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A better solution?

JoeyD,

To a certain degree, not only that still valid but it still applies to every business.

Everyone complains about Autotrader for example but they are the result of where the business took them and not so much where they wanted to be. They had a site, grew the biz, spent money on advertisement, made an investment, dealers wanted more results, asked for more money, competition for leads got expensive, etc. The cycle happens and you can't stop it.

I've been working with the Craigslist system for years now and it gave me a tremendous insight about why Autotrader did and does things the way they do.

Dealers behave a certain way: they will ask for more leads and less money, they will cancel just because one girl showed up with another site and they want to "try something else", they will say they get leads but they don't sell cars, etc. The market will not go to your site unless you advertise, SEO alone can't sustain any volume of traffic. The website owner needs to spend money to advertise and get more results, improve features that every dealer known to man will tell you you need.

So the cycle starts...
 
...We can show that we have 500 local car shoppers on our site daily, that our bounce rate is in the teens, that they stay on our site longer and view more listings than they do on the leading sites, that 60% of our visitors come back...etc.

500 shoppers daily is 15,000 p/month. That's a number I'd hide.. unless... you say the traffic is local, how local? Thats a great number if you zeroed on a tight geo.