Just curious to know where you Hosting Entrepeneurs got your first 100 or so customers from, any advertising agency and was it worth your dollars? Have a good day!

My first customer is my friend, second is from signature in forum, third and so on is from search engine....... until i reach a point that the growth is so slow, i start putting money to advertise the company.

From WHT forums here, and friends :)

Word of mouth, after you get your first handful it really explodes :)

AT GUN point!!!:uzi: :crap:
LOL just joking.

Mine was from either Google Adwords or Overture... but those we very very expensive to begin with....

My first customer was a friend, then word of mouth...after that GOOGLE and sometimes from WHT.

First one came from a friend. first 100 came from local market
via WOM

A friend, another friend, then various others through word of mouth. Forums always got me some order forms submitted, but I think I had the luck of the devil in that 80% of them never continued their payment after the accounts were setup and passwords ready to be given:mad:

Where would you advertise if you had a budjet of $1,000 a month to spend on it? Do you think paying for links to your site off of other high traffic sites really helps get you listed on search engines?

With that money I'd be thinking about AdWords or Overture

Don't forget to tap into the local market, it's considerably less saturated than internet marketing, and you can be pleasantly suprised of the outcome

Off topic but I had to comment..... galacnet that is really funny....

If commenting makes you feel better about yourself, go right a head.

Like many, my first customer was my friend. My client base after that, however, came mainly from WHT and other forums.

We built a directory of Web designers and made sure they knew we would be opening for business soon. This was in the innocent days of 1995 when the Web seemed large but was small, relatively speaking. We had a couple hundred people interested in the directory, and the first hundred customers were more or less ready when we turned on our services.

Kevin

Local market advertising can be a big pay off... I have echoed what many have said here. But it is incredible what kind of business can be had from your local city, and state.

Nice site sigma. I was greatly impressed.

First 4 out of 5 were friends and acquaintances of me and my ex-partner. That 1 out of 5 were through direct selling.

Back as a student assistant in college, I spent a lot of time hand holding professors and department heads in setting up software and learning to use it. When one (a professor emeritus and department chair) retired he decided to start a web business, selling training/refresher manuals to other psychiatry professionals, and asked if I'd help him get set up. When he liked my work he spread my name around.

Other departments in the university wanted my services and were willing to contract out for my help. My boss didn't like not getting the attention and slowly forced me out of employment there under a clause in the employment regulations which said that employees could not work for multiple colleges or departments within the university.

A few months later the entire department was scrapped after a bit of a scandal (the boss liked to consult several hours a day for outside companies while still officially on the university's clock), but by then I had enough clients (the professor emeritus, the lead percussionist of the symphony, etc) and things just went from there.

Right now my client list only rises in single digits annually, but I do a lot more than just hosting. I'm working on pushing my hosting services locally, once I get my new site redesign in place.

word of mouth, never let your customer down.. Never.

It seems that most hosts here have experienced similar problems with getting their first few clients, but i can assure you not to worry about it, the first few months can be rough, while you are struggling to maintain server costs and advertising costs, but as has been said, if you are providing a good service for your clients, then they will be more than grateful to refer other clients.

Another method you could try using is partnering with a web designer, i have done this in the past, and I sell web design for a designer, and he sells web hosting for me and is a very efficient way of getting stable clients.

Word of mouth, and recommendation from existing Customers are ours 90 percent of new clients.

Good luck

Brother of a coworker from my full-time job. Some word of mouth. Not enough clients in general so. I am more looking at the local market now.

1st is from a forum, 100th I don't really remember, but 500th was a friend.

Greetings:

Our founding clients were attained through social networking.

Thank you.