Business Dwindling - Need New Source Of Clients Cause Of Higher Prices

The latest Penguin / Panda what not updates, made it once again harder to rank and keep sites at the top.

Especially the latest Penguin 3.0 forced me to radically change my service.

This came at a certain cost.

1) Literally as everything got more expensive so I had to increase my prices

2) I feel I priced myself out of the market, when I look at other vendors, different quality / different prices but try to teach that someone, all most see are just links or different type of links.

My sales thread is written by a professional on this forum and does a pretty decent job in explaining the differences I suppose, but in terms of sales it doesn't seem to make a difference with the higher prices.

Nowadays I need to invest a certain amount upfront into clients and it will take me six months to break-even on that. I can handle that, but it shows that it's a lot less lucrative then before. In case a client cancels before the 6 months it's not that I will lose as most of the investment are assets (read as expired domains) that can be re-used for others but still.

My current marketing efforts:

- List my service in WSO / Classified section
- Bump my threads every few days
- Support the service with case studies

Result: 1-2 new sign ups per month.

A year ago: 8 new sign ups a week (at $99/mo)
Half year ago: 4 new sign ups a week (at $129/mo)
Few months ago: 2 new sign ups a week (at $149/mo)

Currently: 0 new sign ups a week (at $199/mo)

So it seems the price plays a large role here.

As we speak my business is still running well so nothing drastic, in fact I did have 3 new sign ups today, but only from existing clients that I work with for a long time and I expect another 2 new sign ups from another existing client in 1 or 2 days. However these clients used the old sign up links, while I did explain in my emails that the prices would go up so I suppose they forgot that, have to email them about that or offer a degraded version of the service, eg less links.

Ok back to the point, business is still running fine with over 80 clients to work on on monthly base and numerous one time orders but no new orders so I don't think I'll be able to fare well forever with the current client base. Each business needs new blood so to say.

What would you advice here?

Stick to the new prices to offer a superior service compared to others or ofter a lesser version of the service at a lower price point so I can compete again? What would you do if it concerned your business?

Perhaps seek a new source of traffic that is prepared to pay higher prices (when you compare it to so called offline marketing companies we are still extremely competitive while still offering a better service)? Or perhaps a whole different sales process where capturing leads is the number one priority instead of trying to make a direct sale like we're doing now with the ads.

I could for example give away free things to get them on a list, follow up with emails that aren't screaming buy this but instead point them at live case studies that are ongoing while making them aware of my service along the way, eg soft selling.

You'd think that would work to sell an SEO service? When I look at successful bloggers like Matthew Woodward it seems he makes most of his money from affiliate products and some of his softwares and not so much from client SEO so I wonder if this is a waste of time for me. I'm far from him in terms of blogging, he does have tons of visitors and still he makes so little from SEO so that whole soft selling concept doesn't seem to work that well. Others like Neil Patel seem to do a much better job at that while they don't sell aggresively in your face either. Still he generates tons of SEO leads and that's his main source of income.

So that comes down to prices again, Neil Patel ain't cheap and isn't specifically targetting the IM crowd so am I cause of the increased prices in the wrong market segment where the majority is looking for the next shiny object for a few bucks? (WSO section kind of proofs that right).

Thing is most SEO services in the for sales sections here work, but for how long and how well do they work, I regularly analyze what others offers and no offense but mostly it's a bunch of links on pages with no link juice to pass on so though it ranges from $17 to $99 it won't make a huge difference in terms of rankings, or it's so spammy and based on russian link networks that it works excellent but for such a short time that it's a lot of effort to go through for people rebuilding sites and what not (eg churn & burn).

Most of my existing clients realize that and many of them stick with me for over a year already. I have clients that know how to build proper optimized sites, heck they build better sites then I build for myself, and they get rewarded for that, last time I was stunned how much a certain client made per site per month so the higher price point is definitely justifiable as he made many times more then what he paid.

Another alternative is to lock my service for new customers if it takes so much effort to find new clients and solely work with my existing clients and work on my own affiliate sites.

Any type of advice is appreciated.