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Ask HN: What can I do to improve my website?

7 points by chrishaum ↗ HN
I am the co-owner of http://www.novapress.net, a site that sells test preparation products developed by my business partner. We recently made a major change to our website (switching from Drupal to Wordpress, which should make our lives easier, since we want the site to be as 'hands-off' as possible). Since the transition, site traffic has decreased noticeably; I think the main reason is that we changed our site structure, and the new site navigation is not reflected in our Google listing.

I believe that our website has great potential to be a profitable medium for selling our test prep products. What actionable advice do you have for how we could increase directed traffic to the site, increase conversion, and generally make the site more profitable?

13 comments

[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 27.3 ms ] thread
brianlash
I wanted to tell you that I used Nova materials to study for the GMAT and absolutely loved them. I remember Nova's concern for teaching fundamental math and verbal stuff where most other companies were preoccupied with superficial strategies and one-trick pony tactics.

That stuff has its place in test prep, but there's a strong case for balance between theory and strategy. I really appreciated your materials for that.

dbz
I'm going to assume the design ect. isn't causing the problem, so I have some suggestions in the order of what I would do:

1. Posting on HN

2. Email all your favorite bloggers

3. Email TechCrunch (you may get lucky with a ten second email)

4. Go onto the correct types of forum and advertise (possibly Second Life forums?)

Now, if you are just interested in getting some traffic, you can:

1. Ask your friends to post the link on their social media sites

2. Pay some myspace dudes with tens of thousands of friends $50 bucks to message all of their friends a note you have written (including the link of course)

3. Go onto Second Life and pay advertisers to advertise for you

4. Eh, Google Adsense

Well, that's all I can think of off the top of my head.

eam
Not that's probably an issue, but the site looks too much like apple!
Tichy
Can't you do redirects for Google from the old navigation to the new?
shawndrost
This may also improve your pagerank, since all the links in the wild that point to 404s will point to real content.
mike-cardwell
Redirecting your old pages to the new versions should have been the first thing you considered before changing it... Otherwise you're just wasting all the page rank you previously built up.
apsurd
No direct experience but I have always thought running affiliate programs for online-digital products makes great sense. Let the sellers do the selling and everybody wins.
ohashi
Doesn't sound like you want to improve your website, just drive traffic. Basically you've got 3 major ways to drive traffic:

search - paid or organic

links - from anywhere, anyone

type in - people going to your site directly, often connected to offline advertising

you're probably best of scaling one/both of the first two options.

organic seo rankings is going to take time, you should spend maybe couple hours a day building links to your site for keywords you think are most relevant.

paid search (sem) is another scalable and faster strategy. it's not 'hands off' and requires you to create (well ok, not requires, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND) some landing pages optimized to each keyword and drive traffic to them. It's a math game, clicks * price per click < your margin * conversion rate. YOU WILL LOSE MONEY. You will also learn and improve if you do this properly and can find keywords where you can meet that basic criteria.

as far as getting links... there is the tried and true for SEO purposes: article marketing, directory marketing, social commenting. But don't forget the real purpose of those links back in the day was to actually DRIVE traffic. I saw some creative ways here about having myspace messages, same with twitter, facebook, etc. The best advice I can give you here is MAKE PEOPLE WANT TO LINK YOU. Create some compelling and interesting content. (checkout mint's strategy http://jasonputorti.com/post/472866002/how-mint-com-acquired...)

Good luck.

chrishaum
Thanks for the advice on redirects; I'll do those post-haste.

As far as the site content and navigational structure go, does anyone have any comments? Thanks brianlash for the compliment - I do wholeheartedly stand behind our product.

A big issue is that of conversion. Our jump rate is about 70% right now; it was 80% before the switch to Wordpress, which is a good sign. Still, our conversion is ~0.1% currently, I would estimate.