How The Hell Do I Get Users to Sign up for a Free Product?

[biophase]

Can you elaborate more on whats confusing? Note, my target audience is not the general population. It is people who play fantasy football and are on forums like wall street bets. It is a bad web design, but Im surprised you couldnt understand a single thing on the site - would be helpful to know what exactly confused you

The whole thing is confusing. Honestly, it is hard to pinpoint because I had no idea where to start.

It felt like the first time I logged into a day trading platform and got hit with tons of text and colors.

You’ve got a bunch of smart, technical people here who can’t understand your website. I don’t think it’s us.

 

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[Roli]

Bought Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability this morning to help solve this issue - If its still unuasable after me remaking, Ill pay someone.

Why would you do this? You are leaning into a self-identified weakness. Sure, you can get better, but the amount you need to get better by is huge and you should ask yourself; do you really need to be better at web design? Is any of your business based around web design sales?

Please, do not carry on with this, pay someone competent to redesign it. Don't spend any more money on books or web design courses, give that money to someone who has spent years perfecting their craft.

Can you elaborate more on whats confusing? Note, my target audience is not the general population. It is people who play fantasy football and are on forums like wall street bets. It is a bad web design, but Im surprised you couldnt understand a single thing on the site - would be helpful to know what exactly confused you

The fact that you're surprised shows why you shouldn't attempt making this better on your own. I don't want to offend you or make you feel bad about the work you've put into that site, but it's awful.

It was a real surprise to me when you mentioned fantasy football, I had no idea what the site was for, but I didn't think that.

The whole thing is confusing. Honestly, it is hard to pinpoint because I had no idea where to start.

When you ask for advice you will get a signal and some noise. Noise is like when someone says, "I don't like the design of menu button." Or, "I don't like the colour green."

Signal is when you get multiple comments saying practically the same thing, "It's a bad design." "I can't understand what it is for." "Who is this for?"

Ignore the noise, listen to the signal.

By paying someone now, you'll save yourself a lot of money in the long run, and you'll have a functioning site that people will want to use.

 

[Roli]

Note, my target audience is not the general population. It is people who play fantasy football and are on forums like wall street bets.

If I was someone who used wall street bets, I'd still be confused about your site. When I go there, the first thing I'm greeted by is their name, which also explains what they are about.

Then I can click create a post, which tells me I am on a forum. Then on the left there are a bunch of different topics. I see their social media links on the right where I can find out about more and the page looks inviting and I'm ready to explore.

Now let's compare to your site, your name is tucked away in the corner and gives me zero clue as to what you do. I see I can sign up for free prediction contests, but have no idea what that means.

You tell me to select a topic, which is underlined as if it's a button, but no, the actual button is the greyed out word of "sports", which is one topic, so when you say, "select a topic", you mean, select sports. Then you have a subtopic of currency, then underneath that your tag says "stocks."

So can you see how a user is already confused? You ask me to sign up, but to what? Prediction contests, what are they, what do you do?

Even if the user does no what you do, you are not inviting him into a very welcoming place, no photographs, no posts, nothing.

Get professional help and focus on your core idea.

 

[ehenton]

Your target should be one specific thing. Not a plethora of ideas. What you want is not necessarily what people are needing. You said fantasy football. Even I do fantasy football and was also surprised. Look, no one is going to look at your site to be honest because your layout is all over the place and is barely readable. That's why no one understands it. No one wants to read through it because it's HARD TO DECIPHER because you can't read it EASILY. People dont want difficult. People want everything big beautiful and easy laid out in front of them to pick and choose. Your website has a lot of STUFF on it. You need to wrap your head around on what the CUSTOMER wants and needs, NOT what YOU want or LIKE on your website. Keep it simple. Drive traffic SPECIFICALLY to your site for ONE thing, another site to ONE thing etc then your TARGET AUDIENCE will come. But you can't have multiple ideas that are not related to each other in anyway whatsoever on your site. That's the difference.

 

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[Roli]

Forget that noise. Boots on the ground, hitting up events and LinkedIn – smart move. Paid ads on Twitter and co. can get eyes on your baby, and social media's a beast, influencers or killer content could work wonders.

He can't get people to accept a free product, getting eyes on it isn't the problem.

 

[sigsouk]

He can't get people to accept a free product, getting eyes on it isn't the problem.

I did also launch this 3 days ago - so we'll wait and see. Ive had literally less than 100 visits on a shit UI. Also the web design sucks, I agree, but when I say I worked on this for a year and a half, 90% was non ui related. Im fixing it myself now and will be testing over the next 1-3 months.

"getting eyes on it isn't the problem" - Is quite literally the problem. Yes conversion is low, but as i stated in the original post, I was asking for lead gen's that dont cost a fortune, not click to converted user. You seem more interested in shitting on the ui than actually helping with the problem

 

[sigsouk]

Your target should be one specific thing. Not a plethora of ideas. What you want is not necessarily what people are needing. You said fantasy football. Even I do fantasy football and was also surprised. Look, no one is going to look at your site to be honest because your layout is all over the place and is barely readable. That's why no one understands it. No one wants to read through it because it's HARD TO DECIPHER because you can't read it EASILY. People dont want difficult. People want everything big beautiful and easy laid out in front of them to pick and choose. Your website has a lot of STUFF on it. You need to wrap your head around on what the CUSTOMER wants and needs, NOT what YOU want or LIKE on your website. Keep it simple. Drive traffic SPECIFICALLY to your site for ONE thing, another site to ONE thing etc then your TARGET AUDIENCE will come. But you can't have multiple ideas that are not related to each other in anyway whatsoever on your site. That's the difference.

Thanks for the input - Im going to refactor this to be solely "daily fantasy prediction contests" and get rid of any focus on writing - will keep this forum updated

 

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[biophase]

I did also launch this 3 days ago - so we'll wait and see. Ive had literally less than 100 visits on a shit UI. Also the web design sucks, I agree, but when I say I worked on this for a year and a half, 90% was non ui related. Im fixing it myself now and will be testing over the next 1-3 months.

"getting eyes on it isn't the problem" - Is quite literally the problem. Yes conversion is low, but as i stated in the original post, I was asking for lead gen's that dont cost a fortune, not click to converted user. You seem more interested in shitting on the ui than actually helping with the problem

I think it would be a waste of your lead gen, because you have one chance to get somebody to come to your website. What good is getting traffic now if your conversion rate is low. Wouldn’t you rather get your website to the point where conversion rate is higher and then drive to it?

 

[sigsouk]

I think it would be a waste of your lead gen, because you have one chance to get somebody to come to your website. What good is getting traffic now if your conversion rate is low. Wouldn’t you rather get your website to the point where conversion rate is higher and then drive to it?

Yes, I can work on both simultaneously - updated web ui (not mobile) with all the feedback from yesterday - still a work in progress but I think this makes more sense than yesterday's version

 

[Roli]

"getting eyes on it isn't the problem" - Is quite literally the problem. Yes conversion is low, but as i stated in the original post, I was asking for lead gen's that dont cost a fortune, not click to converted user. You seem more interested in shitting on the ui than actually helping with the problem

Like I said, I didn't want to offend you, but shitting on the UI is helping you. What I meant when getting eyes on it isn't the problem, I meant that you're getting visitors but they are clicking away immediately. I got this info from you, because the title of this thread wasn't, 'how can I get more visitors?' it is 'How the hell do I get users to sign up...'

So I believe your UI is your problem and advised you to get professional help to make it look better, thus solving your problem.

Good luck dude.

 

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