Lately I have come under scrutiny by certain automotive vendors based on some of the properties I own.  My point is I provide value to the consumers.  Their point is I take away from the value of their services or individual dealers. What is even more comical is that some of these properties also use the same marketing strategy that the vendors use themselves.  I just provide a stronger call to action for conversion.  They all push affiliate programs or contextual advertising to consumers who visit their sites. Some vendors also try to capitalize on search for their competitors names using guerrilla spammy video optimization.  It is t-decoration accepted apparently.  The biggest vendor to try to create a ruckus for me over this has also partnered in the past with a training vendor who uses the spammy video optimization.  (see this event) I wonder if he thought about this before he got in bed with them as he was sending the emails trying to run me in the ground.

At the end of the day it does not matter what these bottom tier vendors think say or do.  It has also helped me to establish my personal marketing paradigm for the future.  I will not stop providing content that will help dealers reach wider in their online marketing mix and it will educate them on things they can do, while at the same time if people are not willing to do some of their own leg work to figure things out I probably will not waste much time on them any longer. People want advice and help all the time.  The problem is they are not willing to pay for it or they recognize the value and want it delivered for free.  No more mooches is my new philosophy.

What brought about this epiphany was conversations I had recently with two individuals.

One was with my old GM.  He was whining about me taking away traffic from the search term “Carl Gregory Hyundai” and claimed I was hurting his business and I needed to change my content to benefit him.  While at the same time he is unwilling to pay for it.  So I will use that traffic to generate the most income for me.  This is the same person who thought it was great that I sold every Nissan trade in we got because I took traffic away from “Golden Isles Nissan” and converted it to sales for the store.

The second conversation took place with my brother who is an Atlanta website designer.  He was explaining the problem with having clients that do not understand the value of something or how things work.  One of his lowest value clients keeps emailing him about use for different products like MS Outlook and using a feed reader.  He is showing more patience than I would after he forwarded me his email exchanges.  But it also helped me understand that not every client, contact or customer has the same value in the automotive digital marketing space.

People want free help on marketing their business which puts money in their pocket but the operative word is FREE.  There is a great website that will give you all the free information that you can handle, visit it here, there are plenty of resources to be found there.  That does not mean I am going to stop giving free tips and opinions it just means that I am not going to spend a lot of time on low value activities.

Time is not a commodity I have an abundance of.