What is wrong with my site ???

[lisastorey]

I think it is a fantastic service (obviously biased) but very few people are registering...... am I just wasting my time ??

Would value any feedback.

Site is www.siteeagle.com

Thank you
Lisa

 

[Ozzy]

Hi Lisa,
I'm afraid your website doesn't inspire confidence to peopl eto hand over their details. People are a lot more sceptical these days of websites, so your website needs to be "pukka" in both copy and design.
Sorry if this offends, but I believe you need to spend some quality money on getting a professional website graphic designer to at least design the website visually. Looks account for a lot online.

 

[lisastorey]

Thanks for your feeback,

Not sure if we have the budget for graphic design but will certainally have a look at the design.

Lisa

 

[Ozzy]

To give you an idea, my designers I use charge about £300-400 depending on what I am after. For that they design visuals and then export those visuals into the necessary pages I need but without any content. I can then go and put in the content I want.

There are plenty of website designers on here, so hopefully one will pop up shortly who may be able to help.

 

[Jodimyatt]

Have to agree with Ozzy in the days when you here about ebay scams, almost got caught myself in one today. You need to look super clean.

I may be able to help you on the web design front lisa.

 

[kyber]

I like the idea of this service. The site does need to look more serious though.

I used to use the old NetMind MindIt service a lot on my websites and many people signed up. That service was closed down long ago but alternatives exist such as http://www.changedetect.com/ - how do you think you are differentiated from changedetect?

Stuart

 

[lisastorey]

Hi Stuart

ChangeDetect is obviously one of our competitors and have been around for a while, having said that when we orginally came across the idea six months ago we did a lot of research into other companies doing simular things and it took us a long time to come across these guys so obviously they do not market themselves a lot ( although you obviously found them ok !).

We are currently in the process of having the website redesigned as per feedback from this forum,

We did think about offering the service free and selling advertising space but held off ... maybe we need to re- think this ??

Our system is capable of offering hourly monitoring and we have the infrastructure to support this, maybe we need to offer this as a differentiator ? As a previous user of a simular service I welcome any feedback/ suggestions you have.

Thanks
Lisa

 

[Webstuff]

Unless you're running from either your own server, or an unmonitored server, providing this service for free probably wouldn't be a great idea (I'm guessing it works by harvesting sitedata, and as such would create a fair amount of server workload). Simply have it redesigned well, and maybe buy yourself some google adwords (and provide a different payment service to paypal if possible!). People are bound to subscribe to a service like this, especially if its organised in a nice, simply, easy to use manner.

 

[clickprofits]

Another possible problem is that the Google Alerts service offers some of what you do and is a a free service (although it's not so good for monitoring individual web pages/sites, it's very good for picking up news stories on a topic, company or industry for example).
http://www.google.co.uk/alerts

Mark

 

[Rob Holmes]

Hi Lisa,

The design is not the biggest factor holding your signus back... actually it's not so bad. I've signed up for services on worse looking sites..

Heres the real reason (except for no traffic) your site is not harvesting signups...

The main reason people haven't signed up is you don't give any powerful benefits to your service.

I don't know why I would sign up - why should I ? Whats in it for me? Why do I need to know when pages change? Whats the benefit if this?

Convince me on your site why I absolutely should have your product, make it a total no-brainer, maybe offer an incentive too and I'll sign up.

Rob

 

[Webstuff]

Matrixx makes a great point; You generally need to tell people what to think. Give them a clear list of things they can accomplish with your service, with buzz-phrases; "never fall out of the loop again!" (though probably not that poorly thought-up).

 

[lisastorey]

Hi guys,

thanks for all your input.

I am currently putting together a marketing campaign as we expect to have to sell the idea to people to get them to the site in the first place.... but will have a re-think about the home page (i didn't really want it to look too cluttered though so might introduce links to more informaiton!)

Also I am thinking of changing tact slightly and might start to market to companies aswell as individual users so that they can monitor their competitors sites !?!?

 

[Rob Holmes]

Lisa,

Just for the benefit of readers here could you give us some of the benefits of using your service?

Rob

 

[lisastorey]

Rob,

Here goes, some of the benefits are :

An alert is generated when something on a webpage changes, the 'something' is specified by you and can be configured to be that something is added to the site, something is removed or you can monitor for keywords within the changes.

The type of page you monitor is up to you, it could be a software download page or it could be something like this forum if you are only interested in a particular subject area e.g. tell me when a new thread is added concering firewalls.

This service will save you time if you are a regular user of the web as a source of information. For example, I am currently studying a part-time degree in rehabilitation so have set my account to monitor various websites, including the department of health and the world health organisation monitoring for the word ' Rehabilitation '. As soon as something is added I am alerted !

Most sites offer a newsletter or even an alert e-mail system but setting them up in SiteEagle means they can all be managed centrally instead of having subscriptions all over the place.


Good sales pitch ???

 

[Webstuff]

If I may put in an opinion ("no!", I hear you cry ), if its for a sales pitch you might want to word it less like a dictionary and more like they've just bought the item, and the world is now their Oyster.

For example;

"with our award-winning (If its not award winning, then its cutting edge, intuitive, or in some way better than everything else they've previously looked at) service, you need never again be the last to know when your favourite websites add new content...
...etc...
... or miss out on once in a lifetime offers on your favourite products..."

My sales pitch isn't the best either, but try to highlight how much emptier their life will be without your service. Just a note though; whilst this will work for individuals, you're going to need technical information on hand as well for businesses, techies, etc.

 

[Johill]

Hi Lisa

Your service does make more sense now you have explained it - especially when you described how you would use it personally. I agree with the last post though in that it might be worth spending your marketing budget on a copywriter to get some really attention grabbing copy.

How about getting a copywriter to produce a compelling article which you could then send round to the editors of all the college / uni student newspapers to get some editorial coverage.

Another target audience might be press or policy & research departments in charities to help them monitor issues - I used to work in this sector so if you are interested in following up, then send me a private message.

Regards

Jo

 

[lisastorey]

Hi All,

Just to say thankyou for all your valuable input. Based on this we are having the site redesigned properly (hopefully new design will be up and running).

We have also be talking to a marketing person (as you see above I am not much of a sales person) and are going to launch a campaign to coincide with the new site.

Thanks to all for your input.
Lisa

 

[jayrconsulting]

Lisa,
there is a bigger basic problem than the look and feel of the site and that is it's visibility ( or lack of ! ) on the web. I did a search using 'page monitoring' and got 18 million hits - but your site did not show in the first 20 pages - I got bored looking after that ! For 'website monitoring' - similar results !
This gives two important points;

1. You are trying to get a foothold in a market where there is already a LOT of competition ( and many of the competitors are free ! ). You need to go and have a look at them ( try using the search terms above ) and see if you are genuinely offering some differentiator to entice people to use your service out of this mass of offerings !

2. You need to get some work done urgently in the SEO area to get your website up the rankings, otherwise no one is going to find it in the first place, which I think is probably your basic problem at the moment.

I hope that this does not all sound too negative -t just means some work and perseverance.

Good luck
John roberts

 

[Rob Holmes]

Hi,

John - sorry but I disagree that what you describe is the basic problem.

Here is the logical order.. You must do these 3 steps in the order I put them below, mix up the order or miss one out and the business will fail.

(Try putting them in a different order and you'll see what I mean)

1. Get a good product

2. Sell it well

3. To alot of relevant people.

Sorry, it's not often I correct a post but in this case I think it's crucial.

Rob

 

[jayrconsulting]

Rob,
I agree whole heartedly with your 3 basic steps. I was assuming from the previous posts that Lisa has a good product and from the various posts, that the sales campaign is being totally revamped, so really I was only commenting on what was left ( i.e. step 3 )

You have to forgive me - I am only one of those 'training' types !! and it has been a long day !

John

 

[Rob Holmes]

Hi John,

Cool I just had to clarify it as Lisa's had alot of advice and I didn't want her (or anyone else following the thread) to get confused.

I agree with you that the SEO is crucial and a good web designer will strategically build the whole site with this in mind.

I know what you mean about the long days

Rob

 

[kyber]

Hi,
1. Get a good product
2. Sell it well
3. To alot of relevant people.

Just to be pedantic for a change, 1 is not a prerequisite. At an extreme, a lot of people (including discount and chain stores) do very well out of what I am sure we would all agree are poor products. We could get into a lengthy debate about this around meaning of qualityt, fitness for purpose, creating markets etc. I do think your model is too simplistic.

Frankly, I would rather sell a product that is cheap and convenient for me to provide to one person for huge profit.

I have no idea what you mean by relevant other than by definition if they have bought from me they are relevant. By 2 and 3 are your refering to you supply chain processes and marketing segmentation et al?



Stuart

 

[kyber]

As is often the case, it is the overall proposition that it not clear as has come out in the dicussions above. I think your additional clarifications have helped to position your service much better in my mind.

You asked about my own experience. Well, for the mickey mouse sites I have been involved with (very small businesses) over the years, we used NetMind for a few years to provide a button on the bottom of every page of our website that surfers could use to request a message when the page they were interested in was changed. This can now of course be done with various bits of free software by the site owners themselves but it is probably still easier to have someone else run the service for you. When NetMind started to charge for the service (at very high rates - ie. wanted to close down really) we went off the idea. The service is now gone. I have not yet found anything as easy or neat to add but I have not looked very hard. Here is an example from April 2000 (using the wayback machine - obviously the service does not work now).

On the bigger sites I was involved in, we had a very different agenda (off the top of my head):

• Monitoring competitor sites
• Tracking changes to own sites as a management compliment to internal change management reporting (and to confirm - this was the bad old days - that changes had in fact been propogated)
• To monitor for accidental/malicious changes to our sites
• To montitor that the sites were live

These days, there are more sophisticated techniques for the bigger sites for monitoring competitor sites which I shall not go into. You can guess why. I still think that this is of interest to smaller businesses though not so much from a direct competition point of view (as they tend not to compete on price but on service, location, specialist knowledge, etc.) but on awareness of market trends and for good ideas.

You have therefor several customer segments to think about with the average consumer as a direct target at the bottom of the pile, site owner wanting to retain a customer next up, and competitior monitoring at the top as the biggest commercial benefit. I think the second of these will be the easiest to target first though to get yourself known.

That's my twopence worth anyway.

Stuart

 

[Webstuff]

I agree with you that the SEO is crucial and a good web designer will strategically build the whole site with this in mind.

Although, its little help if all your competitors do the same A small amount of targeted advertising, such as google adwords is a good way to get an initial boost. Personally, I like building up a strong, 'reciprocal link' foundation for websites when possible, but thats only something I'd recommend to people with LOTS of patience (just wait a decade or two, and google will update...).

 

[Rob Holmes]

Just to be pedantic for a change, 1 is not a prerequisite. At an extreme, a lot of people (including discount and chain stores) do very well out of what I am sure we would all agree are poor products. We could get into a lengthy debate about this around meaning of qualityt, fitness for purpose, creating markets etc. I do think your model is too simplistic.

Frankly, I would rather sell a product that is cheap and convenient for me to provide to one person for huge profit.

I have no idea what you mean by relevant other than by definition if they have bought from me they are relevant. By 2 and 3 are your refering to you supply chain processes and marketing segmentation et al?



Stuart

Hi Stuart,

1 IS a prerequisite if you want to limit refunds. If you want to call it 'good for the price' feel free to - but price testing should fall into the selling it well category <smile>.

Frankly, I would rather sell a product that is cheap and convenient for me to provide to one person for huge profit.

Hmm - I think thats TOO ideal and leaves your buiness with a higher than desired vulnerability to competition.

I have no idea what you mean by relevant other than by definition if they have bought from me they are relevant. By 2 and 3 are your refering to you supply chain processes and marketing segmentation et al?

By relevant I mean they are looking for your product to buy. A simple example is using Google Adwords for targetted traffic as opposed to buying in 10,000 hits of untargetted traffic for £2 - Relevant = Hot buyers

I do think your model is too simplistic

The model is the key to creating a website that sells products well. Yes it's simplistic because I simplified it But each step has already filled hundreds of marketing books around the world. But each step must be performed in the order above, cannot be omitted and IMHO no other major steps are needed.

From experience so far (8 years of SEO, Web Design and Making Money For Clients) using these 3 steps have never failed.

Rob

 

[kyber]

I knew you would bite .... I will not build up a potential fire. I am playing with semantics and concepts somewhat. You are clearly successful and have benefited from 100's of marketing books.

Stuart

 

[Rob Holmes]

I knew you would bite .... I will not build up a potential fire. I am playing with semantics and concepts somewhat. You are clearly successful and have benefited from 100's of marketing books.

Stuart

LOL - I nearly didn't then thought I'd explain a bit more to help other readers.

I have read a *few* books - but don't claim to know it all and try to be teachable!



Rob

 

[lisastorey]

Wow .... what a response...

This was one of my first posts to this forum and I really didn't expect so much good advice (and for it to be so emotive :wink: )

Thanks everyone for your input, I really do apprieciate it.

Lisa

 

[kyber]

One of the great things about forums like this is that whilst the key queries are generally well addressed you often get spin off discussions that are of benefit to the community and because the membership is pretty much self selecting to a high standard (not much to interest the time wasters) you tend to get decent discussions without people getting personal (other than for a laugh).

The range of experience on this forum is incredible and is a tremendous asset to people starting out.

Stuart

 

[Rob Holmes]

I agree.



Rob

 

[kyber]

Oh no you don't!

 

[Webstuff]

and then I start talking....