About this Blog

While most web design people or search engine marketing professionals have the expertise and probably years of experience in their field, few, if any, know the auto repair service business first hand.

Knowing what it takes to attract a potential new customer to your shop comes from the personal knowledge and experience of having tried everything in the book, so to speak, to increase the customer count in our own shops. I am very much aware of the countless number of advertising sales people that all of us have dealt with throughout the years, promising a world of “possibilities”, but seldom enough results to justify the cost of the advertising. Moreover, unless you, yourself closely track the results of your advertising, they don’t offer you any type of proof whether the ads are working or not.

You have to be one, to know one.

I spent over twenty years owning and managing five different automotive businesses, I experienced “hands on” the good times and hard times of running a shop, the long hours, the stress and the pain of spending precious dollars on advertising that didn’t work. I went through the suffering of spending $1,500 per month in Yellow Pages Ads that didn’t produced enough profits to cover the advertising expense. I even tried cable television advertising to the tune of $10,000 for two months and all I got were great comments about how good our ad looked. Did it generate enough profit to pay for the ad? A resounding, No!

The World Wide Web, as I know it today.

In 1989 I was fortunate enough to discover the Internet and the great potential that it has to market and promote any business. Moreover, I realized the lack of transparency, as to the size of the business, which allowed for a leveling of the playing field for large vs. small businesses. If you had the right marketing copy and good pictures of the product or service you offered, you could appeal to thousands of people around your shop, or the local area around your business.

The flame of Passion that I always had for Marketing ignited, which got me burning the midnight oil.

I spent the following years researching and learning all I could about marketing in the Internet. Countless hours were spent in front of an IBM PC, with no hard drive and two floppies, fascinated by the great potential available for cost effective advertising. In 2000, I decided it was time to put my knowledge in practice by creating our existing www.ocautoservice.com directory to allow consumers to find local auto repair service facilities. Our parent company is eCommNow (www.ecommnow.com) where you can find more information about us and the services we provide exclusively for auto repair shop owners. In 1997 I sold our last repair shop http://ocautosites.com/Europerformance to dedicate myself entirely to Online Marketing and Internet Research, and as they say, the rest is history.

Now, I want to share all that knowledge with as many auto repair shop owners as possible. I want to help you, the shop owner, decipher all the options and free resources that the Internet offers to promote your business. I will posting on a weekly basis on this blog all the latest techniques and  resources available to help you expand your shop’s presence on the Web. Make sure to bookmark this blog and check it regularly.

Ed Burckhardt

You can check my profiles at: Google – LinkedIn – Facebook – and follow me on Twitter

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