need help from auto classified owners

[BigOrange +]

I'm sure I'm in the same position as all new auto classified site owners. I have read as much as I can here about promoting my site. I have the site finished and it seems to work well.

I target the local car lots and private owners to list on my site. I don't really have much competition from other sites locally. Only one newspaper.

My problem is, I can't get anyone to list. They don't even go look at the site. Nobody wants to be the first I guess. It is hard for me to encourage people to visit my site until I have cars for them to look at. It doesn't seem prudent to pay to advertise the site locally until there are some listings to keep them coming back.

I have printed flyers and distributed to local car lots and talked to owners. When I see a for sale sign on a vehicle I put a flyer on it. My ads are free so they can't beat the price.

Should I go around and offer to take pictures and list cars for the lot owners in order to get lisitngs on my site?

Could someone with a successful auto site give me pointers on how to get started? Maybe give me a step by step system that will work?

I would really appreciate it.

[SkGold +]

Do you have idea how many people looking to sell automobiles through Internet in your city? From my point of view it is easy to convince Internet users to put the ads on your site other then offline sellers. So I would start from search engines marketing. It is not so easy and will be not happening overnight.

Do you want to tell us what is your URL and what is your location?
If I can take a look on your site and know what is your city, I may suggest you starting points for search engines optimization.

Why not to put URL in your signature.
68C is pretty popular and that will give you some points for better position in search results.

For your first ad you may start with your own car.

[bgordon +]

Ok... I am not selling cars but boats... an equally saturated market.

I started with my own boat for sale (which I just sold....) and then I approached some big marine dealers and offered to add their listings to my site for FREE. They would not have paid anything since I had no share of the market and no ads to speak of.

I sat on my MAC for three days entering listing after listing. I really want a single page add script for 68c... hello programmers? gurus?

Anyway, I added the google sitemap mod, the SEO mod and started submitting to every engine I could find. Google picked up all my new ads within 30 days and now checks back every two days.

I listed my site with as many related recip link sites I could find and posted on several news groups. I still post messages on high-traffic newsgroups. The 68c forums are spidered and even this post will get into google in a week or so.

I added maffo's news mod and post weekly to it to keep the search engines coming back. This mod rocks!

I comb the web for new boats for sale by owner and send them a friendly email to list on my site for free. I seem to get about a 40% return.

I have had much success in a short time (live in Sept 2006) and now offer two paid options on top of the free ad. These options are picked about 20% of the time now....

Bottom line is you have to advertise yourself. Be proactive. Sign your vehicle with your website on the back window (and don't drive like an asshole or park in the handicapped spots... unless you are).

Keep emailing people in your local auto trader or other such publication.

Eventually people will refer you to their friends.

Sign up for Google Adwords and set an economical campaign (like $30 / month). I get many hits daily from my adwords and know at least my name is getting out there, even on the sham parked domain sites that get spidered. Filter out your main competitors.... they don't need your help.

Use google adsense and sign up for some affilitate Pay per Click etc programs to make a few bucks in the meantime.

Start a paid referral program where you offer someone a free upgrade to a paid level ad if they refer someone to the site who signs up for an ad (even a free one). Just add a "referred by" field and check it against your user database.

Have a booth at a local tradeshow. Pass out coupons. Smile and have a PC setup like a kiosk.

Make sure your site does not look amateurish. Mimick your biggest competitors for layout, functionality and appeal. Mod your 68 however you have to. Re-skin it, refine it and pretty up the language file to add politeness and courtesy to prompts.

Lastly... don't expect it to take off overnight. You are not giving away free crack afterall. It will take time and you need to wait until you get some page rank to be found when people google you.

I hope some of this helps you out. It is a combination of my own marketing experience (albeit brick and mortar) and wisdom from members I have met on these forums. It is by no means complete but it is the main work I have done so far and I am feeling optimistic since my revenues have now paid for my 68c and a few months of hosting.

I am not trying to get rich but a few dollars helps put gas in my new boat and I do get some satisfaction from helping people sell their boats with a quality ad that actually tells a prospective buyer what they really want to know about a boat that may interest them. This all started because the ad sites I was listing my boat on all lacked the ability to showcase all that I expected to see when shopping online for an expensive toy.

My 2cents worth!

[SkGold +]

Well done B.Gordon.
These are very good points to start up.

[BigOrange +]

Thanks for your response.

OK, a little background. Where I live is not highly populated. The whole county has about 20,000 people in 5 small towns. Even though we are a rural community a lot of people here are well educated and Internet savey. A large number of our people work 20 miles away at Oak Ridge National Laboratory or at the Y-12 National Security Complex that produces atomic bombs. I believe this group will use eBay or other sites like vehix.com to shop for cars.

On the other hand we have a large number of used car lots. Almost one on every corner. The owners of these lots want to sell to local people and are not interested in selling on eBay. There are also a number of car clubs here who have cars for sale. Also there are cars for sale by individuals all up and down the roads with for sale signs on them. What I want to do is bring all these sellers and their vehicles together on my website and advertise to local people that they are there. A place "Where Buyer Meets Seller Online!" I hope to make a few bucks is by selling banner ads. I have been assured by some of the local body shops and auto parts stores that they are willing to advertise if the website takes off.

I don't believe that search engine rankings are going to be helpful in getting my target audience to my website. I believe it will be more word of mouth and name recognition that will ultimately bring people to my site. I see some good ideas in bgordons post that I will definitely try. The name in the back window will be the first one.

Please take a look at my website (see signature) and give me your opinion on the site. Your comments are welcome. The template started out as the default template. I modified it to try to make it simple and as functional as I could. The site is not live so go ahead and register and make a dummy listing if you like. Tell me what you think of the site as far as overall look and feel as well as functionality. I'm willing to make changes if needed.

Any help anyone can provide will be appreciated.

[SkGold +]

Well, I look at your website and your location. Yes, not too many people looking to sell and buy cars through Internet in your area. So probably you right and offline advertising will be the best in your case at this moment.

I don’t have too much experience with offline advertising so cant help you here. You may try ideas from bgordons post. I know that sing on the car working well. Radio advertising should be not very expensive in low populated areas like yours. Also you may try Chaslie Fundraising proposal idea. I think this idea is great, just don’t know how well is worked.

Regarding online search engines marketing it could be done something as well. I saw for example that people searching for keywords like “roane state” or “roane county”, so I would try to make your site show up on good positions for those searches.

Also what exactly towns and cities in your area you are trying to target?
Knoxville, Crossville, Rockwood, Harriman, Kingston are they included in your target?
I suggest you to use this free tool and play around to find out what people searching related to cars for your target area. These will be your target keywords and keyphrases. It should be not very hard to get good positions for your target keywords and keyphrases in your target area but it can take some time. Just use suggestions from this and other threads in site marketing. If you want to get good positions for your keywords faster, use Pay per Click advertising.

[Chaslie +]

It might be worth considering deleting the below mentioned features until you find they are definitely required. This will make your site super friendly rather than possibly 'scare off' newbies.

1. Contact Form 'warning notice'
2. Tip-off to fraud
3. Listing rules

[BigOrange +]

Thanks for all the ideas from everyone.

Also what exactly towns and cities in your area you are trying to target?
Knoxville, Crossville, Rockwood, Harriman, Kingston are they included in your target?

Target cities will be Crossville, Rockwood, Harriman, Kingston and Oliver Springs. All except Crossville are close together. Knoxville is a medium sized city that has a well established weekly classifieds paper called Bargain Mart. Bargain Mart also has an online classified site that dominates online classifieds there. I would not want to compete with them in Knoxville. They will be my toughest competition here in Roane County even though they are 50 miles away. If I could get the local people here interested I will have reached my goal.

It might be worth considering deleting the below mentioned features until you find they are definitely required. This will make your site super friendly rather than possibly 'scare off' newbies.

1. Contact Form 'warning notice'
2. Tip-off to fraud
3. Listing rules

I will make those changes. I hadn't thought about it that way. I was just trying to head off any spam before it got started. I think I will keep the warning and change its wording a little since at the current time you do not have to be a registered member to use the contact form.

Are there any other glaring things about the site that would turn off new visitors that I have not noticed? Is the site to plain looking to keep the visitor interested? Is the site easy to navigate and understand? Any input is welcome.

[SkGold +]

Originally Posted by BigOrange

Target cities will be Crossville, Rockwood, Harriman, Kingston and Oliver Springs. All except Crossville are close together.

I would start optimizing my pages and using pay-per-click for the following keyphrases: chevrolet harriman, cadillac harriman, ford harriman, rockwood camper, rockwood rv, rockwood travel trailer, oliver springs used car and so on..
Check also other cities in your target area.
The most important to know what people searching and than use these keywords.

And don�t afraid of competitors. Sometimes it is very good to have top positions for competitors keywords. But be aware of trademark issue, otherwise you can get the troubles.

[gregbatch +]

1. I would do away with the splash page. It has nothing but a graphic and kills any chance of search engine help. If you need a start page, fill it with useful text and links to the classifeds sections. Work in the keywords noted by SkGold, and more. Dazzle viewers with the opening page. Since it isn't restricted to your templates, you have a blank canvas. Make it clean, inviting, informative, and professional. At the very least, put some links at the bottom of the splash page for engines to follow.

2. Visually, I feel the eye wandering a little on the home page. Try some design changes to make the different areas of the page look more organized and easier to focus on. Kill the auto icons at the top.

3. Use flyers, referral cards, etc. to generate business:

A) These MUST use coupon codes to offer free upgrades to Basic package.

B) Use several codes so you can track which flyers/areas/methods are working best. You must be able to measure response. Kill what doesn't work, double what does.

C) Referral cards can be cheap business cards with a few lines of info and a space to write in the "screen name" of the referrer, which will be entered into a custom field. Unless the referrer has a lot full of cars to sell, upgrades mean nothing. Have a drawing for a nice prize. EXAMPLE: Since it's auto related, work a deal with a detailing shop for 12 months of detailing. They get great exposure, you get a great discount. High preceived value to the winner. Don't forget to tell what the normal retail value would be.

D) Give a "secret code" to auto related business to give to their "special customers" to upgrade to premium..

You must give in the beginning to get the traffic and exposure. Limit all offers by time or number

4. Go head-on with Bargain Mart! As of this writing they have 4869 auto related listings. Would you be happy if you could capture 10% of that market? Emphasize the fact that BM sells other goods. Horses, bicycles, and rollerblades may be forms of transportation, but you focus on CARS. Offer more for less (you do already).