Okay i recently purchased an ad at tophosts.com in the unix section. I did so because i know that a friend does windows hosting and has had really good success with offering at tophosts. Has anyone here used tophosts unix section? I just started and haven't seen that many signups. Do i compare well with the other hosts? I'm i missing something? Any suggestions about my site or otherwise would be greatly appreciated. my site is in my url..

Hi Ckizer,
Advertising using banner ads usually isn't something that's going to produce immediate results. Typically, it can take around a month before you start to see any significant results.

You also need to determine what your advertising goal is, and design your banner accordingly. Is your goal to get click-thrus so more people visit your web site, or is your goal branding your company name so that people will remember you?

When you look at banners on a lot of the host directory sites, you should be able to see that a lot of the advertisers are going for clickthroughs... and in my opinion they go WAY overboard on the banner ads. It's one thing to attract attention, but you don't want to make an ad that keeps blinking extremely fast, such as many of the ones at hostsearch.com, etc.

Anyway, just keep at it and I'm sure you'll eventually see some results. If you're a new company, you can't expect to grow as fast as you'd like within the first year of doing business. It takes time to get your name out there, and a lot of hard work.

Advertising on host directories may bring in some new customers, and definitely helps to make people aware of your company... But in my experience the best form of advertising is word of mouth. Treat the customers you do have like gold, and they will do the advertising for you.

Good luck!

Brian Farkas

Hi ckizer, I`m a newbie at this also and have tried a small add at a host directory. I didn`t do very well, only got 0.5% clickthrough and I ended up paying $1 for each visitor to my site even though the cpm only was $5. I guess almost all will do better than me here :), but not much better (2-3% is average I think). So I`m basically in the same boat as you when my site gets back up :( .
I`ve taken note of adscholar.com, does anyone know if it`s any good?

But I wanted to comment a little on you plans. I think you should at least double up on the storage space on your plans, it won`t hurt you but it would look much better........presuming you are on a dedicated.

Have patience and take care of customers, that`s what I`m thinking even though I was dissapointed when moving into this business. After all when this works out life will be a dream :D (or what?)

Host directories are so loaded with ads unless you come up with a truly creative ad or some super-duper features it all just gets lost in the "noise".

The main issue is that the very good places to put ads are too expensive. Obviously you want to make more money back from a series of ad's (the three "R's" of advertising) than you put in.

Putting up a banner once, you may get people to see it but they aren't going to take much notice. If they see it again, they may remember it, but won't do anything about it. The third time it comes up somewhere, they usually will act upon it.

Hardcopy (magazines and newspapers) are two good medias because you'll be surprised what people would be happy to read whilst bored.. on the net theirs to many more interesting things to do than read ad's.

The top dog is TV, and i'm surprised I haven't seen anything on UK television. (probably because it's too expensive!)

Hope this leads you to your next sucessful campaign..

Be sure you have your plans set.. *good luck* :)

www.names123.com is on late night tele all the time and ive seen it pop up once on prime time tele.

I've tried Google's Adwords service twice now. So far, I've spent a fair amount of cash to produce about 0.8% clickthroughs and no sales. Certainly YMMV, but I've not had a lot of success thus far.

Has anyone had any positive experiences with banner ads or Google's Adwords?

Take care,

Brian

I tried them too. Wasn't impressed. No positive sales. Won't be using it again.

We tried Google Adwords for about two months with less than desirable results. We figured we ended up paying 75 cents per clickthru.

Originally posted by Technics
www.names123.com is on late night tele all the time and ive seen it pop up once on prime time tele.

Can't say i've seen it yet.. mind you do't get much time anymore for TV.. (too dedicated) :blush:

I'm getting scared, i just paid $2000 for tophosts, and I'm not seeing good results, and i think i compare very well to the competition.

freakin $2000!!! and you ask us after you`ve paid that!
You should use your first $ in advertising on experimenting on different places, no mather what we say you must find out what works for you, but spending $2000 on one place is NOT the way to do it!
Hope you get some response though when your add has been up a while.

But isn`t it more like $200 for a featured place and not $2000? How much hits have you got on one day?

Originally posted by ckizer
I'm getting scared, i just paid $2000 for tophosts, and I'm not seeing good results, and i think i compare very well to the competition.

Yeah, but the thing is...there are so many other ads that yours will probably be overlooked.

People tend to "tune out" banner ads now.

--Tina

Well most of the customers who visit tophost come there to find a host, our ad is in the unix section, it's less of an add in peoples eyes. The thing was my friend at another host, in the windows section got excellent results, so i decided to give it a try. I'm getting about 30 hits a day, and tophosts said we would get about 700! But i'm seeing nothing like that....

Anyone try with a banner in hostsearch?

Jedito brings me on another point, a featured banner only costs $350 there, I don`t know if it is as popular as tophosts but it sure is much bettter.
30*30=900
2000/900=2,1): $2,1 for each visitor

Maybe try pressing them on their statement of 700 daily visitors to get your money back, and look somewhere else. Or you can always take it as a lesson and don`t stress.

Yeah, i think maybe i should change my ad to stand out a little bit, i need to think more of what the end user would think like.

Would anybody have any pointers, or suggests as to how to change my ad to get attention? to see it is, in the unix section of tophosts and the blueish one that says sharpwebinnovations. Any suggestions you guys could give would be greatly appreciated.

Hi Ckizer,
Here are my suggestions for improving your banner.

Even out the font sizes of the words on top and/or slow down the rotation a little.

As it is now, it takes a second for the eye to find the starting place and adjust to the varying font sizes and styles. The next frame pops up by the time that is accomplished and only the first line is read. Maybe I am just a slow reader but it wouldn't hurt to give the words in each frame a second or half to sink in before bringing on the next frame.

And now for the tong in cheek suggestion, use the photo on your site of the guy with an arrow pointing at his eye. Flash the photo, and "host with us or we will poke his eye out", or for the more morbid crowd, "host with us AND we will poke his eye out." :D

But seriously, you might want to consider putting that photo in the banner as an eye catcher. Most of the rest of the banners are all text. Getting someone to look is one of the biggest obstacles and the arrow/cursor suggests a mouse click.

Don

Originally posted by ckizer
I'm getting about 30 hits a day, and tophosts said we would get about 700! But i'm seeing nothing like that....

They promised you 21,000 clicks per month? There's no way their site has that kind of traffic. We have a few advertisers that are with tophosts and us, and theyve never got anything like that kind of response.

Either I'm blind, or I don't see your ad.

I think its already expired. He must have decided not to bother with another months worth. At $2K for a spotlight I'm not that suprised.

Might be a little late to post on this thread, but I have a few suggestions for you ckizer if you don't mind:

1.- First of all, people like to have as much information as possible. Try to put more info on your pages, make it easier to read. Your design is great, I personally like it a lot, but your wording is lacking a little information (in my opinion.) You might want to have a professional proof read your site and give you suggestions.

2.- Expand your support area's knowledgebase pages. This is a key area. A lot of consumers go to the support pages to see the type of support they will get after they sign up, if they don't see a lot of info there chances are they might not sign up.

3.- Try changing your hosting page and instead of listing your plans vertically, list them horizontally like most of us do. I know everyone does it this way, but people like to "compare plans" and it is obviously much easier for them to compare if they see the plans side by side.

4.- Consider putting a phone number on your site. I know you might not want to do that, but believe it or not, many of our customers have said that they signed up with us just because they "saw a phone number." Most of them never even call, but they like to know that they could speak with someone should the need arise.

One more thing, I am not against the web host directories, but I have noticed that people that go there have a tendency to search for hosts and read reviews rather than just clicking on huge adds. We are dealing now days with smarter consumers, they know paying for an ad does not give a host the reputation or the reliability and quality that they expect.

These pointers worked really well on us, but again, hard to tell. You really need to sit down and evaluate the type of market you want and based upon that make your own conclusions.

Good luck. :)