Events, Happenings & Cool Stuff

Pimp My Smart Car - Click Photo To See More

This morning I was looking at pre-owned cars in the Tampa Florida area and I came across this blacked out 2009 Smartcar. I’m sure you’ve seen one of these beauties drive by you at some point during the past year.

Besides the Smart Car’s fuel economy being 41 miles per gallon (highway), it makes a great overall city car because of parking. You can easily fit 2 smart cars in one parking space.

Park Automall in the Tampa Bay area has 4 Smart cars available, and this blacked out beauty just came in.

See all of Park Automall’s pre-owned Smart Cars here.

Anyone who listens to Bubba The Love Sponge knows that Hulk Hogan has his 1957 Chevy Bel Air up for sale at Stingray Chevy. I did some looking yesterday and I couldn’t find any photos of it online, except for 1 on the Dupont Registry (it was just the grill).

Today I drove over to Stingray Chevrolet in Plant city to take some photos of it. The car is immaculate (even the interior). Check out the pictures:

[View with PicLens]

2008 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited

The Jeep has been around forever, and I have never been a big fan. Today I received a Twitter Tweet from Dani Lunsford over at Napleton in Kissimmee Florida (near Orlando) telling me she just got a new used Jeep on her lot. Out of curiosity I clicked it, and it was this cool blacked out Jeep.

I went a bit further and checked out all of her other used Jeeps, and I soon realized that Jeep has made some great changes in the past that I haven’t even noticed before.

I saw this red one that looked cool too, having a totally different style than the blacked out Jeep.

After my brief career as an internet director for a car dealership with 3 rooftops, my only conclusion was the fact that the entire internet presence of the car industry was in shambles. Car Dealers are totally vendor dependent, spending thousands of dollars a month in internet advertising. I don’t want to point fingers as far as who is to blame, but I am forced to blame General Motors for the failure of many of their franchises. It doesn’t look to me like the other car companies are doing much better either.

Why do I blame General Motors?

1. Certified Internet Sales Manager Training: Each internet sales manager for any GM dealer must take an online course to become certified. During this training GM encourages dealers to only hire salespeople, not internet savvy people. They go on to explain that “internet sales managers can be trained to be savvy.” If that is the case, who will train them? It would make sense to me if it was a small dealership with only a few dozen vehicles. However, if the dealership has multiple rooftops there is no questions a professional should be hired.
2. Hiring a “Suit”: This one kind of branches out from reason one. This is a name I coined for the car dealership that hires a man or woman in a suit to run their internet department. The internet sales manager course creates this position for multiple rooftop dealerships. He or she spends all day in meetings and getting wined and dined by vendors, and eventually pays each to do his or hers job. My advice? Remove the suit and put on Khaki Shorts and a T-Shirt (stay behind the scenes). Have your dealership buy a decent digital camera and fire the company that comes out once a week and takes photos of the vehicle. Why would you want your inventory to only be updated every week? If you do it yourself you can update your inventory daily, and it would save your dealership some money you could use for other avenues. As you add each vehicle, write a brief unique description of it in the comment section. You will find that you will personally know your entire inventory. Then, spend at least an hour every day obtaining backlinks for Auto Related Blogs. Simply read a blog post and make a comment on it with a link to your dealers website. Actually, I could go on and one here, so bookmark this page and come back later. I will do an entire blog post about this later.
3. GM Seminars: I was excited to attend my first seminar in Orlando that was put on by General Motors. I figured I would have the opportunity to learn something new. As soon as I walked in the door I noticed AutoTrader and Cars.com had a table set up, each with a smiling face behind it. My excitement quickly turned to bitterness after learning the speakers were AutoTrader and Cars.com. These are vendors, why would I want their advise? Not once did they offer advise on what else to do besides advertise with them. I urge GM to hire an outside SEO Professional for their next conference. Car Dealers need to learn what else they can do to make their own websites rank better. The number one thing you can do for your dealership is to obtain backlinks.

So this brings me to Park Automall in Pinellas Park Florida (near Tampa). Dave Ingold is their internet director and I’ve seen his face all over the social networking scene. He is doing all of the right things, and he is constantly wanting to learn more. Dave has the benefit of being self taught, without being tainted by GM conferences and GM online training. Why? Park Automall is not a franchise, they sell late model used cars and trucks. He took it upon himself to learn, and he is putting Park Automall all over the map. It’s called branding, and it seems to be working.

I met with Dave and the owner of Park Automall (Fred Najjar) last week. Currently they are advertising in all the right places. They advertise on AutoTrader, Cars.com and just about every other company out their. They now have their final tool in place. We set them up with their exclusive Used Cars Tampa website, which eventually will give them the edge in Organic Search Results in the Tampa area.

This is what Patrick Bennett & I did for them:

• They now target the Tampa Market with our SEO Friendly website: http://www.tampa-used-cars.com . This site is 2 weeks old, but when it kicks in they will have a strong hold on the Tampa Bay Used Car Market. Although we have a shared Tampa Site: http://www.tampa.used-cars-fl.com, this website is their own with only their inventory on it.


Private 3rd Party Site

• They have their own blog connected to the site. You wouldn’t believe the amount of traffic a properly formatted Wordpress blog can bring to your website. We make one blog post a week for them, and they are free to post as many articles as they want themselves. You can see Park Automall’s Blog here:

Park Automall Blog

• We have them listed in a total of 4 different websites:

www.used-cars-fl.com

tampa-used-cars.com

tampa.used-cars-fl.com

clearwater.used-cars-fl.com

• We automated their Twitter. Every time a new vehicle appears in Park Automall’s inventory we automatically send out a tweet with a direct link to the actual used car or truck listing. They are still free to make as many manual tweets as they wish. Patrick even went one step further. If a new vehicle rolls in at 3:00AM it will be put on hold until the next morning. We also space the tweets out. If Park Automall adds 30 cars their Twitter followers don’t want to see 30 tweets in a row, so we’ll space it out every 20 minutes or so until all inventory is added.

Park Automall Twitter (Click To View)

• Automatic Facebook Updates. Thanks to our RSS Feeds, we automatically update Park Automall’s Inventory to their Facebook Account, which in turn notifies all of their “friends”. It includes a direct link from their status page, and a photo will be added to their notes section.

FaceBook Updates

• Exclusive Car Chaser: We have this tool on all of our shared websites, but Park Automall get’s their very own. Go ahead and try it out on one of our shared sites. Click here, then click “car chaser” and fill in the blanks. You will then see how the notifications come.

Car Chaser. Try It Out!

• Backlinks To Your Own Dealer Website: As I mentioned above, it is very important to have as many backlinks (links pointing to your website from other websites) as possible to your dealer website. The strongest possible backlink you can get is from a “relevant” website. We provide a backlink from each vehicle you have on our website, so if you have 150 cars you will get 150 backlinks (because of your main page on our site). Park automall will get over 450 backlinks because they’re on 3 different sites. After 90 days, dealers in good standing will have the nofollow tag removed whick will flow pagerank juice to your main website. This will help your main website get more organic traffic because you will get links from an “authority” website. If you know how to check pagerank you must see this. Our dealer Page for Lash Auto Sales In Lakeland Florida has a pagerank of 3. Want to see something even better? This actual car listing has a pagerank of 2: Used Cadillac Lakeland.
• Everything Else. I could go on and on, but a true professional will see the value of our SEO friendly used car dealer listings, including our url’s loaded with the correct keywords. This week we also will be announcing Park Automall in a press release written by Lakeland’s own Lorrie Walker. Next week, we will be doing a massive viral campaign. It’s not easy to describe what exactly that is, but when it’s all said and done I will do another blog post on it, and explain the benefits.

Patrick Bennett, co-founder of Showroom Logic had an insane week developing some exciting new features for Showroom Logic’s car dealers.

1) Twitter Used Car Tweets: Any new or used car dealer with a listing on any of our used car websites now has the opportunity to automatically send out tweets to every follower showing each car, truck or SUV as it gets added to the dealer’s inventory. It also includes a link to the actual listing of the vehicle. This happens automatically, 24 hours a day. Here are a few great ways to utilize this:

• Every salesperson on your floor should have a twitter account. They should encourage friends to follow them, receiving updates.
• A “Follow Me On Twitter” app can easily be placed on any dealer website (just like below).
• Dealer Principles & Sales Managers: Follow your dealership on Twitter and be sure your inventory is being updated on a timely basis.

2) RSS Feeds: Each car dealer now has their own RSS Feed. Car dealers can use this to automatically post content to their blogs and Facebook Accounts. The RSS Feed will list each new vehicle as it comes in, 24 hours a day. Any place where the dealers RSS Feed is sent to will be automatically updated.

3) Car Chaser: Users can now set-up their own alerts for newly arriving inventory. It’s a know fact that over 85% of buyers look for their cars online, and it’s more than a 1 days process. Smart shoppers will search for weeks to find the car and price they are looking for. If a user wants a used Honda, but can’t find anything on our site they can set up an alert to be emailed as soon as one comes in. The greatest factor is the user doesn’t even have to create an account.

Showroom Logic is currently in 3 states; Florida, Utah and California. Showroom Logic can service any dealer in an state in the USA. Call Mike at 863-812-6411 for more information.