Blogs are becoming a necessity for many businesses, including car dealers. But many car dealers aren’t taking advantage of new technologies available to them. In most cases, new media integration is far easier than many car dealer bloggers may think.
Integrating new media into your blog is essential for engagement. Aside from copy, video, audio, and images also count towards the quality of your blog’s overall content. By providing a greater variety of content and content types, you’ll likely aid user engagement and readers will become more likely to stay on your blog and return to it again in the future.
Photos are perhaps the easiest method to add visually interesting content to your blog. If you have photos that you want to add to your blog, there are plenty of ways to host the photos, edit and resize them, and then apply them to your blog. Flickr, Photobucket, and Picnik are great tools to check out for photo hosting, sharing, and manipulation. By sharing them elsewhere, or resizing them, you can potentially reduce strain on bandwidth and ensure that your blog’s load time isn’t reduced. In addition, most blogging platforms make adding photos and other media very simple.
While the photos are the easiest and most accessible type of media to upload, there’s a huge opportunity for dealers to take advantage of video. Just as images can easily be uploaded to any blog, video can also be added with relative ease. For example, a dealership television commercial can gain greater exposure online by uploading it to YouTube, such as this one for Richmond used cars. Each video on YouTube enables bloggers to grab the code for the video and embed it into a blog post. And, since the video is hosted on YouTube and not your blog directly, it shouldn’t drain bandwidth.
New tools are also available to help save time when writing and publishing a blog. As Tris Hussey pointed out, there’s plenty of desktop publishing and blogging tools that can make posting quicker and easier. Among these tools is Windows Live Writer, a free Microsoft product that’s currently available in beta. Tools such as this enable car dealers to blog stories quickly from their desktop, without even having to login to their blog’s admin panel. Another tool used by panelist David Peralty was Cover it Live, which enables users to easily blog about live events, such as an auto show or dealer trade show.
There’s plenty of other ways to add new media panache to any car dealer’s blog. Blog Talk Radio is one way to add quality audio to a blog as it enables anyone to host their own Internet-based talk radio show. Best of all, the feed can be added to a blog for your reader’s enjoyment.
The last tool covered is the addition of slides to a blog. Car dealers can make slide presentations and use tools such as Google Docs or SlideShare to publish them online, and then integrate them into a blog post.
There are ample opportunities for car dealers to get creative when it comes to communicating to their existing and potential customers, and with their entire community as well. If you have something to say about your dealership and about the community in which you operate in, there are many tools available to make your blog the perfect platform to broadcast what you have to say. As in our example with Used Cars Richmond, many dealers already have the content to power their blogs, but it’s often a matter of taking the first step into blogging that can be the most difficult step of all.
Continue reading ‘How to be More Than a Blog: New Media Integration’
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