[bigiain]

You're missing a lot of critical details before anybody can provide actionable answers to those questions.

Who are you selling to (or hoping/intending to sell to)? What's their buying process/pipeline? Where will they be seeking solutions to the problem you solve for them?

FB "likes" is a completely irrelevant goal for enterprise sales. Leaving pricing off your website will kill your conversion rate on a consumer-oriented low-cost SaaS site. Facebook and Twitter might be _great_ sources of traffic and signups, but they also might be the _last_ place your customers are seeking your product.

Who are you selling to? What are they looking for? How can you make sure you're there when they look? That might be Facebook or Twitter, it might be Adwords or Adsense, it might be a heavily SEO-ed website, it might involve days/weeks trawling LinkedIn for the right purchasing person at a big company to email/call - without considering the "people in the segment I'm targeting", you can't say any of them is the most effective strategy.

How did you grow your mailing list? Is that scaleable?

[submarine]

1) Selling to freelancers and small to mid companies. Buying process? I'm trying to break into a really traditional marketplace. They haven't used new "stuff" in years. They also won't be seeking solutions to the problem I solve. Every last person I interviewed reacted in a "shit, I do waste time doing this. But what option do I have?"

2) I'm selling to designers. They're looking to spend less time on a boring but needed task in their workflow. How can I be seen by them? You mean to say, in an online sense?

3) I grew my mailing list with paid questionnaires (real life- put an ad in an online magazine) , cold calls, referalls, friends.

[bigiain]

' They also won't be seeking solutions to the problem I solve. Every last person I interviewed reacted in a "shit, I do waste time doing this. But what option do I have?"'

To me, that implies SEO is less likely to be a big payoff compared to paid advertising on subject-matter-relevant sites or publications. You need to work out where these designers "hang out", and how to get ads in front of them proposing your solution to them in an eye and mind-catching enough way. Maybe try advertising somewhere like SmashingMagazine – but carefully measure your costs and conversions, it's _very_ easy to spend way more pre conversion than your customer LTV if you aren't measuring things.

Another thing to consider, can you think of a bunch of keywords you could pay for (for example in Adwords/Adsense) or perhaps Facebook demographics you could target - which might let you get ads in front of designers while they're searching for information related to the existing solutions? I suspect finding keywords/demographics that convert at profitable rates is likely to be hard...