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I have a website providing online resume and cover letter services (resumesquare.com). I have used various inbound marketing techniques like Facebook, Linkedin, bulk email, Yahoo Groups, freelancing sites, etc., but overall response is very low. I am confident in my abilities in this area, and I offer better services at much lower prices than my competitors.

I need to identify the gaps in my strategy.

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Not being rude... but if your cover letters and advertisements are in English and have the same grammar errors that this posting does, then that might be a source of your problems. And another problem is that lower priced options, that are advertising based on price, are typically regarded as a poor choice, scam or "you get what you pay for" and avoided. – Sean Feb 4 '11 at 16:01
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(I did some grammar and spelling correction on your post. Sean makes a good point... if your job is making a good impression, impeccable English is non-negotiable, I think.) – Joel Spolsky Feb 6 '11 at 4:01
@Joel: Unfortunately, editing the post removed the context for Sean's remark, and has made it more difficult to respond usefully to Shraddha. If his real problem is bad grammar and spelling, we no longer can tell how bad it really is, and could wind up giving him useless advice. – Bob Murphy Feb 10 '11 at 5:59
Although I will say, traveling to the link makes it quite clear. After seeing the numerous grammar, punctuation, and capitalization errors on that page, I wouldn't hire the OP to write anything. – Bob Murphy Feb 10 '11 at 6:03
@Bob - all you have to do is look at the original post - it is easy to see - click on the 'edited by' link. – TimJ Feb 10 '11 at 15:54

4 Answers

HI shraddha so you are India and indeed we don need best English :) but your site doesn't look good i mean it looks bit boring and first thing you need to do is making it different and giving it a different feel. So that users will feel that there is something for them here.

Please keep sample resumes which you already built in the home page or give them a tour of CV's which you already built. Right now users are not having all these details.

Atleast in India and when it is a startup people should know the address of your company because they are skeptical whether yours is real company or not :). By the way they don go to linkedin or other services to check your profile and you need to keep all the recommendations in your site itself.

Please see how many customers are reaching you once they click your site.

Give your email in the first page itself rather than they going to the other page and writing the stuff is not what users want shraddha.

Anyways these might be the reasons for not getting more customers even after people visiting your site,

One final thing is that this may not work in india and people are least bothered about their CV . They take CV from others and just copy it or build another CV through online for free of cost :)

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Because you want to be in the business of helping people make a good impression, it's crucial to have impeccable English grammar and spelling in all your written materials. I see from your website that you're in India... are you primarily selling to an Indian audience? Something which seems perfectly OK in one country may come across as being borderline illiterate in another!

Pricing is another issue. If you charge less than the competition, you may actually find that clients think that your service is inferior. In a business like this, you need to charge the market rate or slightly higher than the market rate to signal your quality to customers.

You might try some innovative approaches in the way you charge. You could offer a money-back guarantee. You could charge twice as much if the customer gets a job, and charge nothing if they don't. You should be standing behind your service.

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Are people visiting your site and just not converting? Or are you not getting enough visitors but the ones that do convert fine? Few visitors and the few you do get don't convert?

Depending on where you are at in that spectrum there are very different strategies you could take. What do conversion rates look like for each type of campaign you are running? Which ones run better or worse? If you don't have enough people responding to ads and other marketing material you should try A/B testing your material to find copy that gets visitors. If your visitors aren't converting well you need to think about whether you are attracting the right people or whether the problem is your site not converting traffic. Again, you can A/B test your site to find what converts better.

A/B testing basically means running two versions where half the people see version A and the other half see version B. This allows you to see how differences affect conversion rates so you can move to better converting versions.

Read more about A/B testing.

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When you are at the initial stages and no support from a high fame brand value, the 'reputation' has to be earned...

Daily everyone is attacked by those marketing campaign everywhere telling about how better the services are and how competitive the price is; but question is does this actually help me now or do any good tomorrow?? If it is a no, naturally people tend to become blind towards it. If you have not tired, one area you can focus is to start connecting mainly to the right people, may be just college graduates, group from particular region or college. Or all your direct known connections that falls under this right audience group who has time to listen and benefits from it. Peer recommendation does have power, if they like it they are going to spread it!!

Once things start rolling, another thing I suggest is, you can bring forward the success stories of people who has benefited. This too adds to your reputation you are going to build... all the best :)

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