Ask HN: How can I help kick-start my girlfriend's business? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can I help kick-start my girlfriend's business?

Hey, all! I'm looking for some help with customer acquisition and marketing for my girlfriend's graphic design business. We're trying adwords and FB ads right now, but are not seeing any conversions. Do you guys have any ideas that would help us out?

You can check out her website and work at http://www.samanthastage.com/. As a side note, if any of you need some design work done, I'm sure she'd work out an affordable rate for you.

Thanks for your time!

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I like the general look of the site, but it comes off as a bit sparse in places.

There's a bit of cognitive dissonance between Sam and Samantha. And who is Theodore Taylor?

The portfolio is clean, but the whitespace under the item header makes the page feel unbalanced. The ratio between the main area, the site header, and the portfolio selection bar makes the selection bar feel small.

On the blog, the cutoff for the preview text should be longer. The font use in the post title also hampers readability. I also would reduce the relative width of the navigation column and make the "Read More" target larger by using a button - which would be a good place to use the arrow font.

The suggestions about giving people (which people?) a reason to visit the site repeatedly are right on target. Without that, it's just an online portfolio and not wildly useful.

In my experience, online ads don't work that well for small professional services businesses. As always, YMMV.

The best leads are always referrals. After finishing a job, make sure your client knows that you're looking for more work. If you did a good job for them they will send leads your way. This takes time to build momentum but it attracts the right kinds of customers, and your conversion rate will be way higher than for cold leads.

Good luck!

Instead of putting "samanthastage dot com", put http://www.samanthastage.com/. This should improve your page rank, and makes the link stand out / easier to use, so people are more likely to visit, generating more traffic for her site.

Gotcha. Changed, although URLs don't work as links in the submission text.

Many / most browsers will let you open a link by highlighting it.

I can't think of any circumstances where "X dot Y" is appropriate. People do it sometimes for email obfuscation, as if spammers can't figure out how to do search and replace. Google has very little incentive to bothers and users often have even less. Worry about legitimate traffic first.

Content marketing might be better than ads. It requires more up-front effort but later generates more organic traffic from people genuinely interested in your girlfriend's business.

I like the Monsters Inc style of the frontage by the way.

I am not at all a fan of content marketing on a personal level, but I guess it must be effective if so many companies do it. I mean, the way I look at it, most content marketing is heavily skewed towards the marketing side of the equation and not enough towards the content side. Most of it feels like a sales pitch to me. Nevertheless, this is something she's already going to try with her blog. Any pointers regarding the (admittedly barren) blog section of her site? Do you think it's in a good format? Thanks for the response!

Make a bunch of useful assets, and give them away on her site. Eg like people have done with free tab bar icons for iphone apps. Could be worth a try?

That's actually a very good idea...I hadn't thought of that. Thanks!

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