Need Feedback! : Muse is live, prepping for the micro-test

[Helo]

I threw together a 3 page-website following Tim’s recommended structure using GoDaddy’s WebSite Tonight (it actually took a couple days, but overall it’s a good tool, more on this later).

Some things I’d like feedback on, keeping in mind this is just the testing phase to determine if this product is viable or not.

1) Is the website layout, content, etc. “professional” enough for conducting this test? Any places I can tweak that might make my test more accurate?

2) If/when I sell this product for real, I will have actual audio samples on the web page. I’d love to have them up now but this presents somewhat of a chicken & egg problem: I don’t want to invest the time and money to create a product until I have some idea of its market potential, yet I don’t know how realistic my market test will be without audio samples (almost all similar products have them). At minimum I will need to acquire audio recording equipment, gather some Japanese friends and record them, and then do some editing using ProTools (another expensive piece of software I’d rather hold off on for now).

3) Web site URL:

4) PPC: I setup a google adwords account today, including the analytics. I’m basically waiting a day or so to make sure the page hit counts are working. I’d like some feedback on what I’m thinking of going with so hopefully I can avoid some newbie mistakes (and go directly to the “advanced beginner” set of mistakes, lol). I’ll be as detailed as possible so that hopefully this thread will help many others with similar questions. In that spirit I’ll do my best to update this thread as I follow-through in the process.

Here is my initial set of keywords, with the estimated hit rates google provided when I setup my adwords account (standard):


Japanese language 983.4/day
learn Japanese 381.3/day
"learn to speak Japanese" 44.7/day
Japanese course
Japanese study 23.1/day
speak Japanese


I set my default CPC at $0.50, with a daily max of $30. $0.50 seems a bit high but I needed to bump it up to there in order to get a guaranteed spot in the top 3.

So, I’m a complete newbie at this. The words and groupings above is pretty much exactly what I’m going to use for my trial run. The first line, with 983.4 estimated hits/day, is pretty broad, but will get me a lot of looks. The rest are more specific, with a significant drop-off. Is this anywhere close to the right approach, or at least a good initial set of keywords for the micro-test?

Thanks!

Helo

[Helo]

ps – My mini-review of WebSite tonight…I think it is a good tool for those who have little or no programming experience. I do (I’ve been developing software for 10 years), but I tried it because I wanted something fast and I didn’t want to deal with the learning curve of Dreamweaver. That said, I found the lack of ability to directly manipulate the html code a bit frustrating. Plus, because you are interacting with a server for every edit you make, there is a lot of latency and thus can be frustrating at times. I will probably switch to Dreamweaver if I create another site, but this isn’t a bad way to start.

[jonparker83]

To be honest I suck at copywriting and sales so I'll just help where i can:

1) Layout and design wouldn't be my choice but it's not exactly offensive either. I would say that design isn't as important as it may be in more tech/design savvy markets so you should be ok. One bad point is that the homepage took over 30 seconds to load for me - this isn't really acceptable and I imagine you'll find most people clicking away before it's loaded.

Looking in more detail, it's your images on your home page that are causing the massive loading times. You should really aim to have your whole page including graphics under 100kb and youre images alone are currently 4000kb+. They need to be resized in terms of the actual file and not just using the height and width of the <img> html tag

2) While it sounds like you DO have to add the audio samples to your site, you definitely DON'T have to buy expensive equipment and software. You don't have to use it for your final product but you could borrow/buy cheap recording equipment and use free software for this testing phase at least

3) The URL with the hyphens it better for search engine optimisation and as you say is easier to read but I find without the hyphens is generally easier to remember

Why not register both domains, use the hyphenated URL for your actual site and then use the non-hyphenated one on your marketing material; just setting up an automatic redirect to the hypenated URL (this is domain forwarding and comes free with most domains)

4) I don't know a great deal about Adwords but there are a couple of things to also remember

- Being in the top 3 isnt necessarily best - Ive often heard that the serious buyers typically click further down the AdWords ads with more timewasters or less serious buyers clicking on the top ads more

Also I'm sure you have your numbers wrong for the predicted clicks/day

3000 (cents maximum per day) \ 980 (clicks/day) = 3 cents per click

I could be wrong but I think the 980 clicks per day is most likely without the $30 per day limit in place

Hope this has been some help

Jon :)

[webgal]

No photo should be without a caption. You're missing an opportunity. So add captions.

Nix "Introduction". A subhead needs to relate a benefit, a solution or something compelling. Right now your headline is too generic. It needs to speak to a target audience.

In order to figure this out, you need to tell us who your target market is. Don't say it's people who want to speak Japanese. Is it businessmen, college students? Tell us who is most likely to PAY for the cds. Who are the people who need or want to learn Japanese? There's no point in developing a niche product if you don't speak to the niche audience.

I see that the benefit of the cds is that it's the real deal, usable, conversational Japanese. You need to make a case regarding why this is better. Again, what target market finds this valuable.

After you spend some time identifying a target market that will convert, then put in a sentence some kind of marketing focus. Below is an quick example:

Product: College expands online course offerings allowing them to offer more variety in the curriculum etc.

Target market: Students, 18-25, who don’t want to graduate with an enormous debt and are looking for answers to keep college costs in line and reasonable. And/or students who can’t otherwise afford college and offer the economic advantages of a mix of online and classroom classes.

Marketing Objective: Advertise and position the website to encourage more signups for online courses positioning it as a substantial cost savings. The website would serve as a portal for signups, ultimately growing an online student base and increasing profits for the school for a new library and more visiting professors.

This is the digest version but you really need to position your website as a marketing tool for your product.

[FrozenCanuck]

Hey Helio - I notice you did not ask for credit card information on your second page. Are you going to assume that they would enter it on the 3rd page if they got that far? It's not a perfect assumption but I was going to require credit card info for my muse testing (just like Tim's example of speed reading).

FYI, for the actual website I've been learning how to use WordPress (blogging software). It is very easy to customize using a theme that looks like what you want. You could probably just use Wordpress (setup with static pages) for producing what you did here, and it would be pretty fast. Wordpress is very well suited to search engine optimization, from what I've read, and you could integrate autoresponders (aweber) and PayPal (for payment) when you go live.

[webgal]

FrozenCanuck-I noticed WordPress had some very nice themes for websites, too. One I saw that I really liked was $50. There are free ones, too. But I think WP indexes well.

[Helo]

Hey, I wanted to thank you guys (and Webgal!) for the feedback. Seems I have at least another iteration of both the site and my marketing approach. I'll keep you updated.

Helo