Breda posted recently about Luckygunner.com‘s use of “gunbunnies” at the recent Bullet Fest event, linking to an interview with Brian Crane. Completely unrelated to her topic, here’s something I found very interesting:
Brian: I have an arrangement with them which was essentially tied to how the marketing of the business did. That’s going to be off the record what that actual arrangement is. Needless to say, I became one of the co-founders and they said, “Brian, go do our online marketing. Figure this stuff out.”
Andrew: So what’s the first thing that you do, Brian? You come in there, they put all this on your shoulders. What do you do?
Brian: Immediately start reaching out to the bloggers. So in our particular space, you had just a ton of sites that all had really solid back link profiles. I’d say there’s probably at least 100 active bloggers that have page rank five sites where they’re talking about guns. You start reaching out to them and working with them to promote Lucky Gunner through their sites. Holistically from a marketing standpoint, you want to get that community of influencers pushing us to their . . . twofold, to their actual readers but then also linking to us because it was building our back link profile very quickly as well.
I think the tipping point was essentially there was an event called the Gun Bloggers Rendezvous and not to go into a lot of details, but the Gun Bloggers Rendezvous does a raffle where they give away a bunch of stuff as part of this raffle and they were selling tickets online. And they were using PayPal as the channel for selling these tickets. And PayPal came in and said, “This has to do with guns. We’re going to shut you down.” They cut the raffle off in the middle of it. They essentially removed the component of being able to sell the tickets in the middle of this push to do the raffle, and so we stepped in and we were the back end for those raffle ticket sales. And that introduced us also to a much bigger community of these gun bloggers because people were like, “Awesome. You guys are helping out. Screw PayPal. We hate PayPal.” It’s an interesting space just because people are like . . . it’s a very combative stance because the tech companies don’t really get or like firearms.
Andrew: I saw some blog posts about you and with you on that issue. So apparently it was really heated, and you got a lot of attention and as you say a lot of props for coming in and helping out.
According to the interview, Luckygunner.com was in business for two months before he was brought on board. During that two months they were moving merchandise at a rate of about $250k per year. At the end of the year they’d done $3.2 million in sales.
Brilliant marketing move! And I was quite happy about it, myself. Thanks again, Brian! I’m glad we were able to help out a new company.