Ryan Deluca came from humble beginnings. He had a vision for starting an online business without a clue how to get started. He was a visionary entrepreneur and fitness enthusiast back in the late 1990s. He purchased the domain name bodybuilding.com February 16, 1999 (via domain name inception date site CheckPageRank.net) for $20,000 and started the business out of the home garage. And launched the site April 13, 1999. With little to no visitors coming to his website, he couldn't see how he would earn necessary monies to sustain the business. Despite not having enough wet traffic nor loyal clientele to keep sales revenues coming in smoothly, continued moving forward with his online business vision of growing bodybuilding.com to a nationally respected Internet business, earning acknowledgment and respect from professional IFBB bodybuilders and companies across the globe. After purchasing the domain name and running the business of his home garage, he began to get enough orders to the point where he needed to transition into a professional office building. Deluca understood the power of the Internet and how he could reach his target audience.
Connecting With The Target Audience
Ryan used a number of marketing ploys to promote the site in the fitness industry. The first ploy he used was networking with professional bodybuilders and possibly promoting bodybuilding supplements at fitness shows. This is a number one vehicle for the immediately gaining free word-of-mouth advertising just about anything. Promoting bodybuilding.com and bodybuilding events placed a seed in the minds of fitness competitors knowing they can order their supplements at an affordable price and receive new orders virtually right away. Former Mr. Olympia and IFBB pro Jay Cutler once purchased supplements from bodybuilding.com before starting his own company called Cutler Nutrition. Fitness Shields gave bodybuilding.com necessary exposure to grow the site without shelling out major dollars for online advertising.
Competitors
The success of Bodybuilding.com allegedly created jealousy among founders of competing fitness supplement websites. With Bodybuilding.com earning national recognition across America in 1999, it quietly encouraged potential copycats to engage in supplements sales competition.
Bodybuilding.com offers competing prices and quick fitness supplement deliveries:
MuscleandStrength.com (Started in 2006).
Muscle and Strength stands out in a unique way. While Muscle and Strength is possibly an arm deriving possibly from Muscle and Fitness magazine as an online supplement dealer and ranks well on Alexa and in search engines, they have one unique trait that keeps them one step ahead of generically competing fitness supplement websites and ranking high in competition with Bodybuilding.com: fresh and engaging website content. Many fitness supplement websites fail to keep their site content regularly updated with a unique combination of blogging + image + video, and only uploading .csv spreadsheets of the latest fitness supplements for sale or BOGOs. Muscle and Strength does what others fail to do daily, which is why M & S is closely in competition with Bodybuilding.com.
Comparison of The Companies
Bodybuilding.com and Muscle and Strength rely on the pull medium to drive hordes of traffic. The pull medium can refer to a unique combination of leveraging social networks, email newsletter marketing, adding links in YouTube video descriptions to specific pages on both fitness supplement websites, and most importantly, unique website content. Content is and always will be the number one method of driving large amounts of traffic from search engines and social networks. Bodybuilding.com and Muscle and Strength understand that.
Creative Marketing Strategies
The internet provides an avenue for them to reach the local and national audience mostly based off of creativity and effort of human energy, with PPC advertising taking a backseat until later on when sales revenues became greater from online supplement sales. This is the beauty of having a people-powered online business and making the best of natural internet marketing.
Bodybuilding.com and MuscleandStrength.com both have long-term strategic objectives. Their goal is to keep their target loyal audience engaged in longevity through marketing ploys such as offering fun contests for supplement giveaways, emailing opted in subscribers about one-day discount sales and 4-hour super discounts through copying and pasting a unique code sent to their email inboxes, and providing a way for their followers to stay connected with them on social media like Twitter.com, Facebook.com, YouTube.com, Pinterest.com, Instagram.com, and LinkedIn.com.
Another strategic objective both fitness supplement websites quietly use in reducing costs for advertising and increasing sales is sharing content on social networks and using the energy of the people to share that content with their family and friends. This gives both fitness supplement companies free exposure and increased sales without shelling out one dime for online advertising costs. Because the Internet is mostly driven by word of mouth and content sharing ones networks, this results in companies maximizing Web profit potential, because the Internet is also a portal mostly based on a relationship oriented foundation.
Last but not least, both fitness supplement websites use something besides directly promoting themselves through content marketing, video marketing, and social media engagement that keeps them one step ahead in maximizing Internet marketing profits. This ploy is known as affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a process whereas a publisher or someone known as a third-party independent contractor signs up as an affiliate for someone's site. They promote the advertiser only website or blog alongside their site content. When a site visitor clicks in advertisement on the publishers blogger website and makes a purchase, the site owner earns an affiliate commission. Bodybuilding.com and MuscleandStrength.com incorporate what's called an affiliate program in their marketing mix.
Related: Ryan Deluca - vrfitnessinsider.com
This marketing ploy gives both fitness supplement companies of peace of mind knowing they can reduce their pay per click ad spends and maximize sales potential through offering a commission only based structured to third-party publishers without additional benefits. It's a win-win for both companies as the end result, though MuscleandStrength.com doesn't rank as well as Bodybuilding.com due to less domain age and not enough website and forum content to gain the lead in search engines over BB. Despite M & S not ranking as well as bodybuilding.com due to not having a website seniority like BB, they offer one thing BB doesn't: free samples of certain bodybuilding supplements. This ploy alone keeps people coming back for more because people don't have to spend the average retail cost to purchase a supplement for the first time in order to know if it's worth buying.
Product, Place, Price, and Promotion
Bodybuilding.com spontaneously runs discount promotions on products and brands at random. Place? Only on their website. Price? Pricing is regularly fair. Users can get a discounted price on fitness supplements through bodybuilding.com if they search in their favorite search engine for discount fitness supplement coupon websites, and used the coupon codes in the checkout section of their Bodybuilding.com supplement purchases. Some of these discount coupon sites offer deep discounts to the point where BB customers can possibly get enormous discounts on shipping. Coupon codes from reputable discount coupon websites that promote and offer their coupons to BB customers looking to save money on fitness supplement purchases keeps site users coming back to Bodybuilding.com. Bodybuilding.com strives to keep fair pricing at bay.
MuscleandStrength.com does things in a way that possibly drives customers away. For example, though they have compelling site content plus engaging video with rich images and popular fitness supplements for sale, their prices are slightly higher than Bodybuilding.com. This makes M & S seem more like a transaction oriented site. Why? Their site content is attractive but prices are unattractive. An example of potential above average pricing on M & S would be a product called Natural Sterol Complex by Universal Nutrition. Bodybuilding BB sells NSC for $22.42. M & S sells for $23.49. This is not good for M & S because savvy online shoppers who perform price comparisons on fitness supplements begin to silently view M & S in a certain place in their minds being seen as a greedy-only out for the money site without offering additional value for new and existing customers (unable to conveniently purchase the product at the time they desire).
BB allows customers immediately order and place the item in their shopping cart and see the cost of the product plus shipping with or without having an existing customer account. This gives customers a rough idea of how much everything will cost including product and shipping. M & S prompts you to log in to your existing customer account or create a new customer accounts before viewing additional information such as cost of product plus shipping. Some people are possibly doing price comparisons and don't want to create new customer accounts, which can be seen as a possible turn off to price comparison shoppers. As a result, BB stays one step ahead of M & S in getting more sales and leveraging traffic plus free word-of-mouth advertising from sharing content on social networks vs. Muscle and Strength, thrusting BB closer to organically leveraging the global marketplace. If M & S would possibly use a combination of push strategy and pull strategy in leveraging more web traffic resulting in a possible increase of online sales, this could potentially encourage them to lower their prices, although their affiliate program commissions structure is better than Bodybuilding.com.
Conclusion
The mentioned companies both have unique traits and goodness to offer to their customers through their commerce styles differ in terms of pricing, consumer satisfaction, free trials of certain fitness supplements, and affiliate program commission structures. With the success of BB and M & S, this goes to show the Internet can make anyone successful that starts a business from humble beginnings and strives for excellence as a visionary entrepreneur in providing value to their clientele.