Stuck in the same place for past year
Hey,
This is my first post on Indie Hackers. I got referred by one of my friends when I mention to him that I am having a hard time improving my side project. I will describe to you a bit about myself, the website and the situation I am in at the moment. I would like you to provide me with any pointers and pieces of advice from your own experience that you think could help me.
A bit about me:
I am a Software Engineer. I bought a site called ps2pdf.com a couple of years ago and at the time it only got ~100 users a day. I revamp the site with a lot of useful features and able to get that number to around ~9000 users a day. That was a year ago. Since then I get roughly about the same number of people till now.
About the site:
Ps2pdf.com is an online file converting a website that lets people compress and convert files such as mp4, PDF and any image type (jpg, png, tiff...)
The problem: (Attached photos may not be in the same order)
To be more direct about the problem, I am unable to grow the number of users reaching my website. Since last year I have been adding more and more features but seen almost no growth (Photo attached for the past 16 months user clicked from Google webmaster tools). Even worse, some features get picked up by google and then after a while it gets no users. I attached another screenshot of my Google webmaster tools that shows on Nov 19, 2019, I got over 2000 users from google then it suddenly dropped to 122 on Dec 5, 2019. A similar thing shows on the attached image of WebP to JPG converter of ps2pdf.com. There is another image attached for ps2pdf.com split pdf feature which was a very sad one for me. It is one of my first and favorite features I developed but its usage just went down to nothing within a span of a couple of months.
There are lots of websites out there that don't even come close to features and speed that my website offers but they flourish.
Request:
Since there are a lot of startup owners here. I would like to know how you go about making a profit from a free-to-use website. There isn't much money generated from the website to do any paid advertisements. I was asking one of the prominent sites to give us a review and they asked me 2500 USD for it. Which is astronomically high considering the amount of money the site generates.
I am curious to know the steps you guys took to improve your product and what do you think I can do to make my product better. Please let me know in the comments. Link to your product is much appreciated so that I can check your product and see the results myself.
Also, if you got some time, I would like you to take a look at my website and possibly give me feedback.
Thank you
Homepage is pretty busy/complicated and slows down the page speed. Also your titles/SEO needs some work.
What is PS? Nowhere do I see an explanation as to what it stands for.
Why is your solution better than the alternatives?
Also it triggers my adblock. You may want to implement safer ads.
Hey SEOGuy,
Thanks for the response.
Why is my homepage busy?
I am not a good UX expert as you can see from my home page. I wanted to make it better but when I looked at my Google Analytics for where my users lands and it seems only a small amount of people come to my home page. Following is a summary of last week. Google only sent 4.42% of total traffic to home page. Naturally, I worked on improving download page an individual pages
https://www.ps2pdf.com/compress-mp4 38,184(54.82%)
https://www.ps2pdf.com/downloads 5,685(8.16%)
https://www.ps2pdf.com/merge-image-to-pdf 4,454(6.39%)
https://www.ps2pdf.com 3,081(4.42%)
What is PS?
PS is the file extension for file type PostScript. It only have about 200 users a day (max). So it is not very related to anything else in the website thus I didn't want to emphasis it too much.
Why is your solution better than the alternatives?
Bellow, someone mentioned smallpdf and there are other sites such as ilovepdf and many other video converters. Unlike my website they all have limits. There are some famous site that make people upload and go though the whole process and make people download a converted PDF file that has a message saying if they want to convert a PDF file with more pages, they have to register. I don't do such things.
I am at a point which I understand that just because my product is great doesn't mean people are gonna start using it. Hence my original problem. How do I get more links or reviews from other websites? Is there website or services that you guys know I can get help?
Why adblocker get triggered?
I use adsense, not sure what to do about it.
Finally, I gotta do something about my UI/UX. I don't have much experience in those areas. Thanks for the feedback.
From what I have seen. On your homepage there's a lot going on.
Try to narrow it down. What are users coming for the most? Make that the main focus in the mean time. Then have your additional services.
Users don't like seeing websites that are full of options especially when they are listed as you have done. It doesn't make them feel safe and it's quite confusing seeing as they have come for something specific.
Change the layout and tune it up. Make it more user friendly instead of straight to the point "here are the list of services I provide". They want something light on the eye because what's happening is they see a lot of info on the homepage and now don't want to use the website or decide not to comeback.
Also you have a lot of changes being mentioned. If you feel it's necessary for you to have that there then maybe make a separate page for it. Once again it will take away from your creditability.
I hope this helps you. One of my skills are supporting you to understand your customers better.
Tash
Thanks for the feedback.
Lot of people criticized my home page. Probably I should segregate features in to categories such as Video Converters, Image Converters.... and then have them collapsed. This way it wouldn't seem so cluttered/busy.
I like your idea of showing most used feature first. I think this will be very useful to users.
Your last comment about the changes. I don't know if this helps me with the SEO. For the time being, I try not to touch this section.
I'm glad you agree with me. It will definitely help simplify what's going on.
I think you thought I meant the footer regarding the last comment I made. What I was referring to was actually the section where it says 'Welcome to PS2PDF'. Underneath you have the subject of PS2PDF along with the 'changes', which includes all of the updates about your website from 2002 - present.
To add to what I said I think it's important to make a brand and from this you can possibly start generating a profit. If this is something you could use support in I'd be happy to advise you personally. I have background knowledge around marketing services too.
Let me know if this is of interest to you.
I will link my LinkedIn get in touch or message me directly on IH: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tashika-meah-7a3347174/
Hello
You seem to be caught up with “the more features the better” thing. That’s obviously not the problem here. Given that your competitors are doing well with less features and you’ve asked specifically about growth:
Here’s some things to reflect on:
HTH
I used to believe “the more features the better” thing. But now I know it is not which is the reason for this post. Great questions. I was hoping you guys could tell me the answer to the first and second question.
Thank you for the reply. Those are some great points to reflect upon or research about.
I use smallpdf daily in work for converting pdf files, it looks really good and simple! Just what I want.
Thanks for the reply. Yes, smallpdf a good. If you take a look at my website, what didn't you liked about it?
I think when my search function on the front page, it is easier for people to find what they want to do. If you can identify few places which you think I should do something different, please let me know.
It just seems very busy and instantly turns me off using it, design and UX are so important to me personally. If you wanted to compete with Small PDF etc think about making the users problem insanely simple. Here is what I would do:
If you did that I would use it over the competitors
I have a feeling you'd hate it, cause you probably went against the grain, but capturing emails at least gives you some saved value and an option to monetise... Like at minimum sponsoring the emails you send with the link to download or whatever.
It also allows you to send some more emails with some approvals like feature releases and/or premium products...
Like these are common practices I believe... (while I might dislike them as well, they make sense..)
It's kinda hard figuring out why people need this and what could provide more value... for that you might need to actually collect a bit of feedback data or something..
If it's some silly requirement of a 3rd party it might just have such a low value there isn't much but un-targeted ads :(
What you'd wanna know is specially cases where people use it again and again.
I wonder for example if PDF to DOCX or similar might be used by like 3rd party recruiters to be able to edit the docs and add a logo and/or remove direct contact details for example.
If you know that you can make a better product to them and market it from that tool for example.
So basically what you are looking for / need to know, is there a bigger process the user is doing which has higher cost/value, that he spends more time on and actually represents a thing he considers a paid worth solving and he would be willing to pay for...
Staying 100% anonymous, private, not collecting any list and/or feedback at minimum would sadly not get you a head with this IMHO. You have to engage the customer somehow directly to figure these things out. The less intrusive way if that's what you looking for would possibly to ask for feedback in survey format for example post convert ... you won't get much reactions, but you might get what you need... GL.
Hey, Thanks for the feedback.
I gotta say just like you I hate websites that ask for e-mail. But I get the point.
As for getting user feedback, I recently bought a package from HotJar, it has a feedback feature which allows me to ask people questions. I am gonna consider using it.
You could maybe at a premium feature that converts the files faster. I've seen some similar sites do this where they put the users behind a "time wall".
Hey Shayan, Thank you for the response.
I do have premium packages that does exactly what you suggested. Probably I should advertise it more.
Hi, in terms of UX alone, your product explanation needs to be more obvious, it's too far down the page. At the moment it's just a bombardment of options. You could simplify the whole page with a simple intro header with title, subtitle, and then just a drop down select box for all the conversion options. Maybe if you simplify the site it would be less overwhelming.
You could start by drawing out (https://www.draw.io/) what your page could look like with the least number of UX components yet still make it clear what your product is, and what value it offers, in as few words as you can.
Some good tips on how to create a landing page here - https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/landing-pages
A couple of points:
You can monetize any website with tipping using Tipalink
I used to have a donate button, but that rarely worked. Just wondering, since you are the founder of tipalink, how do you get people to visit your website and tip another website? (answer to this could help me too)
Visitors don’t have to visit Tipalink to tip another website. Tipping happens directly on your website when you’ve added the Tipalink plugin to it. It’s also possible for the visitor to tip any website using the Tipalink browser extension. There’s a Tip Form on the bottom of the Tipalink homepage that anyone can use to tip any url, but it’s not the primary way I’d like to see Tipalink used (more of a backup). Check out the FAQ on our site to learn more.
Make ads work is a lengthy and arduious process, especially if you want results in a year.
I recommend doing a SaaS model, have a look at this site's business model which is similar to yours:
https://sqlify.io/
We do have a SaaS solution at https://www.ps2pdf.com/product. I think you are or will face the same issue I am facing. What is your plan to attract more customers to your sqlify.io?
One upside I see using SaaS paid product is that if it is a product people really need, then you can do paid advertising as long as ROI is positive. But for sqlify and ps2pdf, there are 100s of free alternatives. From the users prospective, they will move to next google search result if ps2pdf doesn't work them.