types in its searches like Google Universal Search does. What this means is that video clips are not going to appear in your searches unless you specifically use the Video search option.

I don’t plan to follow up with this much. I don’t think it’s a big deal but I did deem it important for you to know why bing.com may be appearing in your site analytic reports and to understand some basic things about it. If you want to stay on top of this you can start by visiting ReadWriteWeb which is where I sourced most of the information in this post.

With the iFrame, you diminish your SEO influence. An iFrame is like a box inside a room. It’s its own room, but secluded from everything around it. You can link to the blog’s main page, but from an SEO standpoint you are really linking to a box you can not see inside. A search engine knows it is there, but can not see the contents.

You can link to a page within the blog but then you loose the website shell meant to surround it, so you forgo the visitor experience you initially set out for. Additionally, when you link from the blog, visitors remain in the iFrame unless you insert the parent syntax within the frame tag.

target="_parent"

Another issue is that not all systems and browser support frames. Most today do, with the exception of mobile devices, and most blogs naturally do well on a mobile device. With the iFrame you risk mobile visitors not being able to access your blog at all.

From what I can tell, this blogs looks quite new. It has a few posts and the blogger is clearly sharing himself in addition to the dealership. This is good. Although you must be conscientious of what you publish. The NINJA post pushes the bubble. It will appeal to some, but could throw off others still important to the dealership. There is a threshold for everything, including dealer blogs.

Their facebook group has 53 members, including me. I just became a fan. I look forward to seeing how FB shapes the auto industry. I like what Baron is doing off the bat.

This looks to me like the dealer/blogger discovered the site the other day, set it up, posted a blog and left. For all we know the user never returned.

I see this occasionally. It probably occurs more than we know. When I first started blogging I created multiple new blogs over the course of a few months. It took a while to find which information to publish where. As I did, some of the blogs faded out, but others remained. BlogPro Automotive is really the only one that thrives today from those initial months. It has come a long way for sure. You can visit the original BlogPro site on blogger.

Today I run several sites and am always feeling them out as things progress. It takes time for a blog to evolve. Like raising a child or even growing up yourself. You have to feel it out over time. Conditions and circumstances change and you must re-establish your voice. Listen. Respond. Listen. Respond.

However, consistency proves to pay off over time too. The longer you stick with your niche, however large or small, the more can come out of it. I think that DealerRefresh is a good example of this. Jeff Kershner has been around longer than most, and his tune resounds well with many. When you change your tune, you go sideways (or backwards for some). I know that I have experienced this.

So, where do you take a site like the exoticcars’s blog? I would begin by getting off of that platform. Our WordPress system on BlogPro would suffice. I then would get my logo up there and apply a good-looking theme to the site. There are numerous free themes and themes you can purchase. Themes are like a dress you slip on to your WordPress blog or website. Finally, start posting content on a regular basis. During your first six months to a year you must be posting 2-3 times a week mimally in the dealer world to truly compete.

Of course this day would come, it was only a matter of time. With the efforts of people like Jeff Kershner of DealerRefresh and Ralph Paglia of Automotive Digital Marketing, dealers and auto insiders are becoming increasingly more emerged in the idea and practice of blogging and social media. But what are these things really?

Let’s be clear about something. Setting up a Twitter account or a Facebook account takes 2 minutes, literally. Setting up a blog takes 5 and it is free. If you are paying someone to do this for you without a master plan and direct correlation to your marketing strategy then you are wasting everyone’s time and money. The set up of these things is the least of your concerns. Utilizing them and incorporating them effectively into your sales process is the real challenge.

Looking back to the late 90’s and early 2000’s, I recall the blitzkrieg of car dealers taking on the Web. In the first few years the big question was “should I or shouldn’t I have a website?” Then it was should I or shouldn’t I do pay-per-click advertising (PPC). Now it is “should I or shouldn’t I have a blog and do social networking?”. It’s easy to say yes to these questions but what is not easy to address is the HOW.

Successful business comes down to 3 things most of us know - People. Product. Process. Car dealers have the product and despite today’s economic situation there is no lack of people. There is an abundance of people at the consumer level and at the industry level. But it is the process that throws a wrench into all this.

Dealers have been able to follow a relatively consistent sales and marketing process for 50 or 60 years or so until the advent of the Web. Since then there has been a constant flux in their business processes. First came email, then came Automotive CRM, then Internet Departments, BDC, e-commerce directors, etc.  Now we have blogging and social media. Anyone who thinks that incorporating blogging and social media into their marketing strategy simply for the sake of doing it because they “should” is going to be sorely disappointed. So what if you get 500 people following you on Twitter. Are you selling more cars as a result? Is your service business increasing? Are you improving upon your brand equity?

If you are doing these things, what impact are these efforts having on your results? If you can not draw a clear distinction amongst these things then you may be at risk of treading water. Studying your customer behavior and correlating it directly to your efforts is the ugly side of this business which is no different from any other form or method of marketing, conventional or progressive. Obtaining the tools for the trade is as easy as going to the store and buying them, but that doesn’t mean you end up with a killer deck.

At the risk of getting into semantics, I think it is important to distinguish between services, solutions, and products. The term product can be used in two ways - one to define the widgets, or food, that a company sells and one to define outcome or experience a company offers. For companies that sell widgets, both uses of the word product apply. For those that provide services however only the latter applies, thus your product ultimately is the resulting business experience for customers, employees, vendors, etc.

Creating profit selling widgets is relatively black and white. You have fixed costs and pricing that result in a forecast amount of profit based on sales volume. With services however your costs are difficult to fix. They can vary from customer to customer and from situation to situation. As a result, your profit can fluctuate and scalability throws even more curve balls.

Say hello to Managed Web Services. Like widgets, managed services have a fixed sale price that the customer can budget. The primary difference is that the sale is recurring, typically on a monthly basis. This is not uncommon for IT-related purposes such as computer networking, PC and server maintenance, but there is little market awareness for this when it comes to web-related services. However, that doesn’t mean there is little demand for it let alone supply. In fact, lots of business provide some form of managed web service to customers and customers do have a consistent need for web-related services, you just don’t see it referred to as “managed web services”.

In the coming weeks we will strive to build a case for the mindset of managed web services and depict the importance for businesses to embrace the idea of appointing expert professionals to their web presence to evolve the marketing message, business process, and customer experience in a fixed or budgeted fashion that is solution-driven rather than retainer-driven.

You can start by visiting the Virtual March website and registering with the site to sign the petition. The site lists the activities Pickens is seeking from you, which includes things like crafting a letter to your Congress folk, or even visiting them. I have never done this before but it is time.

If you are on the fence about the idea of signing up or getting involved with another site or movement, let me offer some words of encouragement. First off, if you are an Internet Marketing Specialist of any kind, you want to join PickensPlan. You will see first hand what social media, video marketing, and email marketing can do for an organization with a good cause and some money. PickensPlan is inspirational in this sense. Second, this is for your country, the U.S. of A. We need movements like this from the citizen sector. Our country is in dire straights largely because we have left it up to government to pave our future. PickesnPlan offers not only a patch to energy independence, but sets a new precedent in how the Internet can be used to create positive change.

March with me.

People often ask me how I find time to do all the things I do. My response lately as been something on the lines of, “Just break out of the space-time continuum. Time is not real.” Interestingly, most people get that, but often I find they aren’t clear on how to do it.

Well, the reality is, you can’t. At least not in this physical world as far as I know. But, that doesn’t mean you can not do things because you do not have the time to do them. Sure there are limitations to what you can pull off and when, but truth is if you genuinely want to do something you find the time to do it, or create it really.

One such thing for me for which I am striving to create more time is the PickensPlan. This energy independence effort for America is a new movement started by T. Boone Pickens, a Texas oil man, last year during the Presidential race. PickensPlan has quickly and effectively spread its word using a balanced mixture of Internet Marketing, T.V. and lobbying. Because of its robust online presence (Pickens uses Ning as its primary website), I have been able to keep in the loop of its activities and growth. My mission as of late is to get more involved and serve more as an activist. Like many Americans, I believe the energy independence is the best path and the right path for this once great nation.

From 2003 to about 2006, pay-per-click advertising, particularly in the auto industry, took the field by storm. Car dealers were practically forced to spend thousands upon thousands on PPC advertising to stay in the game. Website technology evolved into a death trap for car dealers because the SEO aspect of car dealer websites was completely disregarded. As a result, when the PPC bubble deflated, car dealers were left with few choices for a truly competent website platform.

Website providers have been scrambling the past 2-3 years revamping or overhauling their platforms to meet the SEO needs for car dealers. Today the SEO rat race in the automotive online retail business is about as over-saturated as CRM was 5 years ago. Mysteriously, while everyone now offers “the best SEO”, many dealers still lack vital understanding about the true role that SEO plays in one’s business.

An example of this was revealed to me during a phone call last week with a dealer group. The dealer contacted us about our content marketing services. He explained that he did his own keyword reporting using Web CEO and that he has effectively positioned his websites across thousands of keywords. He had a good video presence going but still when he searched for a particular set of keywords, his competitor sites appeared in the top results but not his. One of which he suggested sold a whopping “6″ cars a month, which is hardly any at all.

While scoping out everything and listening it was clear that not only did this dealer know and understand all the fundamental SEO practices but also was applying them to his online presence, and I told him this. I explained that he is doing everything we teach our dealers to do and that as far as I could tell he was far ahead of the game.

“But why does our competitor rank higher”, he asked.

My response was two-fold…

a.) Just because a site appears higher in a few searches you perform manually doesn’t mean it ranks higher for others nor does it mean the site ranks higher for the majority of keywords you target.
b.) Just because your competitor ranks higher doesn’t mean they sell more cars.

This second response was key. Dealers tend to approach SEO as some sort of silver bullet to their sales needs. But it’s not. SEO is about attraction, visibility, and possibility. I wouldn’t even classify SEO as creating sales opportunities. That’s what conversion accomplishes. SEO creates the possibility for conversion. Big difference.

I don’t know if this is what the dealer needed to or wanted to hear. I think appearing higher in search was more important to him than having a more successful business. I could be wrong. But what I took home from that conversation was the realization of how even the more sophisticated of dealers that has his head wrapped around all this SEO stuff, can sometimes miss the significance SEO has with your business.

If you are looking at video marketing as “the next big thing” or as a silver bullet to your online marketing needs, be warned. Video is great and highly effective, but it’s time-consuming and expensive. You will need good SEO to get your videos watched, and you will also need an effective conversion mechanism. Video itself is not the best conversion tool. Those that have experimented with viral video marketing may testify to this.

I look at social media as a noise filter. The Internet exudes a tremendous amount of noise. Your website must filter that noise and convert what it can to leads. Your CRM must then organize and market to those leads and your BDC process must cultivate what it can. But what about the noise your website filtered out that did not convert. Do you wait for it to come back?

This is where your blog and other social media sites come in to play. Look at them like a buffer between the WWW and your website. You and your employees can use your/their social media profiles to develop network contacts and business opportunities much more effectively in some ways than can your CRM system. A CRM requires either a web inquiry or manual entry and you could never input the quantity of personal information that a prospects social LinkedIn or Facebook profile would have. So isn’t it more efficient to reference a customer’s social media profile?

A blog, be it an employee blog or a company blog has a distinct role too. It’s like your public hub for general information and total public awareness. Use your blog as a buffer to gather noisy Internet traffic to your website or to your social media profiles. The website will do its thing and filter leads into your CRM. Then you can use your social media networks to cultivate those relationships into eventual business.

For business owners this is natural and even for most top-level managers and executives. But for those lower on the totem pole in their dealership or workplace who have little or no vested interest to do this, a new paradigm must arise giving incentive to these workers to use these tools in this way. I see sales in the auto industry evolving to a state comparable to the Real Estate industry where automotive sales professionals are building their own brand equity under the roof of a dealership rather than just trying to use social media to sell cars.

When I engage with dealers about how blogs and social media can effectively cultivate sales opportunities, they like what they hear. They get charged. But often in the midst of battle some dealers seem confused and unsure of their role. They struggle to incorporate these new tools into their existing BDC processes.

This is not the case for all dealerships and in fact some are vigorous in their online networking, but there is a persistent sense for many of “when will it pay off”. But this is dangerous thinking. It’s not a matter of when but rather a matter of how. It pays off when you address the “how?”.

A blog isn’t a showroom like your website. It’s more like a radio station, a television channel, or even a broadcast network. Find a way to harness the power of that with customers and see how sales get.

As a car dealer, you must take that one step and start blogging. I don’t mean to get a blog to look at, but one to play with. Surround yourself with people you trust that have proven methods and innovative ideas. Get your brain wrapped around things that are new (to you) and be creative in finding ways to engage with your audience. Build trust and the car sales will come.

Invent for yourself the possibility of being a truly approachable dealership. Your website can not accomplish this but your blog can. This must start at the heart with you and those working with you at your dealership. Otherwise, your blog will just be a front for typical dealership “racketeering” (that’s a Landmark term in context, not mine).

In the early days of Internet and the auto industry, some dealers jumped in to having a web presence and either made it work or didn’t. Some didn’t bother. Some waited a while and let things develop. Some pioneered. I remember the bitterness dealers would have for “Internet” customers because they had too much information accessible to them to be ripped off.

This has settled and today essentially every dealership has an “Internet Department” which, really seems archaic now. Why is the Internet still considered a separate doorway to sales? Do dealers have a “radio department” or a “TV department” or a “billboard department”? No. They don’t. So why an “Internet department”? I don’t have an Internet department.

For more than two years now, the possibility I have seen the Internet offer dealers is the opportunity to establish genuine trust and confidence with their customers AND their employees. To accomplish this dealers must lead the way. If they sit back and count on others to do the thinking for them they will be led astray. Dealers need to take responsibility for their desired result which begins with a genuinely perceived possibility.

There is a lot more talk than action out there. The angles dealers take with their advertising is not much different from before and when it comes down to it, dealers just want to sell more cars. By this I mean that dealers struggle to find the vision and lasting patience for cultivating and nurturing sales opportunities. Websites are designed to convert now buyers and the only real Internet tools dealers know how to use for retaining potential customers is their newsletter and CRM.

Dealers must make their blogs tangible to customers AND employees. If you treat your blog as a microsite you degrade its potential power.