Many people are put off with the thought of blogging, mainly because they don’t understand the capabilities of using them for CMS. (content management system) This site is a blog. It is a place I can go to write about my experiences as an ISM to help other starting out and maybe give an old pro some new tips and I will slowly incorporate this blog into a network of blogs.

To give a simple explanation of why to build a network of blogs I will use a well known theory.

Six Degrees of Separation

This theory says that you can be connected to every person in the world by no more than Six Degrees of Separation. The average person knows 45 people. Then those 45 know 45 more on through the sixth degree would give you a knowledge base of 8,303,765,625 people which out numbers the world population by almost 2.3 million people

Now lets think of the Internet. Every public page online is linked to every other page online eventually. You can start on a site about Bambi and eventually wind up on a porn site. That why the Internet is called the “web”.

I am done with math theory and the history of the Internet and I am sure most readers are wondering what this has to do with increasing sales with a blog network.

You can use blogs for many things and in a perfect world if you had every dealership employee blogging about their area of expertise, supporting blogs about service specials, sales promotions, new model releases, maintenance tips, safety recalls (gasp) and driving traffic to your main site. Sites like cars.com and autotrader.com would no longer be the 800 lb gorillas they are now.

By creating a network like that you would cut down on the Degrees of Separation necessary to find your offers online. Your employees blogs would be seen by friends and family, favored on sites like digg.com and reddit.com, become resources for forum users, noteworthy content shared and discussed by others, used in email signatures, on business cards. etc. I hope you are getting the picture. Those blogs in turn would support other blogs and your main site.

That is a perfect world. I doubt you could get the commitment from all dealership personnel for a undertaking like this, however as an ISM every person in your department should have a blog. This will allow them to brand themselves and the dealership at the same time as well as provide incremental sales down the road.

There are some “black hat” ways to generate blogs that could support your main site however these techniques could cause you problems in SERPS., which is a deep subject for a blog about selling cars using the Internet. I will have another blog online soon about “white hat” SEO. While on the topic of SEO let me stress how important it is to do due diligence before hiring SEO firms for optimizing your website. Many of them will use “black hat” techniques to drive a flood of traffic to your site in the short term, but usually cause you long term grief that will have you starting over or giving up on maintaining a site for your store.

If you are considering hiring such a company do so with caution. I would be willing to interview them for you prior to engaging their services and make a recommendation to you. I can be reached at 912-266-1629 and I would not charge for this service.