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Ask HN: Review our site - WorkingPoint

7 points by vinhboy ↗ HN
http://www.workingpoint.com

I am trying to figure out what I can do to promote our bookkeeping/accounting software.

Our customers love us, and CPC advertising is doing great, but we are struggling with organic traffic.

Does anyone here have suggestions on what things I can try to promote our site?

Specifically, what do you guys think would be an easy market to target? Any specific industries?

Should we do referrals? pump out an API? Mobile Apps?

Some people in our space include outright, freshbooks, indinero, etc... and they are all doing a kick ass job with SEO, PR, and what not, but we have always struggled with this.

Also, hiring outside SEO consulting has not done much for us...

All suggestions and comments are appreciated.

Disclaimer: This post may seem a bit self-serving and spammy, but it's really not. I am genuinely interested in how other startup approach "traditional marketing", because as an engineer, analyzing CPC, CPM is much easier for me. Unfortunately that is not a viable solution.

16 comments

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RDDavies
Hmm. You've done a good job promoting it now, I'm looking into it :P. Any chance you guys integrate with shopping carts (magento, etc)?

I work a lot with organic SEO, not so much with Social Media. Let me know if you all need a little help, I'm close with some excellent social media types as well. ryandavies@gmail.com

jbail
A couple suggestions:

The tagline "The Online Small Business Management Solution" doesn't scream bookkeeping to me. If I hadn't read your HN post to know this is primarily a bookkeeping app, I would have never known.

Also, trim down the list on the right of the homepage (the one with Accounting, Invoicing, etc). It's overwhelming to look at and you could use that space to draw people into your call to action...Sign Up Now (which is hidden below the fold).

vinhboy
Thanks for the suggestions. I am not a fan of the tagline either, but I may be over simplifying by saying we do "bookkeeping", we have a lot more than that.
petervandijck
Yes, but you should still have 1 focus. Don't worry that you can't explain everything in the tagline, "bookkeeping" is much better than "management". You have to be specific. You'll get a chance to explain all the other wonderful stuff later :)
golateef
What do you mean when you say "do referrals"? Are you thinking organic (cheap) or paid (expensive)?
vinhboy
Give our customers incentive to refer their friends?
willlangford
I would agree the list on the right side is just too long. Maybe tweak the homepage design a bit to scream book keeping software.

I also noticed you didn't mention conversion rate.. traffic is great but if you aren't converting what's the use? Maybe promoting signup might help too and just get more conversions out of your current traffic. Also Signal vs Noise from 37signals has some cool articles on homepage design vs conversion.

My main income is from ecommerce.. if you had an API with Mageno, CREloaded, OSCommerce, ZenCart.. sure some of those might be out dated and old. but they have a heavy user base.. once integrated use that angle to get free traffic as well.

Goodluck!

vinhboy
Thanks for the feedback. Our conversion rate is good for CPC. We have done a ton of work with LPs and A/B testing, so we feel confident in that area.

I will look at the API consumers you mentioned. Thank you.

exline
Looking at the price, you might be under pricing your offering. Quickbooks goes from between $160 and $320 and intuit does force after a few years. I would add a third more expensive plan if I were you.

Also you should talk about benefits, not features. Technical people like features (we implemented them after all) but most users want to know about the benefits. It is easier to sell how the software will benefit them vs how cool a feature is has.

If CPC is working great and you are gaining paying customers, I'd keep doing more of that. As long as your customer acquisition cost is low, then keep pumping money into CPC for the time being.

You seem to have a lot of good content. I'm surprised that you are struggling with organic traffic. I just checked out the customer list you have, very impressive. It would appear that you are doing quite well. Perhaps you just need to add another plan and get more revenue per client?

vinhboy
I like your "benefit" proposition. I will definitely keep this in mind on my next foray into marketing.
paraschopra
I will give you an idea. I'm sure you have tons of data on small/medium businesses income and expenses. Anonymize it and publish juicy reports and then promote that data (pretty much like OKCupid).
vinhboy
Good idea. I think I will make this one of my next project.
varikin
I like this idea, but also consider your privacy policy before doing this.
[deleted]
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happybuy
I'd suggest that you change your homepage 'Sign Up Now' button to something clearer which emphasises that all of the features are available for free; e.g. "Sign Up Now - It's Free". This button should then link to a enhanced version of https://signup.workingpoint.com/free/ (which may highlight that for only $10 a month you also get the premium features).

Your free offering provides a great deal of useful functionality - I'd concentrate on getting people into the free plan, then once all of their important data and processes are going through your system, it will be relatively easy to have a strategy to encourage users onto your paid plans.

It wasn't until I went to the 'pricing and sign-up' page that I could tell that practically 90% of the functionality could be used for free.