Building trust with your audience is a critical task if you wish to market anything online if it requires personal interaction or an increased trust level for consumers to buy. This is good for me in my local market because I am creating many different levels of online marketing materials to attract traffic to the dealership’s website and my own unique selling proposition and I do not worry about the 30 day window as much as the long term benefits.

I really can’t say that I live up to that goal but I am working on it and with the huge shifts taking place online today car dealers need to start listening to their customers instead of telling them what to do. Your customers are talking about you at work, church, the local bar and now they are talking about you online and how you handle this can make or break your online reputation.

Dealers that spend thousands of dollars monthly on Television Advertising may be the first to jump on the bandwagon, but at the cost it is relatively inexpensive for even small dealers with limited budgets to break into the market.

I will continue to provide content that will allow ISM’s and Internet Salespeople learn to promote themselves and use some of the best Web 2.0 marketing strategies to promote their offers to online consumers.

You can use blogs for many things and in a perfect world if you had every dealership employee blogging about their area of expertise, supporting blogs about service specials, sales promotions, new model releases, maintenance tips, safety recalls (gasp) and driving traffic to your main site.

Chance are if you have seen more than one lead from online lead generation you have seen an email address @yahoo.com. If you are not familiar with using instant messenger keep watching this post as I will provide an Idiot’s Guide to using instant messenger soon to create opportunities.

In my haste to accept the position and get started selling cars over the Internet I really did not think through my answer. The Internet is a tool to generate leads to sell cars to, but the actual deal closing is done in the showroom or over the phone.