How to set up a car dealership blog | Internet Sales Manager in Training

Where is Your Dealership’s Blog?

If your dealership does not have a blog you are missing a piece in your online marketing puzzle. Blogs can accomplish many goals for your store and staff.

Benefits of a Car Dealer Blog

Make it easier for potential customers to find you - Blogs properly optimized have almost instant search engine optimization. Blogs can capture national traffic for brands and models you sell in addition to local traffic for competitive brands and market areas.
Customer Testimonials - There is a lot of buzz about dealer review sites and sales person review sites in the automobile industry today. The built in marketing that these sites offer may be negated by the fact that they people can visit your competition from these websites and deprive you of traffic when people are already looking for you. A blog will allow you direct moderation of reviews and provide you with an online brag book that you control the content. Video, pictures and audio of your satisfied customers can be added on the fly.
Search engine reputation management - A blog on it’s own domain will at a minimum take up two entries in the search engine results pages for people looking for you buy name your stores name and push down entries from sites like www.ripoffreport.com or www.pissedconsumer.com
Online promotion of your staff - Your staff can contribute and have their own page on your company blog. That way when people are looking for them online will find them and who they work for.
Free Branding on Local Events - Almost all local events will issue press releases. These can be used in your blog to have online surfers looking for information about these event find it and deliver your branding message. Whether you sponsor the event or not.
Build a subscriber list - Many people will subscribe to a blog if it provides useful relevant information. You can set up contest, polls and blog only promotions that will keep people coming back.
Search engine optimization and traffic for your main site - You dealership blog will provide SEO benefit and referral traffic to you main site.
Fresh content updates for your main site - Search engines love fresh content and you can add your blog’s rss feed to your site to keep the content fresh and keep the search engine spiders revisiting regularly.

How to start a dealership blog

Starting a blog is easy. Over 175,000 are started a day according to www.technorati.com and there are many free and low cost ways to get started. A word of caution do not host your company’s blog on a free hosting service such as www.blogger.com or www.wordpress.com these platforms can be used, this blog uses wordpress, but not as the place where your blog lives.

Wordpress blogging platform, in my opinion, offers the best CMS to use as it has a huge support network and is the easiest to adapt to offer different ways to present content. You should set your blog on it’s own domain name and a subdomain of your main site should be avoided as well. Blog hosting is cheap and can be bought for less than $50 per year.

Need Help Setting Up a Dealership Blog?

There is plenty of information online that will give you all of the information you need to set up your dealerships blog. Or you can contact me and I can help get you going. Give me a call at 912-266-1629.