awesome awesome awesome

Wow. That is hilarious!!!

Simply Brilliant!

That was great!! So true! Just this morning I got a "friendvite" from a girl from my sorority I barely remember - what do you do? ?

Manny - my opinion hasn't changed much.  I even gave microsites a solid try with a strategy that involved over 40 URL's and it was too much work for too little return.  I had much better results putting my time and energy into my own website.

As Jeff mentioned, now OEMs are dictating what you can and can't use inside domains which limit microsite strategies.  

Alex this was posted in 2008, please tell me your thoughts about micro sites now that were in 2011. Do you still feel the same way about them?

Micro-Sites absolutely work, but not to belabor the great points already made, it's all about conversions. 1 micro-site or 20 micro-sites don't matter much if you can't correlate sales back to each one (or whatever your metric is).

With regard to the expense of building a micro-website Wordpress is a great platform. You can get hosting for $10 per month to test.

With regard to auto dealers having to pay through the nose for services, the auto industry has painted itself into a corner.

Here's my take: Back in 2000-2001 I worked for a pre-dot-com crash company pioneering VoIP and click talk technology. Our test bed were auto dealers across the country. We even participated in the nation-wide roll out for MBUSA.com

We tried to offer the service to dealers at just $25 per month to pilot test with us. Most dealers balked at the service as the price was too low. Once we came out of testing and the price went to $150 for the low end package dealers signed up left and right.

Most GM's won't give a company the time of day if a service appears to be cheap. On the other hand, with effectiveness of online advertising I don't understand why dealers will pay autotrader.com or some other company $6,000+ per month to market their inventory.

In a test I conducted with a local micro-site, we outperformed traffic from autotrader with just organic SEO alone.

Quote: Ryan Lucia

"Leads from your site are the best or close to it. Response time is critical. Most people submit a lead to more than 2 places before visiting a store."

Ryan is dead-on. As a company that generates leads for auto dealers nation-wide micro-sites have reduced lead costs for some of our test dealers by 25-30%. Response time to leads will be a critical factor in 2009. We have seen in some cases where the same individual hits 5 of our sites and submits the same lead within minutes. (no loyalty until you earn it)

Great news! Add chat to your micro site and watch it blow up. Yep, you have confusion, unwillingness to give info, personal uncertainty. All of those are the exact reason to add chat to your dealership websites. Try it, trust me you will love it. A lot of times the reason you don't see results are because people don't like giving info (filling out forms) to capture what they are looking for. I have seen great success on our micro sites from live chat. We are a new micro site company that has hit the scene and we see huge results. Toyota of Orlando get over 1100 leads a month from chat. They pay less than $200 a month. Talking about ROI. Add 20 micro sites and chat to all of them you can do some major damage. I have over 10 years in the automotive industry and micro sites and chat are the best advantages you can have. Leads from your site are the best or close to it. Response time is critical. Most people submit a lead to more than 2 places before visiting a store. Site back and imagine having someone land on your micro site and start chatting with you. How does it give you an advantage? How does it now? So does it take away from our standard leads from email and phone? NOPE! 1% change in both. Just increase your leads by 25% to 400%.

This will make you different, easy to work with, and you get that instant gratification you always want from your clients. At the end of the conversation you will know where you stand.

Joe,

Funny that you mention CMS sites. I am actually in the process to create my own platform based on an open source CMS. The great potential here would be to create a platform that allows me to create content seperate from lead creation ( e.g. create content that you can combine with a form that makes sense for that content) Now we have to create a content page and then link it to a standard form page. This means you lose visitors with the extra click. I want to create a platform that allows a dealer to place different pieces of content on one page. Give me about 3 months and I will be done. Have the layout and basic design done, just need to put all the pieces together (new inventory feed, used inventory feed, flexible forms, etc)

These vendors get to set in telling dealers how it should be done eventhough they all used to work at a dealer themselves and most have no clue.

Regarding the pop up and pop under. Call dealeron (dot) com and tell them that you want to try this tool. It definately increased my conversion ratio ( I had dealeron place this tool for free on my dealerskins site which gave me an increase of 1-2% conversion, which equated to about 50-100 leads)

With dealerskins I converted about 5-6%, now with dealeron site I am converting 9-12% and with dealerskins it included service appointments and with dealeron it does not, so the difference is even bigger.

I will keep working on this open and flexible platform for dealers so you can change themes with the click of a button, add content with the click of a button, seo friendly, etc...

Oscar,
One more thing.

How do those pop-under and over coupons work for you? I havent tried it and I'll try anything as long as it sells cars.

Joe

Oscar writes:

---I would prefer to see a vendor that allows me to build my own marketing messages on my website, and allows me to add a form to this page with the fields I want, and allows me to optimize this page based on what my marketing message is. That is basically what you want with a microsite, but our website providers do not allow us to do with our own website.---

Ahhh... music to my ears. We speak the same language! This is one of my pet rants. It's July dammit, why can't I have a July sales theme? Why does my site look the same when we're running a huge campaign and when we're not?

What you (and I want) is a CMS site (Content Management System). It has been done to near perfection by Alex at CheckeredFlag.com. For us mere mortals Jeff K has recommended Joomla.com that is open source. Get yourself a personal Joomla hack and your off to the races.

I am totally rebuilding UsedCarKing.com from the ground up. It is a SEO engineered CMS, built in CSS so I can change the look and feel without an act of congress to get it done.

Stay tuned...
Joe

I have to agree with Alex' initial posting. I have build my own microsites both branded and non branded to see what kind of success they would give me. In addition, we use a dealer ad association with a website. It might be easy to rank well for certain keywords, but conversion is way lower then the 9-12% I get on my main website.

I just do not see the value in them other then creating very focused messages to your potential customers. That is exactly where the problem is. All of the website providers for car dealers are very inflexible and do not allow you to create mini advertising campaigns on your own site.

I would prefer to see a vendor that allows me to build my own marketing messages on my website, and allows me to add a form to this page with the fields I want, and allows me to optimize this page based on what my marketing message is. That is basically what you want with a microsite, but our website providers do not allow us to do with our own website.

Content is King and putting the content on multiple sites instead of one does not help you. Instead of creating multiple micro sites, I see more value in creating one non branded website next to your own dealer site. This way, you can go after traffic that you are not getting now.

Regarding price. In order for a microsite to successfully index organically in the search engines, you need at least 3-6 months, thus you are paying $1000 plus $200 per month. So let's say $2,000 to get started and then you have to maintain your keywords, content and keep track of your results. I created the sites myself with a cost of about $90 per year and I still did not see the value. It is too much work. As for the person that commented about getting 5,000+ leads a month from microsites (don't believe it). Please show me what you did and I will give you a big fat check!!!

Joe,

First, I do not claim that Ralphs success is due to us, why would I? I merely claim that Ralph is not the only reason OUR efforts are successful. Like I said, RP asked for a particular site, and it was up to us to design, build, optimize and market the site organically. At the time, RP was one man asking us to build a web site for something and make it successful. It takes a certain skill to rank your site naturally/organically on the first page of Google, especially for multiple brands and multiple markets.

It is always good to hear that a dealer is knowledgeable in SEO. Do you remember when you contacted us for Micro Sites last year in May of 2007? At the time you were working at a dealership. We spoke several times about SEO back then. I am the type of company that remebers its clients or potential clients, and is ALWAYS just an email or phone call away. We provide a valuable solution for dealers at a very affordable cost.

Here are some examples.

Example of a Non Dealer Micro Site 2 pages
One such non-dealer micro site we built is in the mortgage industry. We built a 2 page micro site and in 3 months it has received about 10 leads. It ranks on the first page of Google with no other advertising, not even PPC.

For Example: Keyword M&I Bank Construction Loan
Page #1 - Position #1
For Example: Keyword M&I Financing
Page #1 - Position #3
For Example: Keyword Scottsdale Lot Loans
Page #1 - Position #1
And so on...

Micro Sites work so well for dealers in particular because when a potential customer is researching a new vehicle, they usually type in the following combinations of keywords:

"year, model" or "year, make, model" or "year, model, location".

Take the 2007 Tahoe site we built a couple of years ago. Our statistics show that customers are finding the site by Googling the following terms:

2007 Tahoe: position #3
2008 Chevy Tahoe: position #10
New Tahoe: position #2
2008 Tahoe, Phoenix: position #1
and so on...

McCombs in San Antonio built several micro sites with us, and one of them, RedSaysYes[dot]com has high organic raking for the following:
bankruptcy dealers: position #1
bankruptcy dealerships: position #1

To answer what you claim is my tactical error:
We are just one dealer solution provider in a sea of many many choices dealers have. RP now working at one of the biggest companies in this industry does good for what we provide, but does nothing for me directly. RP promotes what ADP/BZ does not what we do. If RP promotes one of our micro sites, his next sentence is, "We (ADP) or I(RP) can do that". I really don't think it is in RP's best interest to promote another companies wares when he is paid by ADP to promote that same service. Other dealer web site providers have approached us to partner with them in the micro site arena and we have approached others too. ADP is not the only solution provider. Before RP joined ADP, ADP refused to even consider Micro Sites. If any bridges were burned, it was by RP claiming those sites as his own and as a BZ site by ONLY changing the copyright notice and then promoting them to dealers as an ADP/BZ solution. It would be like me taking your site and using every word and image and putting it under a new domain name and copyrighting it as my own. No dealer would want the exact same site being used by a competitor, oh wait, BZ does do that already.

Bottom line Joe, we have been in the web development industry since 1995, and for Dealers, we specialize in building micro sites and provide online marketing via SEO & SEM.

David

Mr Jackson,
When I read your post, it was quite clear that you felt that Ralph Paglia’s success is due to you. I happen to think it’s the other way around.

I am a site builder, webmaster, site project manager, marketing director and I am SEO literate. I see all the parts in the puzzle. I will use this analytical method to highlight my opinions.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how important is Internet SEO to this vertical?
>>>answer: 10 >answer: 3, just 2 years ago it was a 1 >answer 1>answer 11>answer 2

to Alex,

Thank you for the followup post and apology. I appreciate it.

Then I misread your comment David. I apologize. I keep up with Dealer Refresh daily and when there are days (almost a month in this case) between comments it is hard to recollect what exactly has been said before.

URL's are definitely allowed and encouraged - I wish TypaPad was able to convert them into hyperlinks though.

To Joe...
What do you disagree with? I gave information do dealers on how to run a PPC campaign. I gave testimony that Micro Sites do work. I responded to a few comments asking for feedback from a dealer, I believe I even gave you props for reaching out to other areas of your dealership, and I responded to Ralph's claim of owning the design of OUR micro sites as his own. Ralph merely asked us to design those sites while at Courtesy Chevrolet. He is now at a competitor ADP or BZResults and using our designs to sell micro sites. Would you want a competitor to copy your exact web site and use it to compete against you? They are exact. I'm sure you wouldn't.

To Alex...
Did you read Ralph Paglia's posts? He riddles his comment with URL's claiming he designed them and NO ONE says a thing. Not even you had a comment for Ralph. I merely responded to his claim of owning those example sites. He never paid us for those, Courtesy Chevrolet did. He never came up with the design layout, we did. Ralph merely asked us to design and build a site and we did.

I know this forum is not for link posting, but when someone directly takes code, copies it and even copyrights it as their own (BZResults/Ralph Paglia), they should be outed. Dealers I have spoken with that know about this situation even question what he did. I don't think anyone can agree with what Ralph is doing.

David

You may not agree with him Joe, but he sure does know how to stick an advertisement into a comment on Dealer Refresh. That's the best under-the-radar solicitation I've seen yet! Nicely done David - it is so good, I think we should leave it up.

I'm not saying I agree with anything you're saying, I'm simply stating that was one hell of a job of sliding an ad message in. Now you get to reap the SEO benefits, so please send some appreciation back to Dealer Refresh.

woa... remind me to not hire Mr Jackson to execute any idea that I have (or would like to share). Talk about hubris! Yuk!

Joe

It is always interesting to see how one subject can have so many different opinions on what works and why to do them. Bottom line is they work. All you have to ask yourself is, is it worth me to do them?

I'm glad to see that Micro Sites have caught on so well and that the future is still so hot. Most dealers are finally seeing the huge benefits to using them. When we started designing & building Micro Sites for Courtesy Chevrolet with Ralph Paglia 2.5 years ago, we saw an immediate success rate with leads. Since then their Micro Sites, 26 in all, have generated over 14,000 leads, all at NO COST PER LEAD.

We designed many different types of Micro Sites for Courtesy. We designed the 2008 Chevy Malibu, 2008 Chevy Camaro (I know it's not an 08 but more on this later), we designed a Phx Finance site, special financing sites like bankruptcy, Ok Credit, Price Quote, Bad Credit, Good Credit, Got Gas, Free GM Oil Change, other specific model sites and even generic non branded Chevy sites. We have a Red Carpet and Red Tag Event Micro Site. Oh, and there is even a Chevy Pride site.

Most of these Micro Sites had PPC campaigns driving traffic to them. BTW, if you are going to advertise a specific message on GOOGLE via PPC, then you better deliver a page that supports your ad. If you are going to build a landing page or micro site, they both better deliver the message and what you promised the customer when they clicked on your link. Don't just throw up an ad that says 2008 Chevy Malibu, $200 discount when you click, and all they get is your main dealership homepage. I'll assume you all know the difference between a landing page and a micro site.

So back to the 2008 Chevy Camaro. I know this is not the year it will be released, but my theory is why change something that is already working so well. If you GOOGLE 2008 Chevy Camaro, the micro site will be the #1 position, beating out Chevrolet. This week alone, the site has received 41 leads. Hard to change something that still works so well. This site has generated over 11,000 leads on its own. There has been no PPC driving traffic to the site, it is all organic ranking.

Dealers should branch out and develop eye pleasing organic ranking micro sites to gain widespread exposure. 1 Dealership web site may be enough, or it may not be. Third party vendors provide leads but at what cost per lead? And you all know your not the only dealer to get that lead. Micro Sites are in-house leads and only yours.

One hot topic for customers right now is the gas prices and hybrid vehicles. Check out this page and see for yourself the number of Daily Hybrid Searches going on. This was an email campaign we sent out, so please excuse the marketing messages.


To Wayne...
You asked, if a Micro Site can provide good ROI, then do it. What is your idea of good ROI? 1 lead can pay for the cost of a Micro Site, so is that good? Is there a higher number? 10, 100? What does a dealer consider good ROI? Are you relying on Organic Ranking, or will you combine PPC? Do different dealers have diferent ideas on a good ROI? This would help me understand your expectations of a Micro Site.

To Tim...
Some dealers purchase their competitors name and redirect traffic, while I don't think this is a good idea, buying URL's for areas you are targeting is. The more specific you can be the better. I like the examples you gave.

To Joe...
Great idea. And it works. Phoenix Chevy did a Tucson Micro Site and Tucson is about a 3 hour drive. They received about 25 leads from the Micro Site.

To Ralph...
I like how you have listed these sites as YOUR Micro Site examples. I urge all dealers to take 5 minutes and look at how EXACT these "examples" are to the sites my company designed and built for Courtesy Chevrolet in Phoenix. While I respect Ralph in his achievements, and his self promotion, Ralph does not own any right to the following "examples". Ralph was involved, but only in asking Fresh Start to build a micro site based on a topic for Courtesy Chevrolet who DID pay for them.

"Paglia Example" www.Chevy-Malibu.com - Fresh Start Site www.2008ChevyMalibu.com
Please note the built by at the bottom of the pages.

"Paglia Example" www.tahoe-Chevy.com - Fresh Start Site www.2007Tahoe.com
Please note the built by at the bottom of the pages.

"Paglia Example" www.ChevyPriceQuote.com - Fresh Start Site www.chevypricequotes.com
Please note the built by at the bottom of the pages.

"Paglia Example" www.ChevyGas.com - Fresh Start Site www.yougotgas.com
Please note the built by at the bottom of the pages.

While imitation is the best form of flattery, I think this goes beyond that and is called, stealing code, using someone else’s design to get ahead, and Copyright infringement seeing how we post Copyright notices on all Micro Sites.

To all the dealers thinking about Micro Sites. Just Google "dealer micro sites", or "Micro Sites" and you'll see what all the buzz is about on Micro Sites. We’ll be the first organic listing. Oh and yes, this is even considered a Micro Site.

David Jackson
President/CEO
Fresh Start Studio, LLC.
www.FreshMicroSites.com

Chip I have some price comparison sites... targeting competitors name and niche... works out nicely...

First GM needs to build a 30MPG car, then they can worry about buying the URL! jk. I'd buy www.over75mpg.com, setup a forum and let people talk about how they've modified their hybrids to achieve this goal, and have it all sponsored by "Dealer X".

--

Long tail SEO traffic, while potentially noisy, is extremely important for small, new, websites (micro sites). It's the only type of SE traffic you can go after in the beginning, unless you're lucky enough to have an authority site pointing to you. Plus the more narrow that query is, the better chance of getting some one in-market.

Additionally, SEO success breeds SEO success, so one day you're ranking well for "Used 2007 BMW 535xi, Boston, MA" and the next quarter you're now ranking for "2008 BMW 535xi, Boston, MA" and then in another quarter you're ranking for "BMW 535xi, Boston, MA" and then "BMW, Boston, MA" until you reach something like "Massachusetts BMW Dealers" and you've gone from a very long tail search, to "stealing" traffic away from your competitors in droves. The important thing is to have a clear-cut plan of what your ultimate goal is and prepare your campaign around it. Ideally you want to be ranking for specific vehicles, regardless of the manufacture year, that you can keep building on year after year.

--

While I can use only the tools provided to me, I suspect that search engine traffic for region, specific cars pales in comparison to region, specific dealer queries. By now, I think most shoppers are going straight to autotrader, cars, ebay, craigslist... when they know what car they want and they'll have used non-region specific queries to figure out what that car is. And no micro site is going to be able to compete with the results for "2008 Honda Accord, Toyota Camry, Ford Explorer...". So, I think long tail is very important for the success of a micro site.

Is anyone doing conquest micro sites? Building micro sites to rank high for your competitor's name?

Chip-

Entertaining Offers:

www.Over30mpg.com
(GM should own this URL)
I bought the URL the day oil broke over $40 a bbl. The current site is just a simple template and has no real value. The value lies in the URL itself.

Send contact info to joepistell-at-gmail.com, or to Jeff K here at DR, he'll get it to me.

thnx,
joe

Alex,
I have plans, big plans, but, nothing as ambitious as yours!

Plus, I'd like our readers to consider their market size.
If you're within a one hour drive of a very large maket (or in one),
excellent ROI from SEO is far more easy to obtain. SEO construction costs (and level of difficulty) are the same in Philly or in Peoria.

Joe