18th April 2007 - Looking for the next foothold

Our second jobs board has now had 255 clients register in just 18 months.  We only really have less than 15 of these as paying customers at any one time.  I just get that felling that there's huge potential in this that we are not milking.  Similarly, the first site pharmacareers has an array of customers who would probably come on board given a little time and attention, but it's not that straught forward, if I launch into a sales frenzy and neglect the other development aspects of the site, perhaps they won't deliver the performance necessary to keep them?

It's a delicate balancing act between keeping the resources to a mimimum until the growth in turnover justifies greater spend, and spending enough to generate the extra turnover to justify greater resources!  It's a difficult balance and sometimes seems to create impossible decisions.  The bull in me wants to spend more to realise the potential.  But the Owl in me wants to be patient to see current projects deliver the improvements we had hoped.

Ulitmately, there are no right and wrong answers, only really best guesses which are such because you've weighed up as many 'what ifs' as possible in reaching a decision.  Once the decision is reached you need to go for it and monitor results carefully to check it's doing what you had planned it would.

In our case, there are a number of options.  We have generated a lot of extra interest through search engine success.  However, although we now have 4 sites running with a high enquiry rate, the biggest weakness is probably not achieving top 3 positions on google for the top 2 phrases on each site.  If we achieve these, this will solve both problems a) no sales person needed as the custom will come to us given the top position b) the site will deliver top performance due to it's position, so we will keep customers.

If we achieve this with the two new sites, this will be the time to invest in sales people to generate growth with less risk.

Todays conclusion, 4 weeks heavy time investment in SEO work to generate top google positions. The top 4 phrases are currently around the bottom of page 1 on google. I'll keep you posted.

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