
There is one Kratom supplier in the world. I have the cheapest Kratom on the internet. How do I promote it? - rms
http://www.getkratom.com
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reitzensteinm
Who are you targeting with this site - people who already use Kratom but are
actively searching for a better price? How many people are searching for
Kratom? I know I've never heard of it.

Frankly, I think this is a bit of an ill conceived plan. You're basically
trying to catch people who are already using and are familiar with a niche
incense, by promising to sell it at a discount. How price sensitive are people
using niche incense going to be? Versus trusting a new supplier off the
internet? So lets run through it - right now your page would convert someone
that:

1) Uses Kratom 2) Sees your advertising 3) Is concerned about saving, er,
actually, looking at your site, maybe a few percent on something that costs
next to nothing 4) Is concerned enough about that saving to buy off of a new
one page site on the internet

All while you are presumably running razor thin margins and paying for the
advertising. Razor thin margins could work when you are making up for it at a
large volume, but I don't think the market is big enough for that. My father
is working on a site that does exactly what you're doing, but for 10,000
products instead of 1 and attempting to catch organic search traffic. Many
products haven't ever been sold, and individually the traffic per product is
very little, but it's the area under the curve that counts. It's very Web 0.2,
but when selling to average people, that doesn't matter.

You might want to consider turning the site into a Kratom info page that only
incidentally sells it. Make comparison pages with whatever else is similar to
it (types of incense I guess?) that will show up in organic search under other
terms. Pages of info or uses or whatever that'll show up in organic search.
Your page rather snarkily tells me to learn how to search the internet. I'm
sorry, but if I don't take the time to research the product you are selling
and find out if I want to buy it, that's not _my_ problem, that's _YOUR_
problem. I clicked on the Wikipedia link and I still don't know what it is...
I mean, I know that it's some plant from Asia that can be burned as insence...
but I don't know why I would care (sell me on the benefits and maybe I'd try
it).

There's another thing you could try, and it'll cost money and probably won't
work (but if it does it'll be passive income for a long time). It'll only have
a chance of working if Kratom is relatively obscure (one supplier in the
world, I'm presuming it is). You'll also have to track things well.

But what you could do is stop selling it at a discount, and bid on ad words
for words like incense, pointing to a page saying exactly the problem you're
facing. Say how good it is, and that you've got the ability to supply Kratom
and nobody really knows about it, but you believe in it so much that you'll
personally send out a sample to anyone in the US that wants one. Full
instructions how to use it etc. Fulfill 100 or 200 orders and run the numbers.
You've paid maybe 1000 x 10 cents to get those people to fill out the form,
maybe $100. You've paid for the samples of Kratom, maybe $5 per person. X of
those people loved it and will become customers - you've got to work out the
gross and net value of each customer, that is, average sale price x frequency
of sale x time they stay customers (could be a hell of a long time). There is
obviously a bit of guess work here. So there you'd have a $x of advertising
expenditure gets you y customers who will on average bring in $z profit each.
If you make decent margins (to pay for your time), keep doing this for years
and you'll make a reasonable amount from the site. If you don't, try something
else a bit radical, or ditch the whole thing and try something else
(recommended).

~~~
rms
Thanks, I really appreciate your advice.

I put the site up without doing a lot of consideration to the marketing, which
is a challange. I put it up because Kratom is an extraordinarily profitable
product for sellers.

The supplier enforced price floor means that I am not operating on a razor
thin price margin. It's close to 100% profit margin. I need not fear someone
undercutting me.

Kratom is not an incense, though it can be smoked. I recognize it is
confusing, but the current vendors of Kratom claim it is an incense and sold
for those purposes only. Kratom is an opiate comparable in strength to
hydrocodone. In smaller doses it is stimulating, providing a mental boost
similar to caffeine but without the jittery side effects. The main medical
uses would be opiate withdrawal, chronic pain management, and treatment of
ADHD. Traditionally, workers would chew the leaves of Kratom but now is
usually boiled into a tea. If you add a lot of sweetener, it even tastes good.
It is high in antioxidants, containing much more than brewed green tea.

The active alkaloid, 6-hydroxy-mitragynine is 30 times more powerful than
morphine by weight.

However, I can't tell people that kratom is a drug on my site because it is
probably illegal to say so. If I told people that 10 grams of kratom leaf is
comparable to 20 miligrams of hydrocodone, I would be selling a drug without
FDA approval. Paypal would also ban my account because they want no part of
this business. There have been Kratom vendors that made claims about Kratom's
use as an opiate on their website that had shipments of Kratom seized by
customs. I have spoken to one of the larger retail vendors of Kratom who
strongly recommended only referring to Kratom as an incense.

If I was legally allowed to market Kratom as a drug, I would. It's a potent
painkiller that doesn't make you tired or slow you down. There is certainly a
commercial market for a new, natural opiate but I'm not allowed to bring
something like that to market in the USA.

It's a bit of a catch-22 -- if I tell people it's a drug, everyone will want
it but I can't tell people it's actually a drug. What I really need here is
legal advice telling me exactly what I can and can't say about Kratom, but
without legal advice I'm afraid to do any more than give people the tools to
find the information for themselves. Does anyone know a lawyer that could
offer a qualified view on my business?

I am competing on price and only able to sell to those that already know what
Kratom is, unless there's an angle I'm missing here. I've been selling on eBay
for a while and a website was the logical way to increase volume. I have some
passionate customers, including one who advocated for me on a chronic pain
management support group. Most of my customers just email me requesting a
PayPal invoice for their Kratom. If I could pull some SEO magic and be highly
rated for kratom keywords, this business would be profitable.

Until then, I'm just going to advertise online. Where should I advertise
besides Google Adwords?

~~~
gscott
>Until then, I'm just going to advertise online. Where should I advertise
besides Google Adwords?

Besides Google Adwords for ads I really like Adbrite.com. Google, Overture,
and other ads are just too expensive, the keywords are all bid up to
outrageous prices.

On Adbrite you can buy ads on sites for a fixed period of time or you can pay
per cpm. I pay about 1 to 3 cents per clickthrough and I have great signup
rates from those visitors (high quality people not junk signups).

The Adbrite system is worth spending some time on to figure it out, once you
do you will spend far less on advertising then anywhere else that I have
experimented with. We may be targeting different markets in that you have a
product and I have a service, but if you gave it a serious try I am certain it
would work out well for you (and you can share some of that new money with
me!).

~~~
rms
Thanks for the tips. It's actually more difficult to advertise than I thought,
because "kratom" is a banned keyword on Google. I can't advertise on other
appropriate keywords like "pain" and I can't use kratom in the ad. So most of
the people selling kratom on Google adwords only mention that they sell Kava,
which is another worthwhile legal drug that is fortunate enough to have
registered supplement status in the USA.

I gotta try and get kratom approved as a supplement by the FDA, the process
doesn't look too bad. But if they want to inspect a facility, I'm screwed.

Adbrite won't let me advertise either, even if I claim to be selling incense.
I gotta try and get the $5 back from them, because they haven't run a single
ad for me. I haven't try Overture yet, I'll give them a try.

So far I've had the best success with Amazon/Clickriver. The minimum CPC is
$.10 which kind of sucks, but they let me make really obnoxious advertisements
about kratom. They also give you as many impressions as you want. I'm up to
50,000 impressions with a .03% click through rate; it's great that they don't
cut or overcharge for low click through ads.

~~~
gscott
If you advertise on individual web sites the web site owner approves or
disapproved your ads, you might try that. Adbrite then click on Directory.

Also, Adbrite is kind of slow. If they have not approved your ad in one day,
that is not unusual. It can take two days often.

~~~
rms
Oh, thanks. I was getting disapproved for the network wide ads. I just bought
a $.30 ad for a "Pimps and Hos" game, hopefully the owner approves it.

~~~
gscott
Keep on buying ads like that until you find the right ones, over a few months
I was able to find the good sites that had low prices for there ads (far too
low, like $5 to $10 a month). Now I get significant traffic for almost no
money compared to spending huge sums on Google Adwords. Adbrite is excellent
over the long haul.

------
rms
All of the world's Kratom comes from www.wholesaleshamanicherbs.com. There is
an unofficial supplier enforced price floor of $9/ounce and no Kratom vendor
goes below this price.

So I have the cheapest kratom on the internet. The google adwords aren't
saturated so maybe I can get users for $0.10/click, which would be profitable
for me. I've also heard that Google charges low page ranked sites more for
Adwords and I suspect my pageranking is low enough that Google might punish
me.

Because of how I interpret the laws in the USA, I can sell Kratom only for the
purposes of incense. A quick google search will review much use for Kratom
beyond this but it makes marketing more difficult. I can't market Kratom as a
wonder drug that makes you happy and productive that also might help you lose
weight.

-

My friends think the website looks like a scam because there is a buy button
on the first page. But from an information architecture perspective, I can't
justify moving the buy links to a separate page with nothing else on it.

Is your first impression of my site that it must be a scam? Is there anyway I
can do to make my site look more reliable?

~~~
Tichy
It makes a really weird impression that you are referring to Wikipedia and
Google for actual information on your product.

I think you need some information that underlines your trustworthiness. There
is not even a picture of the actual product.

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RyanGWU82
Ummm, grow the pie. Make it your life's mission to educate people on Kratom.
If more people want it, and they only have two sources for it, then you're in
great shape.

~~~
rms
My headline is a little misleading. There are many different sites selling
kratom at the retail level. There is only one site selling wholesale kratom.
Out of all the retail vendors, I have the cheapest price.

If a new wholesale vendor were to enter the market, that wholesaler would be
able to make a great deal of money very quickly.

------
rms
Email me (in profile) if you want a free sample of Kratom, I will give samples
to 5 people. You must be 18 or older.

