“Build it and they will come”, a common misquote from the Field of Dreams, is the mantra that many non internet savvy people believe when it comes to promoting a website. if you have been in Internet marketing for more than 10 minutes you should know that is just not true. Unfortunately, old car dogs, find internet marketing of automobiles more of an evil than an asset and their perception is correct if they are sold a bill of goods.

Website design can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars and monthly hosting fees upwards of $200 per month, but if there is no active promotion of the site to capture online shoppers it is nothing more than an expense to the dealer. Even the best SEO’ed site still needs promotion. How do you think it gets rankings?

Our job as an ISM is to drive traffic to our listings and sites, capture leads via telephone or email, schedule appointments and close sales. Creating a funnel in the process. If you are to choose the most critical area in that process it is in the traffic to your offerings. The other steps are very important but people in a position to interact with internet leads need to be the stars not the wanna bes.

There are some really good free ways to drive traffic. You should incorporate them into your daily plan.

Free ways to drive traffic and generate more leads:

• Blog Networks (albeit not free but very low cost, but free options are available)
• Social Bookmarking
• Craigslist
• Local online classifieds
• Forum Signatures
• Community sites like myspace
• Anywhere you can drop a link

I will expound on each topic in future post.