Friday, January 21, 2005
An Open Offer to All Vancouver Island Auto Dealerships
On our website we have links to the websites of over 40 Vancouver Island dealerships. Our website provides an opportunity for those shopping for used vehicles to have a look at what's available without leaving the comfort of their homes.
This saves them time and money from having to travel up and down the Island checking car lots. It's much easier to locate interesting vehicles through some type of advertising medium and then visit the car lots that have used vehicles that interest them.
Our website has recently incorportated new technology which takes marketing on the web to new heights. We all know what's happened with email and most people now totally ignore what has been sent to their inboxes.
We know from past research that car dealerships spend a tremendous amount of money for advertising. It's very important to the health of their businesses. But if your dealership is spending any money for your online advertising, you are spending too much. There is no need to charge for online advertising.
I can see it in print or television, but online it's a whole different story. Most dealerships and many small businesses now have websites, but we know from talking to them most aren't happy with the results from these websites. The problem lies with how most web developers approach their web design.
They try to bring an offline advertising mentality to the web. The strategies for having a successful website have nothing to do with the strategies involved in marketing offline.
Most web developers are really graphic designers or artists and most don't have a clue about marketing websites. They usually just deliver a finished website to a customer, in most cases for thousands of dollars, and then walk away to the next sucker.
These websites sure do look pretty. But if you check your log files, who is seeing them? Maybe you'll drive some traffic to your site through your offline advertising, but what have you really succeeded in doing? The customer has only found your website through a relationship you've previously developed. All you really have is a very, very expensive brochure about your business. And believe me NO ONE CARES. All they're really interested in, is finding out if you have the car they want.
The real reason for a website should be to draw people who have never heard of you or your website before. You can only do this with a website that works. To be honest, not one of the Vancouver Island dealership sites listed here works properly. Your money is totally wasted.
Then, many of you turn to others to list your vehicles on other sites which have too wide of a focus. Do you really need to have your vehicles shown to someone in Waterloo? Not really. In some cases with specialty vehicles you may need to reach a wider audience, but for most Vancouver Island dealerships, you only need to reach those locally.
But a website still has to be designed to draw locally. In most cases the functionality of drawing relevant traffic is totally left out of your website. But now VanIsle Trader.com is coming to your rescue.
Over the past 3 years with your passive help, we have been able to get our website listed with all the major search engines. We have established ourselves as a website that offers listings of used vehicles for all of Vancouver Island.
We have been waiting for the right opportunity to take it to the next level. With recent developments in new technology, we now have the means to distribute information like never before. And the beauty of it is, it won't cost you one penny.
Over the coming days I'll be setting up new feeds for all of the dealerships listed on this site. We have the first one set up here for Pacific Mazda of Victoria. They got the first one because they are at the top of the list.
The rest will be will added as we get them set up. We will be sending one email to each dealership informing them of this opportunity. It's up to you to let us know if it's something you want to do. We have 15 prime spots available. Five each for used cars, used trucks and used RVs.
First ones onboard get these spots. Then it will be up to you to keep them. The only way to keep them is to send good ad copy at a nice, steady, even pace. Once things are rolling, those spots will be filled by those who cooperate the best. Others will be relegated to the dealers page with everyone else.
If you have a dealership and it's not listed here, that's no problem. Just give us a shout and we'll set you up. We want to make this as easy on ourselves as we can. So a shotgun announcement with a race to sign up is the way we'll do it. We don't mind taking the easy route. It's always worked for us in the past.
The only requirement to getting your own page with your own feed is to be able to list a minimum of 10 used vehicles per month. You can list more but we want a minimum of ten per month for your own page.
If you move less than 10 vehicles per month, then just submit them through the link on the sellers page.
Click here to see more about how this will all work...
This saves them time and money from having to travel up and down the Island checking car lots. It's much easier to locate interesting vehicles through some type of advertising medium and then visit the car lots that have used vehicles that interest them.
Our website has recently incorportated new technology which takes marketing on the web to new heights. We all know what's happened with email and most people now totally ignore what has been sent to their inboxes.
An Affordable Means of Advertising
We know from past research that car dealerships spend a tremendous amount of money for advertising. It's very important to the health of their businesses. But if your dealership is spending any money for your online advertising, you are spending too much. There is no need to charge for online advertising.
I can see it in print or television, but online it's a whole different story. Most dealerships and many small businesses now have websites, but we know from talking to them most aren't happy with the results from these websites. The problem lies with how most web developers approach their web design.
They try to bring an offline advertising mentality to the web. The strategies for having a successful website have nothing to do with the strategies involved in marketing offline.
Most web developers are really graphic designers or artists and most don't have a clue about marketing websites. They usually just deliver a finished website to a customer, in most cases for thousands of dollars, and then walk away to the next sucker.
These websites sure do look pretty. But if you check your log files, who is seeing them? Maybe you'll drive some traffic to your site through your offline advertising, but what have you really succeeded in doing? The customer has only found your website through a relationship you've previously developed. All you really have is a very, very expensive brochure about your business. And believe me NO ONE CARES. All they're really interested in, is finding out if you have the car they want.
Attract New Customers
The real reason for a website should be to draw people who have never heard of you or your website before. You can only do this with a website that works. To be honest, not one of the Vancouver Island dealership sites listed here works properly. Your money is totally wasted.
Then, many of you turn to others to list your vehicles on other sites which have too wide of a focus. Do you really need to have your vehicles shown to someone in Waterloo? Not really. In some cases with specialty vehicles you may need to reach a wider audience, but for most Vancouver Island dealerships, you only need to reach those locally.
But a website still has to be designed to draw locally. In most cases the functionality of drawing relevant traffic is totally left out of your website. But now VanIsle Trader.com is coming to your rescue.
Over the past 3 years with your passive help, we have been able to get our website listed with all the major search engines. We have established ourselves as a website that offers listings of used vehicles for all of Vancouver Island.
New Technology Makes This All Possible
We have been waiting for the right opportunity to take it to the next level. With recent developments in new technology, we now have the means to distribute information like never before. And the beauty of it is, it won't cost you one penny.
Over the coming days I'll be setting up new feeds for all of the dealerships listed on this site. We have the first one set up here for Pacific Mazda of Victoria. They got the first one because they are at the top of the list.
The rest will be will added as we get them set up. We will be sending one email to each dealership informing them of this opportunity. It's up to you to let us know if it's something you want to do. We have 15 prime spots available. Five each for used cars, used trucks and used RVs.
First ones onboard get these spots. Then it will be up to you to keep them. The only way to keep them is to send good ad copy at a nice, steady, even pace. Once things are rolling, those spots will be filled by those who cooperate the best. Others will be relegated to the dealers page with everyone else.
Not Listed Here? Not a Problem.
If you have a dealership and it's not listed here, that's no problem. Just give us a shout and we'll set you up. We want to make this as easy on ourselves as we can. So a shotgun announcement with a race to sign up is the way we'll do it. We don't mind taking the easy route. It's always worked for us in the past.
The only requirement to getting your own page with your own feed is to be able to list a minimum of 10 used vehicles per month. You can list more but we want a minimum of ten per month for your own page.
If you move less than 10 vehicles per month, then just submit them through the link on the sellers page.
Click here to see more about how this will all work...
Thursday, January 20, 2005
How To Use VanIsle Trader For Buying or Selling Your Used Vehicles...
You can browse our listings or use the Google search bar at the top of the home page. Set it to search our own listings or you can search the web.
If you see a vehicle you like, contact the owner through whatever means they provide. If they want you to provide a phone number or email address, you can leave it by clicking on the comment link below each posting. We don't recommend using a main email address. We recommend opening a My Yahoo account. See below for more information...
If you see a car that you think your Mom or little sister might like you can email the ad to them by clicking on the email icon at the bottom of each posting or ad.
Don't post any links to other websites or any vulgar or obscene material. I get notified of every comment or posting immediately. I'll remove anything I don't like and will record and report your IP address. If you have pictures of your vehicle on your own webspace, you can provide a link when submitting your ad. Place it in the 'Additional Information' section. If it goes somewhere other than to pictures of the used vehicle, I'll delete the ad.
You can submit any type of vehicle for sale as long as it's used. Motorcycles, ATV's, trailers of any type, boats, on to motorhomes will all be listed as RV's for now. I will set up other listings as I need them.
For now, you can submit for free as long as you are aware that all ads will be submitted at my own disgression. If you make me mad I won't list you.
It's up to you to make sure that your ad is correct. Read it over before you submit, because I will only give it a quick glance to make sure that your IP and phone numbers jive.
You can check our privacy page to see how we collect data and what we do with it.
When you fill out the form to place your ad, you'll be asked to provide some information about yourself and your used vehicle. You can give out as much or as little information as you choose.
I recommend providing as much information about the car as you can. Webspace is so cheap, you could provide a bookful of information and it won't make a difference to how much space we use. It does make a difference to the readability of the page though, so keep it with in reason. I'll notice abuses and cut them off.
This is a stickier problem and why this website hasn't been promoted harder in the past. I don't think I have to tell anyone about email. Believe me; trying to market anything on the web opens you up to an onslaught. And believe me I've had enough.
In the past when we've tried placing ads, people found they were being contacted by some pretty seedy characters. Most often by email, but then that was really all we had.
With this system, you don't really have to provide any personal information at all. Just ask anyone interested in the vehicle to leave a comment on your ad letting you know how to contact them. Then just check back every few days to see if anyone has visited and left you a note.
If you don't mind leaving a phone number, which I think is perfectly safe, go ahead. It's up to you how much or how little information about yourself you offer.
If you give an email address I suggest you use My Yahoo.com. You can open an account just for this ad or for any online email communication. That way if SPAM gets too bad, just delete the account. There really is no way of getting away from it if you put an email address on the web. So be careful about which email addy you use. Don't use a good one.
VanIsle Trader.com owns the website and the content contained on it. Google owns the system that manages it all. We both earn money from advertising on the website.
A seller finds our site and decides to list a used vehicle. He clicks on the sellers link and finds a link to the submission form. After checking a few boxes and providing some information about the used vehicle and how to contact each other, an email is sent to me.
I look at it when I have time. In most cases it will be very soon. Sometimes within minutes. Sometimes it might be days. I give it a very quick scan and then upload it. It goes live within seconds.
Then our new technology, which some of you may have heard about, kicks in. It's called XML or RSS. What it does is sends out each posting to hundreds of news services. More and more of these news services are springing up all the time.
Once they receive this notice then they resend it to all the search engines. Because the search engines trust these news services so highly, they know that the content is timely and very valuable. This infomation begins to show on the search engines rapidly.
Now those of you looking around this website right now might say, well there's nothing here. But just wait. I just started setting this up this morning. Oh, the website has been here for a few years, but just sitting not taking listings. We just started taking them again today.
If you got a vehicle for sale, you've got nothing to lose. It's free...I told how to list without providing any information. Do it as long as it's free. If it starts to get too busy with junk, I'll have to start charging or excluding.
Oh, one more thing, when adding more information try to use accurate spelling and proper names of items or accessories. People search on these things and if your ad mentions them correctly and spelled properly, yours will be picked up. Mention everything, you never know what option someone is looking for.
You can use the old bookmark method or you can save us in your favorites menu. But that's the old fashioned way. You don't want to be doing that.
We're not going to be emailing nothing or anything to anybody. Maybe if I'm feeling extra generous, I might email you about your ad if I see something that could be fixed up.
The cool way to see our ads is to subscribe to our news feeds. You will see little icons with the letters XML in them. Those are our newsfeeds. We have 4 total. We have this one on the home page. It will generally discuss the website, anything I hear up and down the Island and maybe just about anything. We'll have to see about that...
And right now we have 3 other feeds as well. One for used cars, used trucks and one for used recreational vehicles. Others may be added if warranted.
I wrote about how to set up a newsreader account with Yahoo which works really great. I've got two different readers I use and I'm not even going to talk about the other one.
I really like Yahoo...
Anyway the article is on another one of my websites. Another page will open. If you have pop-up blockers, you may have to hold down your control key while you click.
RSS, XML, Yahoo...oh, my...
Good nite, it's been a looooooooooong day...
If you see a vehicle you like, contact the owner through whatever means they provide. If they want you to provide a phone number or email address, you can leave it by clicking on the comment link below each posting. We don't recommend using a main email address. We recommend opening a My Yahoo account. See below for more information...
If you see a car that you think your Mom or little sister might like you can email the ad to them by clicking on the email icon at the bottom of each posting or ad.
Don't post any links to other websites or any vulgar or obscene material. I get notified of every comment or posting immediately. I'll remove anything I don't like and will record and report your IP address. If you have pictures of your vehicle on your own webspace, you can provide a link when submitting your ad. Place it in the 'Additional Information' section. If it goes somewhere other than to pictures of the used vehicle, I'll delete the ad.
You can submit any type of vehicle for sale as long as it's used. Motorcycles, ATV's, trailers of any type, boats, on to motorhomes will all be listed as RV's for now. I will set up other listings as I need them.
For now, you can submit for free as long as you are aware that all ads will be submitted at my own disgression. If you make me mad I won't list you.
It's up to you to make sure that your ad is correct. Read it over before you submit, because I will only give it a quick glance to make sure that your IP and phone numbers jive.
You can check our privacy page to see how we collect data and what we do with it.
When you fill out the form to place your ad, you'll be asked to provide some information about yourself and your used vehicle. You can give out as much or as little information as you choose.
I recommend providing as much information about the car as you can. Webspace is so cheap, you could provide a bookful of information and it won't make a difference to how much space we use. It does make a difference to the readability of the page though, so keep it with in reason. I'll notice abuses and cut them off.
Providing Information About Yourself
This is a stickier problem and why this website hasn't been promoted harder in the past. I don't think I have to tell anyone about email. Believe me; trying to market anything on the web opens you up to an onslaught. And believe me I've had enough.
In the past when we've tried placing ads, people found they were being contacted by some pretty seedy characters. Most often by email, but then that was really all we had.
With this system, you don't really have to provide any personal information at all. Just ask anyone interested in the vehicle to leave a comment on your ad letting you know how to contact them. Then just check back every few days to see if anyone has visited and left you a note.
If you don't mind leaving a phone number, which I think is perfectly safe, go ahead. It's up to you how much or how little information about yourself you offer.
If you give an email address I suggest you use My Yahoo.com. You can open an account just for this ad or for any online email communication. That way if SPAM gets too bad, just delete the account. There really is no way of getting away from it if you put an email address on the web. So be careful about which email addy you use. Don't use a good one.
How It All Works...
VanIsle Trader.com owns the website and the content contained on it. Google owns the system that manages it all. We both earn money from advertising on the website.
A seller finds our site and decides to list a used vehicle. He clicks on the sellers link and finds a link to the submission form. After checking a few boxes and providing some information about the used vehicle and how to contact each other, an email is sent to me.
I look at it when I have time. In most cases it will be very soon. Sometimes within minutes. Sometimes it might be days. I give it a very quick scan and then upload it. It goes live within seconds.
Then our new technology, which some of you may have heard about, kicks in. It's called XML or RSS. What it does is sends out each posting to hundreds of news services. More and more of these news services are springing up all the time.
Once they receive this notice then they resend it to all the search engines. Because the search engines trust these news services so highly, they know that the content is timely and very valuable. This infomation begins to show on the search engines rapidly.
Now those of you looking around this website right now might say, well there's nothing here. But just wait. I just started setting this up this morning. Oh, the website has been here for a few years, but just sitting not taking listings. We just started taking them again today.
If you got a vehicle for sale, you've got nothing to lose. It's free...I told how to list without providing any information. Do it as long as it's free. If it starts to get too busy with junk, I'll have to start charging or excluding.
Oh, one more thing, when adding more information try to use accurate spelling and proper names of items or accessories. People search on these things and if your ad mentions them correctly and spelled properly, yours will be picked up. Mention everything, you never know what option someone is looking for.
How To Read or Subscribe to The Ads
You can use the old bookmark method or you can save us in your favorites menu. But that's the old fashioned way. You don't want to be doing that.
We're not going to be emailing nothing or anything to anybody. Maybe if I'm feeling extra generous, I might email you about your ad if I see something that could be fixed up.
The cool way to see our ads is to subscribe to our news feeds. You will see little icons with the letters XML in them. Those are our newsfeeds. We have 4 total. We have this one on the home page. It will generally discuss the website, anything I hear up and down the Island and maybe just about anything. We'll have to see about that...
And right now we have 3 other feeds as well. One for used cars, used trucks and one for used recreational vehicles. Others may be added if warranted.
I wrote about how to set up a newsreader account with Yahoo which works really great. I've got two different readers I use and I'm not even going to talk about the other one.
I really like Yahoo...
Anyway the article is on another one of my websites. Another page will open. If you have pop-up blockers, you may have to hold down your control key while you click.
RSS, XML, Yahoo...oh, my...
Good nite, it's been a looooooooooong day...
