Seeking Your Input, Suggestions, Recommendations

I am a small business owner attempting to build an effective means of "getting the word out" with regard to my website and products (http://www.tremblingleaf.com/). Outlined here is what I have done and what I have concluded to date. Seeking your thoughts, reflections, invective, etc.

After 2 fruitless years and many countless hours (and dollars) attempting to gain placement in search engines by SEO optimization, etc (doing the work myself and hiring an SEO company). I have abandoned that approach all together. (SEO did teach me what words and phrases the general public is using to search, which is relevant)

From a business perspective there is no return on SEO investment. Yes, if I was a major corporation with major PR budget and need to keep market share on the internet then probably I could buy enough services to make it work. But as a very small company, limited budget, narrow product line, there is no way for me to get to the front of the line via SEO.

Also, it appears that Google is now altering their heuristic engines in such a way as to void most of the SEO strategies that had been successful. So, a total waste of prior efforts to boot.

Google Adwords is very unproductive, too.

I had been to a general marketing presentation where the presenter stated that the best website sales rates he'd seen were for established businesses with paper catalogs whose customers then used online ordering, later. According to him the best figures he'd seen were that 15% of gross sales for this one company were via their internet portal.

Of those who ordered online, 90% had either ordered from a paper catalog or had bought in one of their brick and mortar stores. So, essentially, 1.5% of their gross was from new customers ordering online for the first time. Very possibly their buying decisions were related to either having receive gifts bought from this company, or word of mouth referrals.

From this I have taken that my best potential online customer base is those already using my products, and those with whom they share my products. Hence, I am rolling out a "wet wipe" version of my product which will act as an income producing product offering, a product sample and a business card, too (which also have the website on the back side of the packet). When these are sold by the hundreds of thousands I expect that I will gain 100's to 1000's of sales online. (IE - a very small percentage, but significant in terms of sales)

I have installed StatCounter code to monitor incoming traffic, to see visitor paths and to garner IP addresses/geolocation info. I have recently installed CrazyEgg code to help me optimize my entry page layout and understand visitors' interaction with my page. I have researched popup adverts and purchased an ad code generator and use that sparingly. Between these three utilities I have done a better job with my first visit impressions.

Researching page design I found the much talked about "F" pattern and the need to keep it simple to be effective (reducing "cognitive loading" as they call it.)

Along the way I found "targeted hits generation". And after a few recent campaigns believe that this will be my best overall means of getting new people to visit my site and see what I have. So far its been both good and bad.

The good part is that I have enough traffic which is self referring (IE - target NoAm, category - product relevent) and they have to decide to click through to my site to see more. This filters incoming traffic and delivers a more "concentrated" set of visitors ... people who are far more likely to be interested in and searching for products like mine.

The bad side is (like SEO work) there are a lot of bad imitations and bad implementations. My most recent frustrations have come from waiting for a dog's age to get some Indian subcontractor to actually get the next campaign rolling. This, again has forced me to keep looking and I have found three candidate companies which may hold promise for doing a better job of it: ahits.com, igethits.com and revisitors.com .

Eventually, I'll find a good partner to work with me and will build up my budget to adverts, etc.

I am inviting your responses to this deathly long tirade and hoping to gain a few more morsals of wisdom from this esteemed gathering of marketing mavins.

So, the gate is open ...