What don't I G E T?

I hired someone that I thought was a good web-designer. I paid Network Solutions to guide me for 3 months. I was sure that I had the right title, description and keywords. I ran 3 months worth of paid advertising and so far I've had one order for $40 that cost me $51 to fill.

I suck!

SO - I'm about to call it a day before the nearly $200 a month I put out to keep my site going gets really indefensable. I figure I have put-out $4- or 5 thousand for a site that I hoped would just pay me back $500 a month after expenses.

www.usstrings.com ... that's the site. It looks good to me. cityMax says I have had 19,000 hits to the site in 4 months -- so, WTF? Even 10 or 20 morons of the 19K that may have stumbled onto the site should have bought something; forget for a minute the smart, competitve amateur and pro musicians out there that I was after originally. I know I still have some work to do on my pricing -- but, many of my prices are the lowest or highly competitve. Could it be the way the site looks?

I am beginning to think that my source material is all wrong. Net Solutions says one thing, Yahoo! another - someone else says something else again! I think I'm trying to cover everybase - which puts me head-to-head with all the HUGE players out there.

Should I concentrate on a line of products or two? Should I refine and re-write my source material? Should I just pack it in?

Pls. share your thoughts ... I'd be very grateful. I want this thing to work very much; I've put hundreds of hours into it.

Sincerely,

Larry
US Strings.com

First of all if you really want this to work then don't just give up. Success sometimes takes more time than we'd like. I wish my business was more successful than it is, but I keep working at it.

'Hits' are a pretty meaningless statistic though. 'Visits' are a more useful stat. A hit is recorded for every request made of the server. That includes very image request from the page. So if you have 100 images on a page it's 100 hits, but still only 1 person seeing the page. so 19,000 hits doesn't mean 19,000 have seen the site.

I did look at you site and in all honestly it's not striking me as anything special. You certainly have a lot of products and your prices seem to be fine. You mentioned having the right title and meta tags, but looking at the site I think the titles could be improved. Some pages don't even have a title at the moment.

There's also not a lot of content on your site. Admittiedly there's only so much you can say about guitar strings, but I think you could easily say a little more than you currently do. For example on your page for banjo strings I basically see the same 2 or 3 sentences over and over for each set of strings. What's to distinguish one from another. After reading the same sentence a couple of times I'm not very likely going to read further down the page and may never see the products at the bottom.

For someone that does know exactly what they want it might be good to provide some way for them to get there quickly instead of having to click through your pages. Maybe there's a way to work on the navigation so that if I want to buy a set of ghs phospher bronzes strings for my accoustic guitar I can get there in 1 click. It's only 3 clicks now, but less clicks could still be better.

I think there are a lot of things you can do to improve the site, so don't give up hope or that it can't be done. I think you have a good product and and something that your customers are going to need over and over again. If you can find a way to get people to become customers I think you'll find they'll keep coming back as long as you keep them satisfied.

Have you tired to directly advertise in music stores? Even just some business cards with your site listed on them could help. Or maybe an ad in some of the literature the stores will carry.

It does take time to build a new business and three months isn't really a lot of time. Only you can decide whether you want to keep at it, but it sounds to me like you do so don't just pack it in.

It is obvious what you sell from the moment I get to the site and it's obviously a useful site for musicians. Have you tried marketing to music store sites. Getting links from sites that have anything to do with music is going to bring targeted traffic to your site.

I agree, a lot of people can see your site but unless they are a targeted audience you wont get much use from them seing your site.

I also agree that you should advertise with music sites. Try online music stores, big pro/amateur musician sites.

Thats my five cents.

Regards