Shortcuts- Cheating Yourself
Frankly if you have read this far your so far ahead of the curve its not funny. If you skipped to this part I will tell you there are NO shortcuts. This method is the only proven money maker for online gun stores. Start from the beginning read, learn, ask questions but don't try to find a shortcut. If there was one we would have found it long before you.
So we were talking about spending $4 to net $1200 in online firearm sales and now we are going to show you some of that Redneck Book learnin' I do down here to make that happen.
In all seriousness this is so important to understand before you give anyone any of your money. I don't care what level of the game your at. Retailer,distributor, manfacture these same rules apply at every level. You must be able to calculate ROI.(Return On Investment) I have had site optimization companies tell me that I can spend as much as 30 cents a click for Scopes because"Others are doing it" Guess what those Others are not still doing it. Its a whole new group of people bleeding themselves to death.
This is the GunMuse Golden Rule of Online sales. You get 1% per click from the source of the traffic. Confused? If your traffic is Banners and you get 100 clicks on your banner you can count on 1 sale. So when we charge $250 for a 1000 banner clicks you are guaranteed to get only 10 sales. So it would cost you $25 to sell an item. Why would you do that? well again somethings are not on their face value. First off To get 1000 Unique clicks more than 100,000 people will have to have seen your banner. So you did just buy some VERY cheap branding. Again we usually see 5% purchase rate with our methods but you can't guarantee anything over 1%. Also remember a banner is a VISUAL AD a commercial if you will. If your commercial talks about Browning shotguns and links to a page with browning shotguns. Guess what you just bought a 1000 people looking for a Browning shotgun. So when you buy banner advertising remember its more than what your buying its also what your selling. TARGET your ADS. Make up Hundreds of banners with specific products if your paying by the click. That makes the Branding for FREE.
Buying banners by the impression or Month-Whoa don't do it. Frankly if they can't guarantee your audience then you can't guarantee your check won't bounce. I remember Shooters.com gave me 150,000 banner impressions on their site a few years ago. Cost $150 bucks I got 4 clicks. Imoutdoors.com gave me 3 months for $400 and for that I got 14 clicks. The branding portion sucked because they flooded their site with ads. GunMuse has 1 paid ad at the top. That's it. If you're buying site realestate don't fight the neighbors. The best way to stand out of the crowd is to not have one around you.
The average banner gets clicked on .15% that is 1.5 times for every 1000 times its displayed. So use that math when your thinking of buying banner ads from someone. 10,000 banners for $100 sounds like good deal. If you don't know the math it might be. What it really means you just paid $100 for 15 viewers only 85 more to make 1 sale. See that GunMuse Golden rule still applies to ALL ADVERTISING. With the last example it would take $500 to make 1 sale great if your selling boats terrible if your selling ammo. What we recommend is consult us. We are not going to lie to you. We let folks talk freely on our sites and I don't want any bad press from an advertiser. Build a few dozen banners and test them on banner exchanges to see which one has the highest Click through ratio. Use that one when you get a good deal on impressions. For reference the average Gunmuse ad gets clicked on 1.4% 10 times better than the webs average. Because of the prime realestate.
Apply that GunMuse Golden Rule to all your ad dollars spent online and I guarantee you will be a happier person. I am always happy when I have money in my pocket. Don't fudge the rule because you see better results. 1% of what you get in "TARGETED"will buy if your getting 5% its gravy Over the past few years we have seen results go up and down and 1% is our low number.
So what do you do if your not getting 1% to buy. Trouble shoot. There is something Wrong with your site. Your sending them to the wrong page. The page has a HUGE graphic and it takes 40 secs to load. Or maybe you put a decimal point in the wrong place.(if I had paid attention to myself I would have caught my own mistake)
The sad thing is this 99% are going to leave your site there is nothing you can do about its a reality of the web. Have an exit plan for that 99% The gold may of flowed past your gold pan, so sell those gold flakes to the guy downstream.
Author: GunMuse Date: Thursday Sep 23 2004 10:02:07 am
