Joe
You are correct that the core costs for great microsites will be content creation. We have created a tool car
CarPort App which will allow dealers to add live inventory to posts on Blogger, NING, Vox, Squidoo, WordPress, TypePad, etc. The tool will change the way people think about these free platforms and the content articles you can create on them.
If I write an article on the 2010 Nissan Altima today and optimize the content for the Boston market, it becomes a tool for new car sales. A year from now, when the 2010 model becomes a "used" car, the articles are still valid for marketing. The cool concept is that this blog post is
timeless because its linked to live, changing inventory. When someone read the article 6, 12, 18 months or two years from now the page will have current, in stock inventory.
Here are some examples to see it in action:
WordPress example: 2010 Nissan Altima Sale Boston/
Blogger Example: CarPort App on Blogger
Vox Example: CarPort App on Vox - Vox
NING Example:
Used Cars - CarPort App
Sites like Vox and NING have proven effective in getting to national Google Page one search results. Search for the term "Automotive SEO" and you will see a VOX site on GPO. So, these free publishing tools with CarPort can create new ways to establish a private inventory publishing network.
The second benefit of CarPort App is that it place dealer's car inventory in our new national marketing network. This is a series of regional portals and a national portal to advertise the cars. We started building the network a year ago and will have over 300 regional sites live by DD8.
So the CarPort App gives dealers unlimited blog publishing of their inventory plus their cars are published on our regional and national advertising network.
The national network is new so we'll have some stats to show at the 8th Digital Dealer conference in Orlando on April 20-22nd. Here is an example of the network portal that we create for a dealer using CarPort App:
Hyundai Cars For Sale Chicago IL | Used Car Dealer Chicago IL
The portals will be fine tuned and ready for our Mid March national launch. Also, their cars are also included in
New Cars for Sale | Used Cars for Sale | Free Price Quotes which is in BETA and will go live in March.