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| Success Stories - Running Ads |
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Nature
Site & Posters
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Science and Nature
posters are one of our most popular product lines. Web surfers
want them, but have extreme difficulty in finding them. Many
web-sites would like to provide them, but don't because of some very
good reasons. It is very hard to find suppliers and storage is a
nightmare. Posters are large and
fragile. You have to keep them flat and well protected. (We
had special bins made for ours). Even a minimum inventory requires
a big capital investment and shipping carries it's own set of
problems. The biggest problem is that posters are comparatively
low priced items. Although we have seen sites that offer a few of
our titles, they are generally priced at $10 to $12 each. We sell
most of ours for only $7.95. Faced with the economics, you have to sell a lot
of posters to break even.
Posters sell so well that we've continually
expanded our product offering. Web-Shops.Net now has the largest
selection of Science and Nature Posters available anywhere. The
entire poster department is on our main store - einsteins-emporium.com. It is also on each of our
mini-stores. We even have a site dedicated to posters -
edugraphics.net.
One of our affiliates is a nature site with many,
many pages devoted to animals. The Affiliate wanted to offer our
posters to his visitors, so he developed what we call a
running ad program because it uses a family of similar ads that runs
throughout his site. He spent several days saving hundreds of our
thumbnail photos to disk, then inserting them into his web-pages,
keeping each picture context-sensitive. For example, a page on
butterflies included a poster on butterflies. A page on whales showed a poster on
whales. Generally he showed only one poster to a page and each one
linked to the appropriate page of our edugraphics.net site.
A few examples appear below.
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| Butterfly
Poster |
Brachiosaursus
Poster |
Whale
Poster |
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This proved to be
an extremely effective campaign as the running ads resulted in repetition.
Visitors saw a poster ad on every page and sooner or later, they would
click on one of them. The site enjoys about 80,000 unique visitors
per month. It consistently maintains a 5% referral rate and a 4%
conversion rate. Average sale was $30.00 and monthly commissions
ran around $400.00.
Web-Shops.Net also pays commissions on residual
sales. (See Commission Schedule). One of the customers
referred from this site was a company that deals in animal
products. It began using one of our posters for a promotion and
orders 500 of them every two months. We gave the customer a
discount, resulting in a unit sales price of $6.00. Still it's a
$3,000 order. The Affiliate has received a $210.00 commission on
each reorder. There have now been seven of them.
This affiliate was so pleased with
the program, that he decided to expand it. He simply changed all
of his links to point to the applicable poster page at our main store,
Einsteins-Emporium.com, rather than the edugraphics.net site. This
exposed his referrals to a much broader range of merchandise. In
addition to posters, they began buying everything from seashells to
stuffed bats to shark jaws. (Our product offering is
incredible) Customers who only wanted one poster may not have
ordered before, but the broader product offering resulting in them being
exposed to many related products. Often a customer who was originally
interested in a $7.95 butterfly poster, ended up purchasing a $139.95
butterfly collection. The Affiliates average sale jumped to $75.00
and his commissions to $1,200.00 a month. One of his referrals
purchased one of our bear skin rugs for $4,000.00 and the commission on
that one sale was $280.00. Our
stores offers such an in-depth product offering that running ads can be
used for almost any subject.
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