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Two Iowa Ford Dealers Make An AAA/Trader Independent Decision
by Casey T. Call concepts@rconnect.com
Larry and Deb Jeddeloh have done business in Sibley Iowa for 15 years selling Ford and Mercury cars and trucks. Roger & Lisa Wielenga bought Midland Ford in Orange City, Iowa just about two years ago. Both these small town Iowa dealerships faced the same problem, what to do about the Internet and new media marketing. They both faced a directive from Ford Motor Company, get a web site or Ford will create one for you and send you a bill for $1,250.00 AND $275.00 per month. For both these small stores this was not an Internet solution they wished to buy into. The big cost for Larry Jeddeloh was the $275.00 a month. He felt that the money would be better spent with the existing local print advertising he was running in the Car & Truck Trader every month. If he went with the Ford option he would have to give up his local advertising in favor of a Ford Company promotion that Larry felt would not be as effective for several years to come, if ever.

Roger and Lisa had the same problem with a twist. Not only did they NOT want to lose control of their advertising budget (because $275.00 per month out here in NW Iowa is A LOT bigger issue than it might be for Ford Dealers in Houston, LA, Minneapolis or Chicago) they were worried what kind of product Ford would force on them. Like all franchise Ford dealers, Midland Ford is listed on the FoMoCo Company web site. Roger and Lisa, after almost two years of calls, letters and e-mails had been UNABLE to get FORD to change the on line records to reflect THEM as the owners of Midland. After two years Ford still had the prior Midland owners listed in their records and NOT Roger and Lisa. This fact made them determined to find an alternative to Ford doing a web site for them.

Larry Jeddeloh had contacted AAA World Web about doing a site for the dealership. A deal was struck, AAA registered a DOT COM name for Larry (www.jedford.com), and built a nice little site for $600.00. Since Larry was a Trader advertiser, Jeddeloh Ford already had his inventory on the Trader web site. So AAA came up with the link back to the Trader system for him. Since Larry's site is small and expected a low volume of traffic, AAA arranged a special hosting price for him through AAA's prime provider of only $12.00 per month, to be paid by check for six month blocks. The site went up without a hitch and Larry reports he is already getting calls from it. He is still waiting for his first sale directly from the web but he says he knows it is coming soon. People looking for specific trucks with just the equipment they want seem to be the majority of the callers for the web site. Larry says he is also getting e-mails from car and truck shoppers every week. Shortly after Jeddeloh Ford went on line, Roger from Midland contacted AAA after talking to Larry Jeddeloh. A similar arrangement was made with AAA World Web for a site like Larry's. Once again AAA found and registered a domain name Roger and Lisa liked (www.bestford.com because Midland was already gone) and the web site went up without a hitch. One difference between the two Ford dealers was that Midland was not a Trader advertiser. Roger and Lisa were not aware of the extensive Internet inventory service offered by the Trader. They looked it over and decided it did not make sense to them to buy into the program, until they learned it would cost them maybe $800 per month or more for AAA to update their inventory like trader would do free if they took print ads. Why the cost difference? AAA does not have the advanced database driven system to offer clients that Trader does to cost effectively render pages in real time.
Also the print ad sales people Trader has take digital photos for the print ads that Trader re-purposes for the web based listing. AAA would have to take the photos each month, format them for the web and then build each page by hand.
This process is much more time consuming than the Trader process of inventory display. Once Roger and Lisa learned the facts, they signed up for the Trader program straight away and have been happy ever since. They too, like Larry and Deb Jeddeloh, felt that spending that $275.00 a month with Trader instead of Ford got them more for their money. For the money they get not only advanced inventory listings updated regularly by Trader, they get a 1/4 page of regional print advertising for just a few dollars more. Both these dealer's web sites cost less than the $1,250 Ford wanted to charge for just ONE site, and both dealers feel that the Ford monthly fee of $275.00 is much better spent in local print advertising AND the Trader inventory web listings. For both these cost conscience businesses web sites from AAA World Web in Sibley and the Trader Internet Inventory listings just made sense, dollars and cents.

Midwest Meetings:
From Glossy Magazine to Flashy Web Site
by Tomas Erdman tomas@3aweb.com

Professional Meeting Planners are an important resource for any company needing to hold an event for employees, management or even stockholders. Reaching Certified Meeting Planners with their messages is what every major resort, hotel, banquet facility and CVB (Convention and Visitor’s Bureau) needs to do. Over five years ago Randy Hennen recognized this need and started Midwest Meetings Magazine for the hospitality Industry. After three years Randy needed a web site to list all the e-mail addresses and web sites his extensive roster of advertisers needed to publish. Randy turned to AAA World web to translate his magazine to an E-Zine.

“The challenge” Randy said, “Was to peak the interest of professional meeting planners and make it easy to subscribe to Midwest Meetings without giving away all the content. Larry Alger suggested putting up one or two features from each issue, and listing the rest of the features would accomplish the goal of generating subscriptions while highlighting active links to the advertisers own web sites”. Working with AAA World Web has been about as painless a process as I could have hoped for. Several other web designers I checked with before finding AAA could not deal with my Macintosh Quark Xpress files effectively. But Larry said that would be no problem for him, he told me he owns both Macintosh and Windows computers and has the most popular software to deal with everything from Microsoft Publisher to Quark. “ Randy continued “I just send a Zip disk with all the Quark files and image files and a instruction list to Larry with a deposit check. About a week later I usually have a draft of the new pages up on the web to review. After my editorial staff reviews the work and e-mails the changes we want made, it’s all done in just a few days . I wish all my vendors were as easy to work with as AAA World Web. Putting out a high quality full color magazine is more work than almost anyone can imagine. Anything that makes it easier is just great. AAA World Web along with Call Concepts Multimedia Productions has just completed a total re-design of our site to include a welcome animation and cool new interface.” said Randy. “If you are thinking about getting away from it all without going too far please stop by the Midwest Meetings web site and browse the list of resorts and vacation destinations we have listed in our Advertisers Links pages at www.midwestmeetings.com”. Randy concluded.
B&H In Jackson, MN Tills the Web For Sales
by Tomas Erdman tomas@3aweb.com
B & H Manufacturing in Jackson, MN has been making farm equipment for conservation tillage since 1981. In May of 1999 B & H bought the mower and snow blower product lines from Schweiss Inc. of Sherburn, MN. The marketing department at B & H knew they needed a web site to help get the word out about their new products, as well as their existing farming products. B & H has years of experience doing advertising. They have sophisticated computer systems. They already used the Internet to communicate by e-mail with dealers and had a business account, which included site hosting, with a regional Internet Service Provider. So it seemed natural that they should just buy a copy of Front Page 98 and put up their own web site. After all, the software companies and the software dealers all say how easy programs like Front Page 98, or Web Site Tool Kits, or Web Site in a Box, or Build-It-Yourself-Web-Pages make doing your own web site. B & H found out that designing an effective web site is not as easy as all the software ads lead you to believe.

The biggest problems the B & H crew had building their first site was dealing with scanned images and getting high search engine placements. The pictures they had on the web site were not properly formatted for the web, so the pages took a long time to load and did not look the best. After a few months of trial and lots of errors, one of their sub contractors suggested they contact his web company, AAA World Web. Brad Mohns recommended Larry Alger to them and since then B & H has a good looking web site that loads quickly and has great positions in the search engines, directories, and indexes. The moral of this story is, no matter how much experience you or your company has with advertising and computers, Internet marketing requires a unique set of skills that can be hard to develop. Fortunately those skills are easy to find if you just call AAA World Web at 712.754.2801 or e-mail us at answers@3aweb.com.

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