Tools to Post inventory to WordPress (or similar)

[joe.pistell]

If you're looking to build it and run it in house, or if you're a vendor tossing it together... beware! There is science and strategy needed to make this have high ROI. A very timely and authoritative article for SEO grunts like me: 3 Steps for Optimizing Content for Long Tail Keywords | SEO Book.com

Why do I never have enough time to do it right, but I always find time to do it over?

 

[Brian Pasch]

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.

 

[cherubini]

I like the concept but is there a simple way for the individual salesperson to do it a-la DealerMouth? Maybe at a dealership that won't pay. Give the power to the sales staff by have a way they can do it themselves. Wishful thinking, I know.

i.e. word press blog that can pull inventory from a csv from the dealership. Probably a huge task with all the different dms...

 

[Mitch Gallant]

I've been digging for this type of plugin as well. There was a little interest from GOSO to put something together and judging from the inventory solutions they have for Facebook, they would look and perform well. From what I've looked into this is the most exciting prospect I'm holiding out for.

I also had a chat with Paul Rushing, from Dealer Bytes. He came recommended from TK Carsites. The product looked ok and the cost was high but not unreasonable... might be another loophole to explore, I just don't think it's for us on our budget at this time. I know aesthetics are trumped by functionality and result but I also found his wordpress microsites to be ugly.

 

[Mitch Gallant]

Interested to know if anyone else has found anything for WP?

I called to get more info from PCG early yesterday and still haven't heard back. They must be busy.

It would be nice if someone like homenet was able to develop something, I always find their prices very reasonable.

 

[DrewAment]

Still working out a few bugs....but here is a Drupal plug-in example. I could port it to WordPress if needed. I also have the script written to parse DealerSpecialties feeds (basically a CSV file) into database, could port to other feeds as well.

| Sands Chevrolet

Thoughts/Ideas welcome.

 

[Jeff Kershner]

Drew, I like what you have there in Drupal.

The one company I believe that has been working on this for some time now is Automotive retail websites, custom designed and hosted for car dealerships by DealerTrend : DealerTrend

or their direct site Automotive WordPress Websites: Experience Unlimited Possibilities

I personally don't know much about them but I've heard some buzz around them

 

[mattwatson81]

Instead of setting up a word press blog, why not just get a second website? I think most website providers can do tons of things word press can't do and have a lot more control of it. They can provide mini-sites on their platforms.

What is the big difference?

People do it because word press is almost free?

 

[DrewAment]

Drew, I like what you have there in Drupal.

Thanks, nice thing is that I have written the code to work in a FaceBook page (tab) and a few other areas of the web I see potential.

Really all about experimenting and TRACKING. "Build it and they will come" seems to be an industry wide problem. We can talk about doing cool stuff all day long - but D.I.S.C and R.O.I. are where it is at.

 

[MikeFitzpatrick]

Just saw your thread on integrating inventory into WordPress. Thank you Jeff for mentioning us (DealerTrend). We have in fact been working on WordPress inventory integration for about 2 1/2 years now with a very heavy focus for the last 14 months. Our main focus with our inventory module has been for longtail search as discussed in the article on SEObook.com and we have taken extra time to make that same functionality work within WordPress. After a few bumps in the road along the way we have released a 1.0 version that allows dealers to take full control of their micro-sites or main website. Here are a couple of links to production WordPress websites with integrated inventory pages and dynamic SEO. The first one is a micro-site that is both a hub to social sites and and inventory site, the second is a main dealership website. I have several other examples but don't want to get too spammy with links .

Used Cars Indiana
Miller Toyota LA

I must say the more that WordPress evolves and the more we learn on how to utilize it's potential the more excited I get. Our inventory can be displayed in Blogger and other platforms as well, but WordPress is by far the one that has the most potential.