Where manufacturers tend to make mistakes are through links. Asking for and providing reciprocal links could virtually eliminate the possibility of accomplishing your sites’ most important function – helping dealers sell your products.

Here’s the problem. If a dealer links into your web site in order to show your product to the visitor to his web site, he has no assurance that the visitor will ever return to his site and may lose the customer through the endless links or may even forget how he got there. So at RV America, we have solved this problem for the dealer by creating an interface that keeps the visitor on the dealer’s site, but links into the manufacturer’s site for the product information – there is always a way back to the dealer’s site. Instead of sending the customer to the manufacturer, the dealer brings the manufacturer to the customer. So whatever you link to in your site, as a manufacturer, can be brought in on the dealer’s site. And the last thing a dealer wants to do is to bring up his competitor on his web site or worse yet, bring up Camping World’s web site (http://www.campingworld.com/) on his site. If a manufacturer has links that are not in the best interest of the dealer, RV America advises their dealer customers NOT to link into the manufacturer’s site.

If an RV manufacturer’s web site is to be useful to dealers, it has to be free of links to the dealer’s competitors. Since Fleetwood’s web site is clean, Post’s Traveland can use the information on the Fleetwood site as a resource for Post’s customers.

Two sites that make this critical error are Monaco (http://www.monaco-online.com) and Holiday Rambler (http://holidayrambler/). Since both companies’ sites either link to Camping World or link to sites that do, they have virtually destroyed any possibility of a dealer being able to use their sites as a resource. Why manufacturers would want link to their dealers’ competitor is difficult to comprehend.

Some existing RV manufacturer’s web sites are useless to dealers as a resource to expand the information for their products since they include an extensive Links page. Monaco, for example, even includes a link to Camping World which is a competitor of every one of their dealers in the aftermarket parts and accessories as well as service departments.

While writing this article we were notified by Coachmen (http://www.coachmen.com/) that their web site was on line and asked for a reciprocal link from RV America. We contacted them and demonstrated how with four mouse clicks a user could bring up Camping World’s web site in one of their dealer’s web site (to see illustration click here), and their web designer acknowledged the problem and said she would probably take off the links page – at press time it was still there.

When we received a news release from Winnebago (http://winnebagoind /) announcing their web site was on line, the release stated that they planned to include a large links page. RV America contacted Winnebago and talked with their manager of web services. As a result, Winnebago abandoned the links page and now the site is a valuable resource for their dealers.

The rule of thumb for an RV manufacturer should be "no links to RV related web sites."

Two excellent examples of RV manufacturers’ web site that do it right are Fleetwood (http://www.fleetwood.com/) and SMC Corporation (http://www.rvamerica.com/smc/). Continued