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?
Hmmm, I get it now. It's a tough situation... if I were you I'd just keep doing it like you're doing it now, maybe even lose the wikipedia link (since it could be construed as a hint), stress that it's an incense only and all other uses may be illegal (or not, maybe it would be better to not mention it? IANAL), and let all your sales come from word of mouth.
After all, do you really want to build a business around this? You're playing with fire. I've read a few horror stories about the FDA freezing entire businesses with little or no chance of appeal. The legendary Gary Halbert (RIP) I believe stopped dealing with anything like this in the 80s because of them. But if you sell it as incense only and explicitly warn against all other uses (and IANAL and IDPOOTV so obviously consult one) you could just keep this as a nice passive-ish stream of income that'll grow naturally for years.
You will probably want to delete all of these comments, too :)
>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!).
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.
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.
There seems to be another catch-22 here: if you are too successful at promoting kratom, and people are buying it because of its opiate-like properties, then you're inviting the FDA (DEA?) to schedule it.
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?