Marketing 101-- What not to do.

I regretted that I did not get any Bow Rests ready for the Oct. 1 opening of bow season, but by October 15 I had fifteen ready for sale. Wanting to see what value people would put on the Bow Rest I put one on a seven day auction on Ebay with a starting bid of $39.95. After three days there were no bids, but 15 people were watching the item, encouraging I
My Ebay pictures
thought. Then the first bid came in at the minimum. Later I learned that the bid was by a friend who had wanted a Bow Rest and wanted to get the bidding started, "stir the pot" as he described it. Well, it turned out that he bought it for the minimum bid. Next I resubmitted as a seven day auction with a minimum bid of $0.99 and asked my friends not to bid so I could see what value people in general put on my product.

Unfortunately, this time there were about 30 watchers, but no bidders until the last day. It actually went for $1.04, just two bids! This was revealing indeed. When I show bow hunters these pictures in person, the usual response is "Looks like a great idea." Why then were people unwilling to place a reasonable value on the Bow Rest?

What did I learn from this experience? Apparently Ebay is not the place to introduce a new idea or product. Lesson number two: PayPal sent an email asking whether I wanted to accept the bid of a person with no feedback, and I foolishly said yes. This person had nothing to gain by sending a report since he had no feedback record to spoil. Therefore why bother to send a report?

How could I get my message out? All my sales (all three of them) were to people who knew me and were aware of my success with the Bow Rest. Being 73 years of age, almost all my friends had given up bow hunting long ago. I figured I needed a web site where I could present the Bow rest to the public in general. Never having had a web site before, I naively assumed that if you put up a web site, people will find it using the search engines and I would have a national market for the Bow Rest. I found a hosting company that offered to register a domain name, prepare a web site, and submit the site to the search engines for only $80 per month. With my limited resources this sounded pretty good.

The domain name bowrest.com was taken, but I was told that my second choice, bowstabilizer.com was available. By email I sent in pictures of my bow rest, a description of what it does and how it works, and its features (shoot more accurately, hold a draw longer, minimizes game spooking movement, etc.). What I got was a web site that had none of my pictures or information and which was totally inappropriate. Fortunately they had a web modification program that was very good. In two weeks of trial and error I was able to come up with a reasonable web site.

I published it to the web, but was unable to get to it by typing the url into my browser. Instead I got a site offering the domain name for sale for $900. When I complained to customer service, I was told to wait and they would get the domain for me. I certainly knew they would not pay $900 for it, but I trusted that they were true to their word. Days went by, more calls to customer service, but still no results. Finally I talked to someone who actually looked into the situation and recognized that the domain name was not available. The person who told me bowstabilizer.com was available had erred. Bowstabilizer.net was a suggested alternative and I accepted it. Finally, after three weeks the web site was finally on line (www.bowstabilizer.net).

I soon realized that even a week after the hosting company submitted my url to the search engines, only on Yahoo was I able to find my site when searching for Compound Bow Rest & Holder, and it was on page four. When I search for a given term I rarely look past the first page for sites. So how do you get traffic to your site? I saw that I had a lot to learn.

Continued on the next post.