BluesBear, Kodiak, here's a description of the site. I hope it's not too long, but there are a lot of points I need to make. Again, I really appreciate the offer to help promote this.
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Up until now there has been no site like Gunshopfinder.com on the internet. The whole purpose of the site is to give those potential new customers who don't know your shop exists--and there are many gun owners in your area who don't--a way to find you. It also gives those "gun shop junkies" who like to take an afternoon drive to check out new gun shops a way to find you.
They can find your shop by clicking on a star on a map of your state. When they do, they'll get a list of the subscribing shops in that area. They can then click on a star next to your shop's name, and get a full page description of your shop: a general description, the brands you carry, range facilities if you have them, gunsmithing services, hours, directions to your shop, a photo of your shop, a link to your website if you have one, and more. You can put whatever information about your shop that you want on that page.
They can also find you by selecting the By Town link on our site and clicking on your state. That will give them a full list of all the subscribing shops in the state. Again, they can click on the star next to your shop's name and get the full page description.
Another way they can find you is by brand. We have over 1,000 pages of individual models from manufacturers such as Kimber, Remington, CZ, Beretta, Colt, HK, S&W, and more. And we're adding more product pages every week. When the potential new customer is looking at a model--say a Smith and Wesson Model 60--they get a photo and a description. There's also a pull-down menu which they can use to find a Smith and Wesson dealer in a particular state. And, again, they can click on the shop to get the full page description.
Included in this package is an unlimited number of classified ads, including photos.
We've made it extremely easy to create the pages and the classified ads; all you need to do is type information into boxes on a form. To add photos, you just click a "Browse" button and our software uploads the photo, sizes it and puts it in the right place on the page.
All of these features--the full page description, being searchable by brand and so on, and the classified ads--are part of what we call the Enhanced package. We're offering a free trial subscription for the Enhanced package for six months. At the end of six months we'll give you a call to see if you want to pay to subscribe. If you do, the cost is just $10 a month. If you don't want to pay to subscribe, your shop will still be listed for free on the Gun Shops page for your state.
Considering that a single-line Yellow Pages listing costs $20 to $25, reaches only potential customers in your immediate area, and provides them with only your shop's name, address and phone number, we think you'll agree that this is a very good deal.
To see what the site is all about, go to
http://www.gunshopfinder.com . For an example of what a page looks like, go to the Wisconsin map at
http://www.gunshopfinder.com/wisconsingunshopmap.asp and click on the star next to Milwaukee. You'll see two examples of shops that have added photos as well as full descriptions.
We just started calling gun shops in late April, and it will take until June before we have shops in all fifty states listed. It will be probably over a year before we've contacted every shop in the US. Based on our experience with doing other websites, we're very comfortable in making the prediction that by the beginning of next year the site will be getting at least 100,000 visitors a month, and probably more.
If you already have a website, that's commendable; most shop owners don't recognize the potential. However, unless you've invested a lot of money having a professional search engine optimization tech work on your site--a service that can cost $300 or more a month--chances are that most people won't find you if they don't know your web address.
We've successfully gotten many, many sites in the top rankings on the search engines. For example, if you do a search for CZ pistols, you'll find The Shooters Shop is number two on Google. They're number one for the term Ed Brown pistols. They're number five for Kimber pistols, number five for Wilson Combat pistols, number one for cartridge boards, and about number six or so for Bushmaster rifles. In short, we've gotten them in the ten top rankings for just about every line they specialize in.
Gunshopfinder.com will be in the top ten results for a whole slew of search terms, including product names like those above and dozens of others, as well as terms such as Kansas gun shops, Michigan gun shops, etc.
For most shops that have websites, visitors are going to find those sites more quickly through gunshopfinder.com.
Again, the whole purpose of this site is to increase traffic and sales for the subscribing shops. We hope you'll see the value in being listed on gunshopfinder.com. If you'd like to try the trial subscription, you can either click on the Contact Us link on the site, or call us at 414-543-1916. We'll be more than happy to write your page for you, as we've written the descriptions for every other shop that we have on the site right now.
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