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The statistic or something similar to it has dominated the sales pitches and marketing materials of search engine optimization companies for a very long time. I just saw a mention of it in an article from 2005 and it’s been reiterated again and again ever since. Nearly every study seems to come to the same conclusion. Nearly every study is wrong, at least from a business perspective.

If you torture statistics long enough, you can make them say anything you want. I could go into a long-winded breakdown of why this is a completely bogus statistic, but I’m going to appeal to common sense instead. If you take a second to think about it, the reality of search engine optimization becomes very clear.

If you include all searches, the number is probably accurate. The problem is that the majority of searches should not be considered when judging the importance of the top ranking in Google. They aren’t the type of keywords that need to be optimized. For example, the top keyword for 2012 was “Facebook”. It was searched for over 3 billion times a month in 2012. People wanted to go to Facebook, so they searched for it in Google. It’s the safest way to avoid the challenges of typos that take you to the wrong place, so they search for it. Guess what the first listing is for that keyword? What percentage of those 3 billion monthly searches do you think clicked on the top listing?

The second most searched keyword was “YouTube”, followed by “Hotmail”, and then “Google” (yes, people searched for Google in Google). Again, the top listing gets the lion’s share of those searches.

From a business perspective, the top keyword for the vast majority of companies will be by name. People who do a search for Dell with find dell.com at the top and that’s exactly what they’re going to click. People who search for “Richmond Ford” were looking for Richmond Ford and will click on the top listing which is.

The other searches, the important ones that people type in when they’re looking for something other than a specific company or website, are the money terms. They’re the ones that you will want to rank for in order to drive additional traffic to you website. These are the searches that drive down the numbers from being so high (near 100% when people do a search for Hotmail, for example) all the way down to 42%. Why? Because when people do these types of searches, they’re looking for choices. They’re not looking for a single website in particular. They’re looking for the right website. They will scan the listing and pick out pages that seem to match their needs.

People who are searching for “Richmond Ford” know what they want. People searching for “Virginia Ford Dealers” want options. It’s easy for richmondford.com to rank at the top for “Richmond Ford”, but the ability to rank at the top for “Virginia Ford Dealers” is the key to moving the needle. For those searches, the top listing does not get 42% of the clicks. The top listing gets more than the second listing, which gets more than the third listing, which gets much more than the fourth and fifth listings, which get much more than the next five listings. I’m not saying that being at the top isn’t important.

I’m saying that the right search strategy for the majority of businesses that have a diverse range of keywords that can drive relevant traffic to their site is to get the top spot for as many keywords as possible, but also top 3 listings for other keywords and even top 5 listings for others. Getting more keywords is more important than getting the top listing for fewer keywords.

The same effort that it takes to get the top listing for a challenging but semi-relevant keyword can be used to get top 3 or top 5 listings for dozens of other keywords. This is where the needle is moved. This is where the traffic is increased. Once the wide strategy is in place, it’s good to go back and move them up even further, but don’t get hung up on getting the top listing for single keywords. It’s good for ego but not necessarily for traffic.

www.internetsales20group.com">http://www.www.internetsales20group.com

Automotive Vendors, Cars.com, Car Gurus And Autotrader Are Discussed - Car Dealers BEWARE!

Let’s first take a moment to let the cover image of this story wear off a bit. It’s pretty freaky, I know. Once that’s done, let’s talk about how the evolution of search marketing has come to the point that we need to use freaky images to get your attention.

SEO and PPC are very different which is why for years it has been okay to have one company running one and another company running the other. They have always been complementary of each other but they didn’t necessarily have to talk to each other. The separation between paid and organic has for some time been considered a positive – trying to do both is hard because of the potential conflict in strategy and purpose.

Things have changed in 2013. The two must talk to each other. Whether it’s two different companies working each separately or through a single company that handles both with different departments, the best way to have a solid search marketing strategy is by making sure that efforts on both fronts are truly working together. When done properly, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Here’s why:

• PPC Focus on Organic Weaknesses – SEO takes time. PPC is instant. When there are important keywords that are lagging from an organic perspective, the fastest way to bridge the gap is through PPC.
• Organic Cannibalization – This is a debate that I would love to have with any search professional. If you’re ranked at the top organically for a mid-level search term, you don’t need to pay as much for it (or even buy it at all). Studies have shown that for the types of mid-level search terms that garner clicks based upon choice rather than position, PPC can take organic clicks away and yield the same basic results as not buying that keyword in the first place. In other words, the money is spent but the clicks don’t measurably increase. There is a very specific strategy behind identifying these types of keywords that would take more than this blog post to flesh out, but when the two sides are communicating, money is saved on the same number of clicks. In essence, ROI goes up as a result.
• Double Down Principle – There are certain keywords with which it makes sense to dominate from both a paid and organic perspective. This is where having a shared understanding of the analytics driving both comes into play. For example, is a page ranks at the top organically, a consolidated strategy would have the paid listing pointing to a different landing page. When people click through to one, then the other, they’re greeted with two different types of propositions.
• Rightsized Budgets – This is arguably the most important reason to have organic and paid talking to each other, even being the same entity. There are times when services should compete, but this isn’t one of those times. When the dollars are being managed separately, both sides want more of the budget to prove success. When the budgets are consolidated, the goals align to achieve the most high-value clicks for the amount of money being spent regardless of which hand is doing the spending. It’s the best path to achieve the highest ROI on search marketing spend.

Take a look at your paid and organic search companies. Are they talking to each other? Are either saying that they don’t need to talk to the other because they work independently? If so, it may be time to look at someone else because that sort of thinking is antiquated. Get the two hands talking to each other as soon as possible.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's the main point, but it's definitely one of the keys. Exposure on social media is an extremely high-potential benefit of having a strong presence on social media sites, particularly Facebook.

There has been a lot of talk lately about social signals for SEO purposes. This is another key, but it's completely separate from getting exposure. There are other key points and goals - driving foot traffic, driving website traffic, and having a proper communication and reputation management tool are just some of the others. Today, we're talking about exposure. It's the one thing that has been very commonly used in the past by many dealers but it's also something that some have fallen away from in recent months.

In many ways, social media is like television. People don't go there to hear about car dealers, to see the brand, or to hear about the big sale this weekend, but that doesn't mean that the message doesn't reach them. Unlike television, there are algorithms in place to help or hurt your exposure. This is where managing your social media for the sake of exposure comes in very handy. When done right, a dealership can get exposure and help to improve their EdgeRank at the same time. Here are some of the things that you can do to make it easier.

Post Good Content

It sounds simple, but so many dealers and businesses in general simply aren't posting good content. In the car business, it's easy to find good content. We're surrounded by it at the dealership. We're exposed to it all the time on social media itself. It makes the news, fills thousands of blogs, and is the central topic of tons of videos that are posted every day. There's no reason to not be able to find strong automotive content to post on social media.

Local content can be good as well when done right. You have things happening in your community right now. You have places that make for amazing photographs or stunning videos.

The biggest challenge that some face is repetition. Depending on who you're using as a social media partner or the tastes of the people at the dealership who are doing the posting, it's very possible that the content getting posted is good but common. We've seen some vendors that will go so far as to post the same content to multiple dealership pages. This is just lazy. It doesn't have to be absolutely unique, but it shouldn't be so common that everyone has already seen it.

Keep it Steady but Don't Overload

There was a time in the not-too-distant past when social media gurus were recommending posting every single day no matter what. Many have changed tunes do to research, experimentation, and simple trial and error. Today, it's very possible to get a good bump on Facebook exposure without posting more than 2 or 3 things a week.

That's not what I'm recommending. I just want you to know that it can be done and works just fine. Ideally, you're able to post enough on a daily basis at the right pace based upon your fan engagement to get a strong momentum boost going with EdgeRank. However, if you don't have that boost, if you're not gaining momentum, it's better to slow down than speed up. Posting too much can do more harm than not posting enough.

Play in Other Yards

This is something that nobody's really doing. Sure, there might be a few, but for the most part Facebook pages are only interacting with those who are posting to their page. An easy way to get the brand out there, build interaction, and participate in the community is to venture forth onto other pages on Facebook and interact.

Sincerity is key. You do not want to like, share, or comment on local pages without a strong and valid reason. Interacting for the sake of interacting is easy to sniff out, so make sure that if you're representing the dealership with a like or comment on someone's Facebook post, you really mean it.

This helps in that it allows your brand to spread to people other than your fans and friends of fans. It's an ultra-simple way to separate your dealership from your competitors because nobody is doing it.

* * *

There are plenty of ways to gain exposure through social media that we haven't talked about here. Think quality over quantity. Think sincerity over automation. If you do it the right way, you'll get the same type of benefit that you get from television at pennies on the dollar.

It's very possible that I'm beating a dead horse on this one, but I'd rather beat a dead one than a live one.

If you hear me speak or read my writing, you'll know that I've been pushing this concept for a long time. This is the last plea I'll be making. It's the eleventh hour, so everything I post going forward on the subject will be tips for those who have decided to do it the right way. No more heartfelt pleas - either you get it or you don't.

Social media is embracing search as a primary missing piece to the time-domination puzzle. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest - they all realize that being integrated properly with external search while allowing for robust search features of their own is the key to taking the tremendous amounts of personal data they have on us all and turning it into something useful for both users as well as the all-important advertisers and data-collection services.

Google and Bing are acutely aware that they have all of the outside data that they need. The only part that's been missing to some degree for a decade has been true human sentiment on a personal level that is not tainted by artificial inflation techniques. Finding that balance between understanding what the people really feel versus being manipulated by blackhat techniques is the last victory they need to make their search engines nearly perfect which is why both have been trying for three years now to properly integrate social signals into their search ranking algorithms.

Content is the binding force in all of this. It's very similar to the food that a restaurant serves. From a search perspective, understanding the way that food at a restaurant makes them feel is a key to getting a true understanding of consumer sentiment surrounding that restaurant. In other words, the things that people are saying about the food helps the search engines know which restaurants to recommend. From a social perspective, they need to be able to gather all of the data about the restaurants themselves. They know individual sentiment. Now they need to combine it to form conclusions.

This is the bare essence of the merging of search and social around the hub of content. Businesses that are creating high-quality content and using the right strategies to get this content out there from a search and social perspective are the ones that will win in the long run. Before anyone starts saying that they need strategies that work today, it should be noted that marketing is often like driving a car (warning - it's another analogy so brace yourself). You don't look at the road directly in front of the bumper on your vehicle to steer the car. You look down the road. You see what's happening beside you, behind you, and in the distance in front of you. When you're barreling down the highway and you see brake lights ahead, you put your foot on your own brakes.

The same holds true for internet marketing. Knowing that search and social are hovering around content as the key to both disciplines and uniting all three around a unified strategy is what we're seeing on the highway ahead. As a result, we're able to drive the road that we're on more efficiently, at a higher rate of speed, and with the knowledge that we're going to be able to make turns or hit the brakes before getting into an accident. This is the strategy that helped us be preparing for the Google Penguin update years before it was ever introduced. It is the strategy that helped us avoid the pitfalls of artificial page like inflation on Facebook well before it became more of a detriment than a benefit.

This is what's coming. Are your eyes on the road ahead or are you peering over your bumper to look at the road conditions right now?

Here's an infographic by Marketing Adept that gives a decent breakdown of what's happening now. Knowing that can help you look to the future.

The rise of content marketing and more importantly the focus that Google and Bing have put on website content engagement have changed the way we view the types of content we put on our websites. It’s no longer sufficient to focus all of your content on the basic search engine principles of keyword targeting. You have to have content on your domain that draws in the important social signals and time spent on site.

In other words, your websites have to be interesting to a wider range of people, not just those specifically looking for your products and services.

There are several types of content that go on websites, but the two we’re going to be talking about here are the two most important content additions. There is basic content that is relatively stagnant on your website; product descriptions and inventory items rarely have to change, for example. There are other types of regular content additions that somewhat influential as well such as press releases and service announcements. Those are the content types that we won’t be covering.

What we will be covering are often called different things depending on who is describing them, but I look at them as conversion content and conversation content. These are the pages that should be getting added to your website regularly and on an ongoing basis. If you can only focus on one major discipline when it comes to enhancing your website traffic, search rankings, and social significance, creating these two types of content would be the activity that I would wholeheartedly recommend at the top of the activity list.

Conversion Content

For those marketing a website, this is arguably the easiest to understand from a needs basis. This is the type of content that should have an immediate impact. It’s usually geographically targeted and almost always product focused, so there’s a clear understanding how it can help.

For example, a Honda dealer in Irvine, CA, should be ranking well in Google for the various Irvine searches with their homepage alone, but they may need to create a content page called, “2013 Honda Accord Santa Ana” to have a landing page geared towards those in neighboring Santa Ana.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to do everything, and as a general rule anything that’s too easy is probably the wrong way to do it in the eyes of Google. In other words, automatically generating dozens, hundreds, even thousands of pages to hit the multitude of targets is the wrong way to do it. The practice is relatively common, so common that it often takes Google time to catch those who are doing it, but in the end they catch everyone. This type of blackhat conversion content creation leads to destruction (i.e. de-indexing or even a penalty).

Real conversion content creation is a manual effort, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be tedious or time-consuming. The page mentioned above should only take 10-20 minutes to create depending on what content management system is being used. It’s not rocket science nor does anyone need a PhD in SEO to make it happen. They simply need to create a page with lead generating tools on it that has visuals in the form of images and/or videos of the product and content describing it. The content itself doesn’t have to be long – a paragraph or two works though a little more would be better – and it can still be conversational.

There is no need to make the content keyword rich. As long as the title tag is set up properly and the content mentions the target keywords somewhere in there, that should be enough to start targeting the keyword appropriately. When you try too hard to get the keyword, you often make it harder to get.

Conversation Content

This is the type of content that I often have the hardest time convincing people to build. It goes against the nature of old-school marketing that has been embedded in most of us. In essence, conversational content has nothing to do with converting a visitor into a lead or a sale. It’s often whimsical, only loosely relevant, and seems to bring no value other than to entertain or educate.

Today, it’s the content that can have the biggest impact on search and social marketing. With conversation content, the goal is clear as day written in its name. You want conversations. You want people talking about the content on social media. You want people saving the content in their bookmarks. You want people talking to you about the content in the form of comments.

The image above was taken from a conversational piece of content titled “7 Charming Honda Vintage Ads”. There is very little chance that a Honda dealer is going to have any of the cars being advertised on the page. The page is not designed to sell anything, in fact. It’s designed to get shared. It’s designed for people to see it on social media sites, click through, and reminisce.

Most business website pages outside of the blog are not shareable. Sure, they might have social sharing buttons on them, but nobody is going to share an inventory details page of a 2009 Honda Civic. They aren’t going to share a service appointment page, a specials page, or an about us page. People share content that they find interesting.

Just as you want to be in the conversation with pages on your website, people want to share content on social media that can spark conversations. A page like this one will encourage people to share on their social networks because it’s interesting to see things such as vintage ads.

Social signals don’t just help with social media popularity. They don’t just help with the search rankings of a particular page. Their most important influence is that they help a domain rank better. The more pages that are on a domain that are getting shared well on social sites, the better chance they have of ranking for similar keyword terms as well. This dealership might not care about whether it’s ranked for “Vintage Honda Ads” but it certainly wants to rank for “Dallas Honda Dealers”. Social signals through conversation content pages help to this end tremendously.

* * *

As you continue to push the envelope and watch your digital marketing evolve, it’s important to keep in mind that things aren’t always obvious. They’re clear – that much is certain – but the techniques and strategies that have lower adoption rates such as creating the types of content in this article can be the differentiators between your own marketing and the marketing of your competitors. If you’re creating these types of pages and your competitors are not, you have the upper hand. It’s that simple.

People in the world of marketing and businesses trying to use social media for promotions almost always face a paradox. It’s like a Chinese finger trap – the harder you pull, the more trapped you can become. That’s the world of social media and it’s the biggest reason for failure.

In social media, the more you try to talk about your business, the less your message makes it out to anyone who might actually care. On Facebook and Google+, the algorithms make it to where self-promotion can only last for so long without hurting the quality of the page altogether. On other social sites like Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, self-serving posts often make followers stop following. If you can’t talk about your business, what’s the point of putting your business on social media?

The truth is this: you can talk about your business… a little. To do that, you must earn the right. To earn the right, you have to talk about the things that are both relevant to your business while still holding the interest of your customers. In other words, you have to talk about them and/or the communities in which they exist online and off.

Those who do it right often take their social media marketing to the next level whether they mean to or not. You see, talking about others is one of the easiest ways to get them to talk about you. When someone else is talking about your business on social media in a positive way, it holds ten times more weight than anything you can say about yourself.

There are two important points of discussion, both of which are too long for this particular post, so we’ll touch the surface now and go more in depth in the future.

Earning the Right to Promote

This has been called many things by many people, but we’re all talking about the same basic premise. If you over-promote your business, products, or services, you’ll turn people off. They won’t see your posts because they block you, unfollow you, or report your posts as spam. By doing so, they aren’t just keeping themselves from seeing your posts on Facebook and Google+. They’re also preventing others from seeing you posts. When this happens too much, your page becomes toast. It’s burnt. It reaches nobody. It’s worthless.

Some take this premise too far and apply the extreme opposite strategy. They don’t talk about business at all. These are the people who are pushing a branding-only strategy. The idea is this: if you entertain and inform people, you can talk about anything that you or they consider “engaging”. This puts your logo and business name in front of more people. They like your business because you post great cat pictures. With this strategy, the goal is to be on of the “cool kids” on social media.

This strategy is absolutely ludicrous, though technically it’s not as bad as over-promoting your business, i.e. spamming.

I recently heard David Johnson talk about a post he put on Persuasive Concepts about it and his description was spot on. I’m not going to go into full detail here as it was a long explanation, but the basic idea is that if you bring value to your fans and followers by focusing on topics that interest them and that are important to your topic, you earn the credits necessary to cash in on promotional posts. For example, a car dealer might post car maintenance tips, customer testimonials, and pictures of cool cars most of the time while posting business-relevant posts occasionally that talk about “the big sale” or something more creative.   

This is earning the right. More on that in a future post.

Talking About Others

There’s an important lesson that should be understood before I go into any details about this. Intention is easy to sniff out. Sincerity is key. If you are talking to and about people, other businesses, charities, or anything else with the intention of getting them to talk about you, people will know.

If, on the other hand, you go in with the right frame of mind and position of heart knowing that most of the people and organizations you talk about on social media won’t reciprocate but you want to do it anyway because it’s interesting and valuable to your fans and followers, you have a chance of succeeding. It’s that simple.

Take a sincere interest in the community and the lives of those within it through your social media. You live close to people. You work close to people. You’re a part of the community. Highlight the best parts of the community and the people in it. Give credit to those who do the right things. Use your business social media page to bring good things to light and to help others succeed. Do all of these things sincerely and good things will happen for your business through social media.

This, too, is a topic that needs more flesh, just not right now.

Customers and Community

Take action. Be a part of it all. Participate.

If you focus on others, you’ll be able to get out of the Chinese finger trap of social media. If you just keep pushing (or pulling) harder, you’re only going to make things worse. Sincerity is the key. It can’t be said enough.

There’s a saying in online marketing that has been around for a while. “Content is king.”

The truth is this – before the last year, it really wasn’t. Content has always been important, but it wasn’t until recent updates in Google and Facebook that content took a huge leap from being a portion of search and social marketing to become the actual hub through which search and social marketing flow. Today, marketing starts from content and works its way down versus recent years where content was simply a tool in the marketing strategy.

Google, Facebook, Bing, and Twitter are getting smarter every day. They have more brainpower going into figuring out how to stop spammers than the spammers have dedicated into finding new ways to spam. In other words, any tactic that involves practices that aren’t focused on quality can only bring short term benefit and can eventually lead to doing more harm than good. That’s the way that online marketing is heading and that’s a very good thing for both internet surfers as well as honest businesses and marketing agencies.

The old days of automated link-building tactics and paid social media promos (other than advertising) are long gone. Marketers can only achieve a true impact from quality content. Thankfully, this means that, in many ways, we’ve reached the end of the road of major strategy changes. That’s right, the practices that go into proper online marketing today are the type that will last for a long time, perhaps indefinitely.

It’s a bold statement, but if you think about it, that’s exactly where we are. Sure, there will be opportunities to find better channels, new tools, and make adjustment to different styles, but the end game is upon us. Quality content on and off of a website is the cornerstone of search and social marketing today and will continue into the foreseeable future.

After working the MDA Jailathon Yesterday .

I felt ENERGIZED and PROUD I could do good for my community!

If you haven't tried participating in charitable works your missing

a "Good Karma " opportunity and a golden networking opportunity!

I

Let’s call it what it really is, shall we? Despite efforts by Bing/Yahoo to stay relevant as well as efforts by Facebook and Twitter to enter the search game, there really is only one. For years, I’ve always had to add the caveat when discussing search marketing that “When I say Google, I mean Bing and Yahoo as well.”

I won’t be saying that any more. If we’re talking search, we’re talking Google.

It’s not that the others don’t exist. They do and they’re still somewhat relevant. Millions still use them on a daily basis so they cannot be ignored completely. However, when it comes to making decisions about search marketing, there’s only one algorithm that needs to be taken into account, one traffic source whose numbers should be used to steer the strategy.

The infographic below asks the question of whether or not Google is a monopoly. In reality, that’s not important, though the infographic points to a glaring fact that Google is the leader not only in market share but also in innovation and others, specifically Bing, are always just chasing the leader from a distance. The important takeaway is this: if you want to craft your strategy for search, particularly organic, mobile, and local search, then Google is the only thing to consider. Again, Bing and the other options are still valid, but if you build your strategy around Google, the others will eventually fall into line.

It’s been like that for a while. Google was the first to look at inbound links as a primary ranking factor and the others followed. Google was the first to truly integrate personalization and the others followed. Google was arguably the first to truly integrate social media into their search algorithm through the use of social signals, though in this case the competition wasn’t far behind. It doesn’t matter. Think Google when you’re thinking about your strategy and the rest will fall in line.

Paid search is a different thing altogether and many have found success with the cheaper clicks through other search engines, but even in that case the only way to truly hit a bulk level is through Google. Facebook is making strides in this arena, but they’re still worlds apart.

The funny part of it all is that Google is extremely vulnerable to manipulation, second only to Twitter when it comes to ease. Both rely more heavily on real-time data than the others, which is both their strength and vulnerability.

Here’s the graphic…

Source: Franchise Gator

This is a topic that has been covered so many times that one might wonder how it keeps popping up. The reality (from a content perspective) is that Facebook posting best practices is the gift that keeps on giving. It’s frustrating to dealers and annoying to bloggers, but at the end of the day there’s one simple truth: whatever worked yesterday may not work today but may work again tomorrow.

That’s Facebook. It’s social media in general from a dealership perspective. There are three dynamics at work and they rarely do more than lightly influence the other two:

• Facebook and other social media sites are constantly changing. As a result of changes to their algorithms, posting rules, and layout/design/UI, the game is continuously changing for dealers who want to be successful on social media.
• Users are changing. It’s not just that more people are getting onto social media. The trends of what they like to post, how often they post, and the platforms through which they post are all in constant flux.
• The world is moving. This is one of the factors that few really take into account but that has a dramatic effect on social media posting strategies. Political sentiment, breaking news, natural disasters, new gadgets, more websites… this list could go on indefinitely. Anything that’s not directly associated with the social media platform or its users can fall into this category.

With so much “posting turmoil” in the strategy tsunami of social media marketing, it’s no wonder that there are major points of confusion. There was a time, for example, when businesses were told not to post on weekends. Today, depending on which study you read and whose advice you take, there is evidence that the weekends are exactly when businesses should be posting more. Go figure.

There have been numerous studies and infographics on the topic, but the one below by Pagemodo does a nice job of giving “JD-Approved” advice on posting times, styles, and frequency. One major point of contention, though, is that the advice to post 2-3 times a day should not be considered a general rule. It all depends on your goals, of course, and unless your goal is strictly branding, this is not the appropriate frequency. Otherwise, the data is sound.

I wish I had a dollar for every corny fishing analogy used when talking about customers in our business. Ok, so I wouldn’t be rich, but I’d have, like, seven dollars. But who can resist a blog with cute kids in the picture?

Pay attention.

I recently took a fantastic striper fishing trip at Lake Texoma with my two boys, Cooper and Carter. I decided to hire a fishing guide for a couple of reasons..one, more fish..two, my A.D.D. kicks in pretty quick when having a line in the water for more than 10 minutes.

I started thinking about why people hire guides when heading out on a fishing trip.  Simple…they seem to have more success catching fish.

The Guide understands the behavior of the fish. He studies them. He knows what motivates them. He knows what is important to them. He knows when they are hungry.  Heck, he even knows when they're in love.  He knows that certain things bother them, makes them uneasy. He is patient, calculating, and pays attention to the smallest of details. He prepares.

He knows where they are going to be. If he miscalculates on their location, he wastes little time adjusting his plan.

He knows his business.  He doesn’t operate on hunches.

In the digital landscape, we need to understand the behavior of our customers through research.  We need to know what information moves them in the direction of our products and services.  We also need to know where they are going to be in the digital space and set up camp there.  On the clearest of days, with the most talented fishermen and the best bait, all is for naught if we drop our lines where they aren’t.  Conversley, if we are in the right place and our bait is wrong or even worse, missing, we get the same result.  We have to beat them to where they’re going and welcome them when they get there.  Otherwise, we miss the boat. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

Why do we treat this like a game of chance?  Like no other time in history, we have great bait.

It’s called data.

Without it we’re casting a bare hook.

Who’s your Danny?

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Mark

There are all sorts of tips, tricks, and techniques to drive more traffic to a blog. They usually involve either paying for it in some way, improving an avenue such as through search engine optimization, or building subscribers. The reality is this – all of these things take time. What doesn’t take time other than the effort that is required to make it happen is writing better blog post titles. The right titles can increase blog traffic. The wrong titles can desperately hurt it. This is an immediate effect.

More and more businesses are starting to blog today. They are syndicating, optimizing, promoting, and doing all of the best practices that the gurus are giving them. Still, they are only seeing small increases in traffic if at all. Every now and then, they see a post that spikes. Was it amazing content? Possibly. Was it shared by the right people on social media? Probably. Did it have the right title? Almost definitely.

It blows me away when I see so many titles that simply suck. Yes, they suck. They aren’t attracting anyone.

The title in the blog post above attracted people. It was wildly shared. It was blogged about on other websites. It made an impact. Despite being wildly popular and talked about around the web for weeks, the story itself wasn’t that interesting. It was good, but not good enough to make it the talk of the blogosphere for as long as it was. The title, however, was brilliant.

Depending on your style of business and blogging voice, here are some quick examples of blog post styles. This is a very basic sampling. You can do better.

• Emotional Statement – The Biggest Reason Your Blog Traffic Sucks
• Numbered List – 7 Reasons Why Top 10 Lists Still Work
• Play on Common Phrases - Why Good Guys Really Do Finish Last in Sales
• Contrary Statement to Common Phrases – Good Guys Finish First if They do These Things
• Big Time Promise – Cut Your Blogging Time in Half While Doubling Your Posting Frequency
• Three Worders (use sparingly) – The Blogger’s Conundrum
• Nonsense Titles (that make sense) – The Best Blog Titles Work Best if You “Backwards Them Write”

Again, there are plenty of other types of titles out there. The key is to check out the right sites. See how other blog posts are being written and what titles they’re using. Just because it’s a business blog doesn’t mean that it has to be bland and boring. Titles drive traffic quickly. Make them count.

Thanks to the crew at Digital Dealer for the opportunity to speak on Reputation Management at Digital Dealer.

Digital Dealer may have presumed Reputation Management would be the most sought after topic at the conference.  Ah-no.   I was shocked at standing room only in some sessions but not for the topic of reviews and reputation mgmt.

The lack of butts in seats for all rep mgmt sessions reveals many dealers simply view it and the truth of what is reputation best practice as a nice to have, not a have to have. 

I likened it to hearing your smoke detector go off in the middle of the night—and you get up and remove the battery! The irritating beeping sound stops, but the fire is still raging, and you're not addressing it!

The reputation industry scandals are the clue phones that are ringing with warnings. 

For instance, Forbes released news of “mug shot extortionists” who targeted a man who had gotten a DUI.

His arrest and mug shot quickly surfaced online and his wife received an email from a service provider letting her know that for a small fee, approximately $400, the service would get the posting and photo back down. Horrified of what the item might do to her business if it were seen by distributors, she quickly complied. Problem solved.

Then several weeks later the item appeared on a nearly identical site and she received an identical offer: Pay $400, and the new item could be removed from the web. By now my friend realized she was in an endless loop of extortion. But her initial $400 is gone, and for now, at least, the damaging item lives on.

Forbes also provided this news from a source in the U.K., who asked that they not be identified by name:

“I am aware of the extortion used by most of the biggest ORM firms out there, to name one, it is [redacted]. You will see a huge list of websites they claim they are able to remove bad reviews, reports, affair complaints and trade complaints from. Our team became aware of a scandal where we found that many of these sites have either been setup by the company themselves, or have created financial relationships with the owners of the sites to remove content when paid.”

“Most of the biggest [ORM] Online Reputation Management firms are involved in this kind of mafia extortion. A client of ours who refused to do business with [redacted, but a different company than the first] found a slew of negative listings about themselves appear online just a few weeks later. The company called again and remarked they ‘knew about them,’ offering our client a reduced contract of $25k a month to remove or demote the results.” “What a racket!” said Cheryl Conner, contributor for Forbes.

There isn’t any industry or person exempt from being attacked in this way, hence proactive review building and short circuiting complaints is now mandatory to survive as a business.  Many decision makers are unaware of the dangers of reactive reputation management, versus proactive reputation management, and that is a bit frightening. 

The search engines will shift algorithms again and Dealers Google scores will soar or hit the floor, based on using honest and unbiased steps to building reviews or manipulative means to publish reviews preferentially. 

The worst practices and the impact of unbiased and dishonest reputation mgmt practices have yet to hit a dealers bottom line. Meaning, dealers have been sold worst practices, veiled as best practices that in the short term can satisfy a dealers appetite to get reviews posted and manage  negative sentiment.  Fact is, a number of our new dealer clients stopped following what they thought were best practice, fatigued from low review response rates, the hemorrhaging of removed reviews or de-ranking penalties.

What about the Google slap in August that was symptomatic of not paying attention to best practices?  Perhaps Google was elusive and sent all of us mixed messages and failed to strongly sway dealers from setting up a review kiosk in the showroom. Regardless, that's not my point. My point is unbiased and honest review building has powerful meaning. 

What I want to know is...could the next Google slap have been avoided had dealers followed the Google rules of how to harvest honest and unbiased reviews in a non manipulative proactive process. For example, will Google slap dealers who use, in my opinion, a biased process where the dealer sends a feedback survey and IF the customer is satisfied, customers are sent an email to post a positive review?

The unpredictable giants; Google and Yelp.  Will they continue to throw down the reputation gavel and sentence dealers to review purgatory who do not pay them or fail to nudge the customer to post on yelp if they are a yelper [10 reviews or more] or on GLocal if an active Google-user? Will they say, we warned you, again!  Will penalties only apply to those whose violations are the most extreme; for example, allegedly hiring for reviews,like Samsung did recently. 

Please revisit the conflict of interest page from Google and define how you define honest and unbiased in terms of how you manage your reputation and build reviews or negate complaints.

Dealers with a biased or dishonest control of reviews may see a slow decay in their reputation scores and ranking.

Will dealer decision makers shift their consciousness to a more proactive understanding and do what Google says about honesty and unbiased review building, literally!  Perhaps, we humans are wired that way; we need a good slap to our reputation before we wake up to that beeping sound, and finally call the reputation fire department to put out the review destroying fire.

Jerry Hart
President
eReputationBUILDER
Schedule a free demo
888-810-0441

When it comes to advertising today, things have changed. In some ways it’s due to social media. Oh, who am I kidding? If it wasn't for social media, most brands wouldn't be held as accountable as they are today. Even local businesses, car dealers in particular, rely on social media and review sites to tell their story beyond the cars themselves.

It's all about relationships.

Searching for “I Love Zappos” yields 2,000,000 results. Searching for “I Love Dow Chemical Company” yields 3, according to Bob Garfield and Doug Levy at the SXSW panel titled “Cant’ Buy Me Likes”. Thanks to their presentation, this number is sure to go way up as people discuss it (such as this blog). By contrast, searching for “I Love Satan” yields 293,000. It’s not a good thing to be loved less than the prince of darkness.

What has happened? Why is it that billion dollar ad branding campaigns get usurped by a YouTube video by a disgruntled customer? They described that scenario of United who has been pushing their brand forward for years with a familiar tune, “Rhapsody in Blue”, only to watch it fall apart when they had a disgruntled musician post a sing about them.

Again, it’s all about relationships.

Here are some quick takeaways that dealers can use to understand the way that things are really working in this relationship era.

“The reality is that thinking of trust as a means of encouraging a transaction is like having a child for the sake of tax deduction,” said Levy.

Purpose and incentives can go hand-in-hand, but people can tell the difference. If a consumer smells insincerity, it won’t matter how much good you’re doing in the world. Do good. If the world enjoys and admires the good that your company does, that’s great but it’s not the goal (at least it shouldn’t be).

“Brands that are admired for the totality of their activity perform better than companies that are only excellent at their business goals,” said Garfield.

Branch out. Being the best at what you do is great, but sometimes the things you do that have nothing to do with your business are the ones that last. What do you remember when someone mentions a brand like Goodyear? You might have thought of tires, which is their business. You also might have thought of a blimp over a sporting event which is not their business but helps to sustain their brand in a positive way. The same can hold true on social media.

“The fundamentals of relationship era marketing are trust, belief, purpose, and authenticity,”

Yes, yes, and yes. And yes. You have a relationship with all of your customers – past, present, and future – regardless of whether you want it or not. Embrace it.

This is where it goes wrong

Things were going great. The points being made by Garfield and Levi were insightful, well-researched, and thoughtful for most businesses. Unfortunately, their advice took a turn for the worse, not because it wasn’t valid but because the ideas that they were giving their audience of media professionals were incomplete. I totally understand the need to sell more books and to use events like these for teasers, but the concept of telling businesses to stop focusing on their primary marketing techniques and switch to finding funny videos of laughing babies and branding that way was a poor direction to take.

Will cat pictures be more liked than business-related posts? Of course! Does that make them more effective? Absolutely not.

I haven’t read their book so I don’t know if they expand on the concept in there in a way that won’t turn businesses in the wrong direction, but that doesn’t matter. They shouldn’t have hinted in that direction to the audience without giving them the caveats. I’ll go into more detail when I get back from SXSW but for now, don’t jump to YouTube and find videos of babies to post to your social media profiles. Hold off until I rebut.

Automotive Internet Sales Coordinator / BDC Rep

 / Appointment Setter PAY PLAN!

*** This is a SALES POSITION!!! NOT Customer Service!!

They are SELLING THE APPOINTMENT!

• “Road to the Appointment” process… (Outbound / inbound phone call process)
• How Qualify a prospect
• Identify a prospect’s wants, wishes, needs and expectations!
• They will have 25-35 (Minimum) word tracks in their arsenal… “Objections & Rebuttals as well as “What Ifs…”
• A complete time management and organization strategy
• A complete FORECASTING strategy… “3 Minute Book”.
• They will NEED to have a thorough understanding of 3^rd party providers, information sites like:
  • Edmunds.com
  • Kbb.com
  • Autobytel.com
  • Carsdirect.com
  • Dealix.com
  • They need to have THOROUGH knowledge of their products… they do not NEED to memorize everything, but they need to know where to access the information.
  • Knowledge of the dealership’s website(s)
  • EXTREME KNOWLEDGE of the Dealership’s CRM… this is one of the MOST important aspects to their job!!

$3,000

????

Simple J

$400 week salary X 4 weeks = $1,600 per month

What do I STILL need to earn in commissions to meet my $3,000 GOAL?

$1,400…  The questions is HOW am I going to earn it???

Before you can really answer this… you need to know what your commission plan is…???

$1 for an appointment

$15 for an appointment that shows

$25 for a sold appointment

For a TOTAL possible commission earnings of $41…

100 – 50 – 25

$100 - $750 - $625 = $1,475

$1,475 + $1,600 = $3,075…

100 appointments = $3,000  per month

100 / 4 weeks = 25 appointments per week…

/ 5 working days = 5 appointments per day…

They NEED to make or take 120 calls per day…

Why…? B/C you will ONLY connect with about 11-14% on the phones.

So, 120 calls per day will result in 11-14% connections which = 4-6 appointments per day (5).

Stressed about your Online Marketing Strategy? Don't know what you should be tracking and what benchmarks to measure? Then watch this week's Think Tank Tuesday Video, Leave Your Comments below the video and Share it Please.

Travelling around the country, I get a first hand look at around 300 Dealerships a year, and they all talk about how they do business.  Why they are different, why the community comes to them, how they have the best people, why they are the best Dealer in town.

If you could tell every prospective client that walks through your door one thing about you, the thing you are most proud of, that one thing that says here is why you shouldn't dare do business with anyone else what would it be?

For some it is integrity, best employees, community service and investing, dozens of years in business, caring about their clients for life, etc....  Dealerships are filled with honest people, that work hard, are highly motivated, and operate with great integrity.  Start talking with all the great employees and they are neighbors, moms, dads, pillars of the community.

WHY AREN'T WE TELLING EVERYONE WHO ENTERS OUR FACILITY!

Dealers, get the biggest sign they make and hang it in the center of your showroom.  Tell every person that walks through the door the Sales Consultant you meet is your neighbor and is going to help you with all the caring, kindness, and integrity that can be mustered.  As a Dealer I am committed to making sure you have all your pricing and product needs met by a person you enjoy who values your time.

If this was hanging in your showroom, on every desk, read by every prospective client, wouldn't your staff hold themselves to a higher standard?  Won't your clients hold your staff to a higher standard?

STOP TELLING YOUR STAFF IN MEETINGS WHY YOU ARE THE PLACE TO DO BUSINESS, START TELLING THE WORLD IN WRITING!