Under the Hood- Best Practices for Automotive Blogs and Forums

People love cars.

Automotive sales in the US grew in 2018 and there are signs of recovery for the industry in the UK this year too.

Buying a car is a considered purchase and beyond the car itself, there are a whole bunch of accessories and items people look at buying for their automobiles. People turn to publishers, bloggers and forums for advice about what they should buy and seek out expert opinion before they make a purchase.

That gives automotive blogs and automotive forums ample opportunity to monetize links in their articles and get rewarded when their content inspires a sale. So this post will outline best practices for a successful automotive blog or forum and how to turn editorial articles into killer commerce content.

Signup for Skimlinks and start monetizing your car-related commerce content today

Find a niche and focus on it

Readers invest in automotive sites that cater to their particular area of interest. So if you can figure out a niche that nobody covers yet, but people are interested in, it’ll be an instant win for you in traffic and from an SEO perspective give you an area you can dominate.

If you are an expert in a particular domain, you should also have a more engaged audience, as they’ll access you and you exclusively for the insight you can provide.

If you think that there ought to be more news comparing and contrasting hybrid cars or an easy how-to guide for child or pet safety in cars, then chances are others think so too. Get out there, discover your niche and focus on it.

Find Your Voice:

In tandem with finding your niche, you need to find your voice too.

Whatever particular voice you choose when blogging about automotives, make sure that it is both continuous and sustainable.

Whether you present material in a strictly professional way or more humorous manner, your voice is what makes the difference between whether people read your content once, or people read your content for a lifetime.

When you think about the audience you want to have and the feelings you want your readers to have after content, let that guide you. If you want to appeal to an older demographic that has specific needs from cars, err on the side of professionalism. Alternatively, if you’re going after millennials looking for bargain automobiles or new parents that want a car for their kids, you might want to alter your tone to be more irreverent or more concise to reflect the amount of time people have to read your articles.

Once you find your subject and your tone, then you can start focusing on the next big step in autoblogging: finding your readership.

Build Your Audience

Your audience are your readers. The people that determine whether your website will be a side hustle or develop into a fully-fledged business.

Trust is a key factor in converting into the latter category.

Any advice you give must be authentic and advice that given the opportunity you yourself would act on. If you recommend a particular air freshener, it has to be because you would use it in your own car.

Another step is to make sure the community knows your an authority on your area of choice.

Comment on other people’s blog posts, post in the forums and share your opinions on social media. You want to be recognised for your opinions: positive, constructive or otherwise.

With this don’t necessarily just think about playing the nice guy. People will get tired if you aren’t being candid and they’re also savvy. They’ll be able to tell if you’re being two-faced, so make sure you give praise only where it is truly due.

Forums are a good place to find discussions, share around your content and engage with people. You can do the same in Facebook groups or on Twitter if you find a relevant community and hashtag. Find where your people are (they may not know they’re your people yet!) and put your content in front of them.

Something to else to consider is opportunities for syndication. If you can you guest write a post somewhere in exchange for a backlink or offer the same service on your website it can be a great way to cross-promote your content. Just choose wisely, to make the most of these partnerships you are going to have to share their content on your page too.

Monetize with Care

Adverts are all well and good, but they aren’t really the best way to monetize your site anymore. Few people click on display ads and they also make for a really poor experience for your readers.

So we offer an alternative way to monetize commerce content.

Our platform helps automatically monetize links to our network of 48,500 merchants around the world. When a reader clicks on a link in your content, if they make a purchase as a direct result, our technology helps you earn a percentage of that sale as commission.

For example, you could write about the best in car accessories and link out to everything from air fresheners to bobble-head dogs to have on your dashboard. If a reader clicks on the link to any of the accessories and makes a sale you’d earn commission.

You get to help your readers find products they like, and they have the opportunity to help you keep your site up-and-running. Our platform also includes further solutions to help you monetize on mobile, in email, on social media and include price comparison in posts automatically.

We have a large range of automotive merchants and you can view them here. Categories include car accessories, cars, motorbike accessories and motorbikes. Whatever the form of wheeled-transport, we’ll have something to offer.

So if you want to get started with an automotive blog and monetizing your commerce content make sure to sign up for Skimlinks.