Car Stereo Chick (aka Annie Amen) is introducing herself

[Annie Amen]

:wave: Hello everyone. First off, what an awesome forum! This is exactly what I and so many other entrepreneurs need. There are so many naysayers out there in the world and complainers that are happy to try and drag you down with them. Thank you MJ for providing such an awesome safe and encouraging place to mingle, brainstorm and vent!

Here's a little background info: I've actually owned my own business since I was 23 (28 now). My husband and I took over the same business that I started working at as a part time job while in highschool. I started working there when I was 17 and since taking over (5 years ago) we've doubled the annual sales volume and built a new store double the square footage. I love that business and love growing it and working at it, but I don't want to settle as an owner/operator of a brick and mortar retail store. I want to take my experience and knowledge to the internet where I can provide my services and solutions to a much larger audience.

Here's where I can use some advice. Almost everything I've managed to accomplish so far has been done learning as I go. However, my schedule is getting overloaded and as a bit of a control freak and someone who wants to understand everything and figure out everything myself, I am struggling with delegating. I am considering using a service to get backlinks/traffic to my newest blog. Has anyone ever heard of or used DBD SEO? I received an email from them that I was suspecting was going to be one of those automated spam emails about how they can improve traffic to my site, but then I read it and it appeared that an actual human being did look at my site and wrote to me about how they can help me increase traffic.

What have others in similar time crunched situations done? Do you outsource? I'm just having difficulty weighing how much my time is worth and how my time may be better spent writing content and creating product pages while I pay someone to help me get valuable backlinks/page rank. My newest blog hasn't even been indexed by google yet (it's been 2 months), but I feel it's loaded with great content.

I'll stop ranting now. Thank you everyone for your honest, constructive advice and your support. PS if I can help anyone in any way, I'd love to (I'm pretty good at writing business plans, finding loans/capital in difficult financing situations).

 

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[Trevor Kuntz]

Hi Anne, welcome to the forum!

As far as SEO, what kind of blog do you have and what kind of keywords are you trying to rank for? What's the reason behind your blog? To inform people? Drive traffic to another site?

 

[Annie Amen]

Hi Trevor,
One of the blogs I have is on Car Stereo and when I started it, I wasn't really thinking about monetizing it. It was just something fun that I wanted to do. My goal was to inform people with REAL advice from an expert as there is a lot of bad misinformation out there regarding this industry, how things work, what to buy and how to install it. There's no regulation or accountability, anyone can be an "expert". There's a lot of fly by night shops and a lot of people on forums that think they know everything because they installed one thing in their car. The internet is good and bad. By time people make it to me they have been given so much bad advice that they're totally confused and don't know who to trust. So I'm really trying to educate people and help them achieve the best sounding systems in their cars and explain it to them in a way that anyone can understand and I'm trying to build relationships with people.

With 30,000 page views a month and very low bounce rate (.5-2%), I think that I am providing valuable content and gaining trusted readers. I just started an aweber account and am working on getting that integrated, otherwise I have RSS and ton's of reader email.

I haven't spent a lot of time picking keywords as I tend to just write the way I talk as if these people were in my store and I was helping them in person. I really build keywords around whatever the topic is I feel like writing about. Like I thought it'd be a really good idea to do a story on radar detectors. A lot of people debate "Escort 9500ci vs K40". Especially Audi/BMW/Mercedes drivers. So I made "Escort 9500ci vs K40" keywords and now if you google that (on my computer anyways) I'm on page 1, second result (not sure if google looks at recent search history in creating search results).

So how do I monetize that (other than using it to gain trust from local customers who read it and think, yeah she knows what she's talking about, I'm gonna pay her $2200 to install one in my car)? I figured inserting affiliate links. But I haven't converted one.

So I think my approach is wrong. I just started making product sections where I will focus on product selection and recommendation, more of like a place to shop and treat it as if these people we're here in my shop. So I'll be able to really personalize the experience and help people hone in on the right product for them rather than just writing posts on various products. Does that make sense?

I mean I'll continue to do write ups/press releases because there are people out there that want to read my blog for valuable information that might not necessarily be buying anything at the moment. I'm just totally new to this and I don't feel comfortable with things like squeeze pages (they seem like internet infomercials to me). I think one of my reasons for success with my brick and mortar store is I'm NOT a traditional salesperson, I'm here to help people 1st and foremost and I have fun doing it and that's how I convert sales in my store. I want to do the same thing online, but I'm having a hard time figuring out how to. Thanks for any input.

 

[Trevor Kuntz]

Wow, that's an extremely low bounce rate.

Okay, so what's your B&M retail store? Is it based around stereos or something entirely different?

 

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[Annie Amen]

B&M store is car stereo and other mobile electronics sales and installation. We were actually selected one of the top 50 mobile electronics retailers in the country for 2010-2011. And I learned a lot (still learning every day) about running a small business, so that's why I started my other blog (on small business) that has yet to be indexed by google. That's why I was thinking of hiring someone to help me with back links/seo on that one.

 

[Trevor Kuntz]

Do you have an eCommerce store for your stereos?

 

[Trevor Kuntz]

And what's the link for your blog?

 

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[Annie Amen]

I tried the yahoo store thing, I used to have one selling women's brazilian activewear using a merchant account. I tried it with this site too, but didn't get any bites on it. I didn't think it would be profitable or a good investment of my time. I have strict dealer agreements with the brands I carry; in order to carry certain brands I can't sell online or if I do it has to be at specified prices (i.e not really competitive). Also, sometimes it's a headache dealing with customers and electronics over the counter in our store. We usually sell with our installation (labor is where the money is), but that doesn't always happen. You sell someone a $100 subwoofer, make $50 profit, tell them how to use it/install it, and they don't listen and blow it up, but you still have to exchange it for them. You eat the cost of shipping product back and forth to the manufacturer (subs are heavy), tying up valuable inventory and waste time dealing with the whole process. I wouldn't want to deal with that on a large scale. That's why I thought affiliate would be better. I take my share and let the bigger merchants deal with the headaches. Here's a link to the blog.

 

[Trevor Kuntz]

Right, yeah, I try to stay away from electronics as well when it comes to eCommerce. Too much risk.

Well you are indexed on Google, you're just not ranked. I can't find your site within the top 800 results for "car stereo." However, for car stereo blog, you are number 19 (bottom of page 2), so that's not too bad. And you have a domain with the words "car stereo" in it, so that's a definite bonus. The question is just whether it's worth it to you to SEO the site. You could probably make a decent jump for a hundred bucks, but who knows how long it would take to make that back. I think your best bet for making money would be to make some sort of car stereo installation guide and sell it or something like that. From what you've said, you obviously have a decent amount of traffic, so I would find a way to monetize it without relying on ads. Are there any non-electronic accessories you could sell?

I think your site definitely has some potential.

 

[JDIII2007]

Annie,

The Fastlane philosophy is not real big on affiliate marketing because it is not a true business in the sense of what fastlane businesses are. However, based on what you said, you could certainly choose to do affiliate marketing. You could certainly continue the way you are doing it by doing product comparisons or recommending certain products in a review style. For your current blog, you may be better off doing product reviews of products you guys sell where the links go to the affiliate program you are promoting. It may also be worthwhile to build an autoresponder where you are giving away a free ebook of tips or information these customers would value and you then promote to the email list you build with updates of new products or when you do new product reviews.

You might also be able to do lead generation if these various installation dealers would be willing to pay if you were able to direct them customers. This would take more work but would be a true fastlane business.

As for SEO, there are plenty of different services out there. They tend to rise and fall based on the latest algorithm change by Google. It is easy enough to outsource this work to the Phillipines or just use a service but recognize that in 6 months or a year, you will often have to move on to another one that is more in keeping with Google at that time.

 

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[Vigilante]

welcome annie

 

[Annie Amen]

Thank you guys so much. It's just so great to have honest feedback from people that know what they're doing. I'm tired of stumbling around in the dark and it's just so nice to have a safe place to talk to people where I can get valuable, knowledgeable advice and constructive criticism.

You know I actually started to write an e-book, outlined it, wrote quite a bit actually, and then put it off as I kind of need my husband John's help with certain sections, especially getting detailed pictures during installs. I already registered carstereohowtoguide.com so I might as well get on that and finish it.

The lead generation for other install shops is interesting. I was actually thinking of trying to come up with a better standardization in this industry. Anyone can open up a shop, there's really no licensing requirements. In the state of Connecticut anyways, you don't need a license or insurance (unless your landlord requires you to have insurance).

There is this thing called MECP certification, but honestly I see MECP certified installers at Best Buy and PC Richards drill through customer brake lines and blow up BCM's just trying to do basic installs. So there is a need for better qualification and standardization and maybe I should be the one to come up with that and qualify shops. They'd have to meet certain criteria, take a test, have their shop inspected and make it like a yearly thing to maintain accreditation.

Thank you for the insight! And if you ever need work done on your car, make sure you ask if they're insured, licensed and how long an installer has been installing as well as how long they have been at the company. The longer, the better.