Ask HN: The webmaster nobody cared about

3 points by wishiknew 11 years ago | 8 comments

I own a website with a decent amount of traffic but my visitors couldn't care less about me, it seems. This is a music website and it features a set of handy tools (which I didn't write). I don't feel my visitors are telling themselves 'yeah this guy only gathered various tools he found on the Internet and added ads next to it' because the comments I've been getting for years are really positive ('thanks, this is so useful!'). My problem is that whenever I try to sell something to them, they don't care at all. And I'm not even trying to sell them rubbish. The first thing I tried is to put a banner on my hottest page, describing an ebook I felt I could write, to see how many people clicked on that. Then recently I recorded quality tracks in a studio and made a lesson for beginners (most of my visitors are) with them. I made that for free to gauge the interest. In both cases the CTR is about 1%. They're not even giving me a chance! It seems they're in this habit of using my tools and are able to ignore the rest. The only thing they like is the AdSense banner, which I've never quite understood as I hate ads. The thing is, AdSense only pays well from October to January, the rest of the year is meh. So what should I do, a blinking red banner saying "check this out"? I hate flashy alerts but perhaps most of the Internet uses them for a reason? Has anybody been in a similar position?

spocked 11 years ago |

A 1% CTR is quite normal for an adsense advert. Assuming your advert is a banner ad, it should have similar CTR.

It is important to understand that over time people develop banner blindness - your ad could have copy providing a lot of value, but the human brain would simply be ignoring it. I would suggest A/B testing with different types of ads, with different copy and call to actions.

One more suggestion is that you can build an email list. It might be slow at start, but over time as the list grows, you no longer have to depend on users coming to your website and clicking your ads. You can contact them directly in their inbox. Obviously don't spam them with useless emails - offer them something of value in every email and try to email them every month (or every week if you can). People also react differently to emails since they are more personal and if you build up trust, it should be a lot easier to get their attention.

wishiknew 11 years ago | |

My AdSense CTR is actually much better (3%-5%), that's what I don't understand. But I've just deployed a new version and I put some sexy unsplash.com images in my CTA and content. It's only been a few minutes but it's already looking much better. It still puzzles me how much you have to dress your content to make it attractive on the Internet, though. You could write articles in thirty seconds and get away with it as long as you put boobs and kitten pictures it seems.

spocked 11 years ago | | |

Images work really well when the user is surfing in general and not looking for something in particular. That explains why images are very important for Facebook Ads, while keywords are very important for Google adwords (search).

The only way to know is to keep running A/B tests.

rajacombinator 11 years ago |

1) don't make it personal, 2) don't blame your users, blame yourself.

Put yourself in their perspective. When you visit a random website, do you think about the webmaster or people behind it? Or do you treat it like a tool to get something done? If your users aren't buying what you're selling, it's because it's not relevant or you're presenting it poorly.

wishiknew 11 years ago | |

If I were a music beginner and I saw an experienced player offering me an insight into his playing and his email address to help me, I'd become a fan. I actually follow some rather mediocre people online just because they put stuff out there on a regular basis. They're all less shy than me when it comes to promotion, that's for sure. To me a plain-text site like HN is great but I may need to stop thinking like me when it comes to content promotion.

m1k3r420 11 years ago |

Not sure, you seem to have contradicted yourself. You open with saying you did not write the tools and then claim they only visit the site to use "your" tools?

Have you given credit to the person who wrote the tools?

wishiknew 11 years ago | |

I said my tools because it was shorter, but yeah, they're not really. One is by me but didn't involve coding so I don't really consider it a tool. Two of them I bought on some CodeCanyon like website. Another's development was sponsored by me. The last one is credited to its author through a deal we made.