Freelance Writers - conversions for new clients

What are the general conversion rates you get for your writing services? From my experience, I get around 6-9% conversions from new visitors to my site. This is purely from marketing campaigns I run now and then (not those coming from either EC or ES). I didn't count wom clients or repeat clients, just first timers who never worked with me before and found me through non-industry channels. Anyone else has the same-similar experience? Better? Worse?

P.S. I am genuinely interested to hear other people's experiences (mods, feel free to move this to a thread where unregistered users can't see it, if you want)

I'd say that anything over 2% in the online advertising world is very good, so 6-9% is excellent. How can you tell these numbers are accurate (what if the same student uses different emails ; )

They may use different emails, but not different PayPal

I'd then suggest that you start an advertising agency for writers ; ). But there could be another explanation - the right (ie. those who need exactly what you offer) contact you. Do they pay after you send them a quote or they pay right away once they fill out the form with order requirements?

Hah, in all honesty, I played with the idea for a while. But I realized I couldn't compete with domestic companies, so I dropped the whole thing.

To answer, I only counted conversions that ended up in actual purchases/payments and inquiries that I refused/couldn't complete.

Btw - to clarify, you mean PAID marketing campaigns (that may include PPC in search engines, paid banners, email newsletters), correct?

Major search engines don't do essay or dissertation service advertising anymore.

But yes, I was referring to paid advertising on different channels.

I don't go for PPC, there are far better choices.

However, I don't do it often (there's really no need :) ), mostly during the off-season or when my regulars finish up and I need a few new clients to cover the gap.

That's why I wanted to see if others had the same experience.

I know (assume) you're affiliated with a company, but I'd like to hear from other private writers, since they're the ones I compete with.

I assume many don't use paid advertising or some type of social media promotion, but surely some do.

Conversion rate for us depends on the landing page. Anywhere form 2 percent to 7 percent depending on the page.

WOW! For a site with an Alexa ranking of more than 10 million, I'm sure you can just about pay your annual domain renewal with that now.

I totally agree. I seem to get nothing from this, and if I do then it just about covers the cost of a single bout of advertising in this way. Moreover, it's a constant battle to stay within the regulations. To do so often means having completely inappropriate wording on the ads, leading less of the right clients in my direction. Even when I state that I'm offering model papers as opposed to custom-written papers, Google ad words has an issue. I guess they know all the tricks.

Right now, conversions to new clients have slowed due to the pandemic. It appears that people are tight for cash these days and the parents of the students who normally browse, observe, then order, aren't as liquid as they were before. Everyone is still rebuilding their savings and other finances so generating buzz that can gain a company new clients tends to be a bit difficult these days. In a month, I have had around 50 inquiries convert to actual orders. I am still hanging in there, hoping that the trend will eventually reverse.

@Freelancewriter , is there a chance that you can offer some words of encouragement to potential independent writers who are afraid of entering into this business at this point in time? Is there a difference between the conversion rate pre, during, and post pandemic for you? If there are other active independent writers who happen to be reading this post, please feel free to share your input regarding this topic. I am sure it will make for an interesting discussion amongst us.

To be completely honest, I wouldn't encourage anybody to start doing this kind of work for a living now, in the age of AI. Even if current AI programs can't compete with good human writers, that will likely not continue to be the case indefinitely, as AI evolves and improves. By contrast, the 2020 Pandemic hardly affected my business at all after the first 3 or 4 months of that year.

I remember the pandemic era as well. Academic writing flourished during that time. The students were all studying from home and hiring academic writers so that they could enjoy the lock down playing video games or developing other skills that did not require human interaction. I was so busy during that time that I was practically working around the clock covering papers from gradeschool to PhD level dissertations. I really miss those days of abundant writing assignments. While the academic writing field may lose some ground to AI, I choose to believe that there will still be a client base for human writers going forward. AI cannot take over the academic writing job because it will always lack the logic and humanity that can be found in human written opinion and research papers.