dial_d - 8:49 pm on Mar 27, 2006 (gmt 0)

I have created a website which provides a service to residents of a particular state. (We'll say that state is Ohio.) But, I am having problems reaching my target audience.

I have been trying to target people in Ohio with Adwords but the volume is very low, even with a 6% CTR (search) on my ads. The reason the volume with Adwords is so low is because that there are not a lot of people searching for this service. Mainly because they have not realized that the service can exist on the net alone.

Adwords is also quite expensive. I typically have to pay 0.50 a click to stay in the top 3. My conversion rate is quite good, around 10%. But the service is cheap and Adwords ends up costing me slightly more money than I make. Which wouldn’t be so bad, the service is the kind of thing people would come back for again and again, if only I could reach “critical mass”.

I’ve tried to do link building but I have basically hit a brick wall. My demographic is extremely wide. Almost anyone living in Ohio has a potential use for this service, including children and old people. Only a handful sites are even related to mine. Those sites are my competition and aren’t willing to link to mine. Most of the hobby type websites which are specific to Ohio have also been reluctant to link to my site. Not because they don’t like the site, but because they don’t want to link to an unrelated web site. Of the Ohio specific directories only a handful are free and those are usually a specific type of directory i.e. Directory of Hotels in Ohio. The business directories all seem to charge and are just too expensive to justify the cost (typically several hundred dollars). In my experience, directories rarely send much traffic anyway.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to bring in a lot of visitors from a specific state?