Paintball Advertising

Thanks for looking at our advertising page. The truth is banner ad advertising is not a very effective way of generating leads and sales for your business. Granted, it's easy to overpay for a prominent spot on a popular paintball site and boost your ego by having your brand in front of everyone. At that point it should be considered branding and not sales lead generation.

At one point I was making good money selling merchants and manufacturers banner ad space on this site. I'd post some mediocre graphic ad they would send and count the impressions that always seemed to produce a poor click through rate.

I'm just not willing to do that anymore.

Let me share with you what I've learned and I hope it can help you(and paintball) in some way.

First of all let's separate direct sales lead generation from trying to gain search engine results on Google. Buying text links is strongly frowned upon by Google and your internal SEO(search engine optimization) is a whole different thing than where we are going here.

People don't react to graphic advertising or text links like they used to in the late 1990's and early 2000's. We've learned to skip over the ads, partially because we are bombarded with it and also because it isn't what we are searching for right at that exact moment.

When little Tommy is searching for something to mount on his Spyder MR1's tactical rail, he is going to see what his friends are using or see what people recommend on the forum he frequents. He may also walk into his local store to see what they offer. But, when it comes time to buy he is probably going to open up Google and start searching for what keywords he has built in his mind as the item he wants. Let's say he searches for, "Spyder MR1 Rail Upgrades".

It doesn't take much to think merchants should be optimising for the main, overly competitive, paintball related keywords. Every merchant wants to come up number one for key phrases like: Paintball or Paintball Guns. That's fine, but it's not going to get you the sale for Tommy's MR1 accessory. What Tommy is looking for is a small key phrase that isn't frequently searched for. Large merchants can't optimize for every paintball related key phrase. It would be like the ol' needle in a hay stack scenario.

Here is where your dollar is best spent. Affiliate marketers, like myself, do extensive keyword research and optimize for these smaller key phrases. I don't want to take your position for: Paintball or Paintball Guns. I don't have the resources and it would be silly for me to go after that, especially when I'm not worryed about branding. What I do well is seek out go after these small key phrases that have a higher conversion rate and are much easier to capture.

I'd take 10 good small key phrase SERPs(search engine result placements) over Paintball or any other trophy key phrase on Google. It's easier for me to get there, has a much higher conversion rate, and a lot less competition.

Back to our scenario; after doing key word research I find out that about 60 people a month are searching for, "Spyder MR1 Rail Upgrades". I crate a page optimized for that key phrase and capture it on Google where Tommy clicks through. I pre-sell(by recommending it) Tommy on a product and send him to your site through an affiliate link posted on my page to the exact page you have this product listed. Now you've got Tommy on your site and you can offer him your great customer service, free shipping and up-sell him other items for his MR1.

All this off a phrase you would have never singled out and you've probably left for your competitors to capture.

I work for you and you only pay me when I get you results. Imagine getting 100 affiliates like this producing for you.

This is the type of thing I do every day as a full time affiliate marketer and I'm damn good at it.

What's the point you ask?

Opening your business to affiliate marketers is much more effective than plastering banners all over the place. It's cheaper and based on only paying people who convert for you. If I can't send you traffic that brings you sales, you pay me nothing.

What's involved?

Although there are in-house affiliate programs and add-on software for your site, I'd very highly recommend going to an affiliate network. Commission Junction(cj.com) is a huge one and one of my favorites. But, there are many networks to choose from: LInkshare, Share-a-sale, GAN.

There would be fees associated with maintaining the program with the network and they can provide a turnkey solution or someone to educate and help with getting you setup. You could also find a outsourced affiliate manager to set up and maintain your program.

Typically, paintball merchants offer a 5%-20% commission and can base it on performance(base of 5%, 10% after $5k in monthly sales, etc). And like I said, you only pay your affiliates when they produce for you. It's a win-win.

Please consider starting an affiliate program instead of spending all of your money on banner ads, failed directory listings and other forms of ignored media. Paintball deserves better for it's players and most certainly for it's hard working merchants that are trying to survive in this economy.

I'm not selling you anything here and am not offering to set up a program for you. What I want is to join the program you get set up. Please contact us after you get the affiliate program going or if you'd like recommendations for highly motivated Affiliate Managers that I've worked with over the years in this business.

We'd love to start sending you people like Tommy and the 50,000+ other paintballers we get every month to our tiny paintball team's website.

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The info below is out dated.

We are not currently accepting new advertising.

Why should you advertise on Wolfpack Paintball?

The obvious reason is that your customers are here everyday. We have a very paintball focused audience made up of active paintball players looking for advise, products and fun.

We serve new updates regularly with useful resources and the type of information people bookmark. Many of our visitors come from direct bookmarking or typing in the address. They are seeking us directly.

What sets up apart from the others?

We are ranked by Alexa.com as one of the more popular paintball websites(http://www.alexa.com/topsites/category/Top/Sports/Paintball). That puts us above or with paintball websites like: PaintballTimes.com, Facefull.com, Bpjunkie.com, ActionPursuitGames.com, WARPIG.

We have top rankings for major paintball related keywords on Google. That makes our site very visible for people seeking new information. This could put your company in front of these people everyday.

Advertise Your Paintball Related Business

Why will you benefit from advertising here?

Our paintball team includes a Search Engine Optimization Specialist. Our pages and articles are created very search engine friendly and usually get indexed by Google within a day, and in some cases a few hours.

Our website uses only "WhiteHat" SEO techniques and is designed for long term visibility. This type of professionalism will be applied to your advertising as well.

What can we offer you?

Wolfpack Paintball generates over 45,000 page loads with 22,000+ unique visitors a month.

We offer two basic website spaces for advertising. Both are very visible "run of site" ads and have a good click-through-rate. Our website currently contains about 400 pages of original useful content and is growing every week.

The most affordable spot is a 125 x 125 pixel graphic positioned below our right side navigation menu. The other is a standard 468x60 graphic banner that displays at the top and bottom of our pages. The rotation of top display and bottom display is set to 'even'. This means every user who loads more than one page will potentially see your ad above and/or below the content of our pages.

We may offer other advertising spots by request.

Our general website content has a neutral to positive tone. We want to keep all advertising in this tone.

We host all creative/banners and manage our ads through Google Ad Manager. We have a maximum of three banner ads rotating and a max of two 125px square ads at and given time.

We are not currently accepting new advertising.