Well it is finally official Microsoft Submit It! and bCentral Business Directory are closing down. A move we had anticipated  for the last year or so since bCentral was no longer taking any new signup since October of 2006. It is about time that Submit-It went out... it is a very useless and hard to work with tool... but I'm glad that Microsoft will move our dealer listings from bCentral to Microsoft Small Business Directory.

Important parts of the official news:

Microsoft retiring Submit It!
On May 18th 2007 Microsoft will retire its Submit It! service. The service's site preparation, directory submittal, and reporting tools will be decommissioned. To help you transition away from the service, we are giving you a limited period of free access to Submit It!’s site preparation, submittal, and reporting tools. In addition, existing Submit It! customers are being offered a way to retain their Small Business Directory listings, for free, through 2008. Please read below for more detail and when you can expect to see changes.

Directory submittal, site preparation and reporting tools ending
Effective 3:00pm Pacific Daylight Time on May 18th 2007, you will no longer be able to log into and access the Submit It! service. The service’s site preparation and optimization tools, directory submittal, and reporting services will be decommissioned and any data associated with these service components will be permanently deleted from Microsoft servers. If you want to preserve any reporting information please log into the Member Center <http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=6557362> to do so before the service end date. Additional instructions can be found in our Submit It! Customer FAQ <http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=6557363>.

Continued listing on the Microsoft Small Business Directory
Also effective May 18th 2007 at 3:00pm Pacific Daylight Time, the bCentral™ Small Business Directory <http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=6557364> will be retired. In its place, we are offering existing Submit It! customers and others who currently have bCentral Small Business Directory listings a free, grandfathered listing in the new Microsoft Small Business Directory. While we will be preserving the present directory’s link friendliness and search ranking value, slight changes will be made in the way the directory appears to the public and how you may alter your listing. Please read below and see more details about these changes in our Small Business Directory Customer FAQ <http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=6557365>.
.....

BTW on the http://www.bcentraltransition.com/SBD/ site the dates are wrong. Where is the QA Microsoft.

What is a local search engine?

Local search engine refers to online yellow pages and specially designed algorithm by likes of MSN*, Yahoo, Google and AOL.com to return results in a geographical area. Take for example Google Maps, on this service you can type in an exact location or just general keywords for a service offered, i.e. Used Car Dealers, Ames, Iowa. Try it for your business, if you do not come up under the expected keywords; you need to optimize your business profile.

Who are the major players?

• Yellowpages.com, SupperPages.com, SmartPages.com
• Google Local
• Yahoo Local
• MSN Local
• TrueLocal

What can I do?

There are two distinct methods by which your dealership could take advantage of this new opportunity.

• Organic/Natural Optimization
• Pay – Per - Click

Organic/Natural Optimization

The strategy involves:

• Updating the data source
• Enhancing your dealerships profile
• Monitoring dealership reviews

Updating the data source

Most local search engines pull there data from providers like InfoUSA and Acxiom. As a business you must make sure that these database contain accurate and up-to-date information. Making changes to this data isn't difficult. To update your profile on InfoUSA please visit http://list.infousa.com/dbupdate.htm.

Most local search engines provide means for you directly update there data online, look for "Update Your Profile" in the footer of these search engine web sites.

Enhancing your dealerships profile

Before beginning your optimization take a breather and profile your business. Write a one 350 character paragraph that accurately describes your business and your location but keep it simple and readable. Try to input as many different keywords as you can into the profile.

Know the categories you want to target before hand. Google Local offers you to be included in five categories at most so choose them wisely. Theses categories are kind of like keywords a user might input to locate your business. To get keywords and alternatives you can use the Google Keyword tool located at:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox

Have your hours of operations listed on your web site, include payment methods accepted and make sure your mailing address is listed on your web site. As Google and TrueLocal can pick up that data.

Monitoring dealership reviews

Pay attention to opinion published about your dealership. Keep an eye on CitySearch.com, Yahoo Local Reviews, DealerRater.com, LemonFree.com and others. These reviews can affect your business's reputation. Setup Google Alerts to inform you whenever you dealership is mentioned online. Don't get blind sided by bad reviews.

Proactively solicit reviews from your customers to improve your business reputation, rank, and content quality with in local search engines.

Pay – Per - Click

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) inclusion refers to a fee based listing on local search engines. PPC listings are typically served at the top of results pages giving your business the opportunity to be in a premium spot above the rest of the listings and to be listed for searches for your competitors.

Unlike tradition advertising and most forms of online advertising messages are broadcast to general audience; PPC ads are shown only to people who indicate and interest in a specific topic in a geographical area. PPC model of advertising is both effective and compelling, since you as business owner can advertise only to people who indicate interest, at the exact moment that they indicate their interest. That’s the magic moment for you as advertiser.

You as advertiser only pay when a customer clicks on your ad. If your ad appears 50 times and receive five clicks, you only pay for those five clicks. With PPC you enjoy a tremendous level of control over your costs. You can set a maximum daily budget and specific amounts you are willing to pay per click. Most PPC services provide free conversion tracking and online reporting, you get customizable reports that continuously track your sales conversion and return on investment. These reports can also be emailed automatically on a regular basis. Giving you full controls over your campaign spend and clear insight into performance.

To get started with PPC see following websites or contact us at 515-232-2024.

• Google AdWords (http://adwords.google.com)
• Yahoo Search Marketing (http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/)

* For MSN one would not really call there local search a search engine, it is out of beta but still lacks in functionality.

Here is a list of vendors and tools I would have for a the best of the bread dealership online marketing website for an OEM dealership.

• AutoJini.com Powered website with platinum package plus these additional features and services
  • Chrome VIN decoding
    
  • eVox to provide the images for new inventory lineup
    
  • Dealer Specialties to provide the data feed and images for used cars
  • Google Analytics to provide me the web statistics
    
  • Live Chat
  • Click-To-Call
  • Organic Search Engine Optimization Service
  • Pay-Per-Click Program
    • Adwords, Yahoo, MSN with minimum of $100/mo spend on each.
  • Campaigner8.com for my email marketing
  • Cost: $695/mo(Excluding Dealer Specialties and PPC spend)
• Adam, ReyRey or DealerSocket CRM
• Cars.com & AutoTrader Account to get my listing in front of over 60 million users.
  
• X-Time for online service appointment hookup.
• RouteOne to manage my finance applications
• Minimum 1 listing a month on E-bay
• Ongoing training from Sean Bradley or Cyclone Automotive

Total cost: $2500 to $4500 a month. Largest cost being Cars.com, AutoTrader and the CRM

In 2006 we all heard the that Google is going into to Affiliate Network and compete with the likes of CJ, Linkshare and others... Today we got an email from Google AdScene team to sign-up for referrals beta site.

Reason this is important for dealerships and automotive vertical is that it will open up pay per performance advertising at relatively low cost. Pay for performance works bit different then pay-per-click... instead of paying for each click to your website you can set it up to pay only when someone completes a certain action on your website... like submits a lead form.

In this post I will be focusing on one of the things as a dealer you can do to generate more leads from your dealership website. If you recall from my previous post "How do I make my dealership website an effective lead-generating resource?" the first thing we need to do is drive traffic to your website.

So here are the methods you can use to drive traffic to your website:

• Online marketing
  • Search Engines
    • Natural/Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
      
    • Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
    • Paid Inclusion
  • Classified Sites
    
• Offline marketing

Search Engines

What do you do when you are looking for something online. If you are like me and most other online users you'll likely visit your favorite search engine and type in what you are looking for. According to some studies and our web stats there is a likely a 70% chance that you found this post and our dealer website product by using a search engine. So getting your site listed in search engine matters greatly for driving targeted traffic to your website. There are three search engine marketing methods you can use to increase your visibility, Natural/Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and Paid inclusion or Search Engine Marketing.

Natrual/Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Is a method of increasing your visibility in the natural search engine result pages (SERPs). So when someone searches for your targeted keyword(s) your site appears in the first few pages of SERPs and not the sponsored search results on the top, bottom or right. This is a very very very high level look at things and no way I could cover SEO in this post... However here are the few things you can do now to increase your rankings in the SERPs

• Pick your keywords carefully
• Have the main keyword in the title of your page do not use Welcome to XYZ dealership as your title
  
• Do not keyword spam (frequency of keyword is higher then normal, using unrelated keywords)
  
• Have good content on your homepage and use your keywords. Use the main keyword in heading tags or bold them
  
• Avoid full flash based sites as search engines can't index them
  
• Get incoming links to your site.
  

Pay-Per-Click
Its a method that allows you to choose the keywords you like your site to appear for on search engines. And you decide how much you are willing to pay when someone clicks on your ad. The places these ads appear are top, bottom and/or right of natural search engine results. This is an excellent way to get traffic to your website. However, this should not be the only method used for online advertising due to the cost involved. Here are few tips that could save you some green when doing PPC or you can always hire a third party like us to manage your PPC campaign.

• Setup your campaign using GEO targeting.
  
• Choose your keywords carefully and be specific do not use general keywords like "auto dealer"
  
• Use ad Variations and test your ad copy
  
• Integrate your PPC programs conversion tracking tools into your website
  
• Keep an eye on content match and ban sites from your network or not use content match all together.

Paid Inclusion
You pay a price to have your site included in natural search engine result pages. Inclusion is guaranteed however placement is not. Personally I think it is just waste of cash. Google search engine does not offer this option, very good thing.

Classified Sites

For classified sites I cut them into four different categories, national auto classified sites, regional auto classified sites, generic classified sites and local classified sites.

National auto classified sites contain the likes of AutoTrader, Cars.com, Vehix.com, CarsDirect.com, Edmunds (I think AutoTrader powers their site but you can sign up for dealer listing) and etc. I won't be covering them much as most off us already know the value of these from personal experience.

Regional classified sites are the unknown in your local region examples being IowaMotor.com or WheelsForYou.com. Google for some others as the cost to get your inventory on these sites is going to be lot less then national sites some may even post your inventory for free and you may see better ROI from these then national.

Generic classified sites are the onces ignored by most dealers... these include craigs list, kijiji.com, Google base, Oodle.com and others. All these mentioned sites offer free postings. For craigs list and kijiji.com the posting process is manual but it is well worth the 5 mins it takes to post one listing. As that one listing could generate up to 250 unique visitors to your site and get you 5-7 leads. When posting your listing on these make sure to include a link back to your site from the ad content. Please please follow the rules when posting on these sites, as it will keep everyone happy.

Google base and Oodle.com will take your full inventory file and can be automated unlike the other two. BTW AutoJini.com sends your feed to Google Base and Oodle.com for Free.

Local classified sites are the local websites started by a web developer in your city. Almost every city has few off these use your fav search engine to find them. Contact the site owner and let them know that you can send them your inventory in electronic format. Most will add your inventory for free as they need content.

Offline Marketing

I won't cover this in here as ton of books and blogs are available on this already. Two things I will mention:

• Your web address should appear anywhere your name appears
• And checkout article "10 Strategies to Increase Traffic to Your Auto Dealership Website" by my colleague Syed Azam

I hope this sheds some light on methods available for getting traffic to your site. In the next post we will look at how to turn this traffic into leads.

The biggest questions we have after launching any dealer website is "How do I make my dealership website an effective lead-generating resource?" so in the next couple of postings we be covering the basics steps you should take. So lets get started...

To start generating leads from your dealership website there are two things you need to do.

• Drive traffic to your dealership website
• Convert visitors into leads

Sound simple right... actually its not as these require planning, time, money. In next posting we will look in-depth into "Drive traffic to your dealership website" and the tools and resource offered by AutoJini.com to help you with this.

Building inboud links is a very powerful website promotional tool. If it is done correctly, your linkage will:

• Increase traffice to your dealership website
• Improve your rankings in the search engines
• Save you a lot of money in advertising

Use the following information as a guide to start your linkage campaign. If all this seems to overwhelming then check out our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) service. We are here to be your source of information and guideance. If you have any questions contact us.

Step 1: Link Building Kit

Before we start building links we first need to gather some information about the site we will be working on. It is good idea to keep the information you generated from the guide below in a separate document as it will become tedious typing this information over and over. A better option may be to install the Google toolbar or other form filler plugin for your browser (we use RoboForm for Firefox). To get started we need the following things.

• Free Email Account
• Mailing Address
• Website URL (duh)
• Title
• Description
• Keywords

STEP 2: Where to submit

Free search directories.

Visit our hand compiled list of auto dealer link directories.

Use Google

• "add your site" + "website design"
• "add a site" + "website design"
• "submit your site" + "website design"
• "submit a site" + "website design"
• "add your URL" + "website design"
• "add a URL" + "website design"
• "add an URL" + "website design"
• "submit your URL" + "website design"
• "submit a URL" + "website design"
• "submit an URL" + "website design"
• "suggest a site" + "website design"
• "suggest a URL" + "website design"
• "suggest an URL" + "website design"

Research the competition.

Search for back links to competition.

link:www.competitor.com (google)
linkdomain:www.competitor.com (msn)
link:http://www.competitor.com (yahoo)

Well we hope the above information is usefull in building inbound links to your website. If you have any questions or need further clarification contact us.