besides adwords, do any of you use one of these "hosting directories" to advertise your hosting?

thank you

From the emoticon for the thread title, I'd assume you were mocking other posts, but I'm confused if you are or not...

I'd reccomend searching around, basically local market and targetting niches is the way you want to go

People tend to give up on AdWords too easily in my opinion. AdWords didn't work too well for us to begin with, but by working on our website and tweaking our keywords and text ads, we've been able to solid stream of sign ups from AdWords alone. AdWords is nice to have around now when other methods don't work as well.

Does anyone know if there is anyone that you can hire to get a decent AdWords campaign going?

ive been using adwords and have had some success with it.

also i didnt pic that emoticon to mock :)

i guess im looking for anyone with good experiance hitting those niche markets, like the yellow pages, or local papers etc

Nowhere. Word of mouth is your best friend. :)

Word of mouth is great! In addition to that, do not overlook your local market!

ya i have 102 domain now, most are via word of mouth.

i need to look into local newspapers

I mentioned a short time ago that we advertise in magazines. We advertise in a few regional ones in the UK and Europe. When we signed up they did say that the first three months would not bring any customers, as customers like to see the advertisment maintain a steady exposure.

We did not get very much on our first two advertisments at all, we are not even sure if we received one enquiry but the next add received some healthy feedback and the ones we have running at the moment are getting lots of good feedback. It just seems you have to keep going, pretty much in the same way you do with adwords from what other people have posted.

But with hosting magazines your adds have to stand out as the competition is above, below and to the side of you in a hosting magazine :)

It depends on what you are aiming for local papers are something we have yet to try.
It just seems that you have to keep going, learn from your experience on what brough you success and what didn't and how you can improve on it.

Have I gone off topic again :cool:

What most people starting out in marketing their new business fall into the bad habit of, is going to the "Marketing Buffet" and sampling a little bit of each method to find what works for them, and usually get frustrated when nothing produces results.

While sampling different marketing tactics is a good idea in theory, it is ineffective in practice. Almost all marketing tactics take time and effort to bear fruit. (You can't plant an apple seed one day, and expect to make applesauce from the tree that grows the next).

You need to first make your business plan. In this, you *should* have done a marketing analysis of who your target market is, and list some ideas on how to reach them. Based on who you are marketing, you then need to compile a marketing plan/strategy for your different markets.

Take a look at real world companies (brick/mortar), they often have market research groups with case studies and market testers that they test their marketing plans on. Once they get good feedback, they do an initial run of the marketing plan (Usually 6-9months) to get a good amount of saturation to properly judge the response. Based on the response, they tweak the plan to optimize it.

A good marketing plan consits of different marketing tactics (combination of adwords, hosting directories, print ads etc) with a common theme. It is very difficult to pull off a good marketing plan with just one tactic.

Id say word of mouth is the best-Cost nothing.
Like mentioned above local market is always profitbale as you wont have much competition in your local area like you would on the net.
Good luck
Reagrds,

Word of mouth is great and everything, but it would only be effective for a company that has an established customer base.

Originally posted by HVoice-Eugene
Word of mouth is great and everything, but it would only be effective for a company that has an established customer base.

Not true at all. Word of mouth is how my company got going. You tell your friends, family, co-workers, etc and you will get business. It is best to start off in a niche market such as going after people that are local to you. You can charge a bit more that way too.

Word of mouth can provide very pleasing results as we have personally experienced. But it's important to keep in mind that once in a while, if you attract a customer not in your target market, that's when word of mouth can have a negative effect.

E.g.
Picture this scenario.
1. Inexperienced client signs up
2. You provide everything promised plus more to ensure good experience
3. Due to clients lack of ability he/she blames problems he/she blames the problems on you.
4. Problem client spreads negative feedback.
5. Friends of the client originally being referred to you will now have an equally negative force encouraging them not to sign up.

Basically what i'm trying to say is, it can take 10 people to encourage someone to take up your services, but 1 person can cause you to lose 10 people. So don't rely on word of mouth alone.

We have tried good AdWords, its worked out well. We have tried sponsorship, that has worked out well too. And most of all, we've tried to be innovative and pursue advertising streams and deals not many have tried, which has worked out very well indeed.

It's good to get other peoples ideas, but it's even better to come up with your own idea which you can exploit and have better control over the competitiveness of the advertisement.

We first started off with some simple posts on some directories, but yes, the best method is Word of Mouth, i put a ad in the local paper and it did generate a bit of traffic. finding a good market where im at is kinda hard since its a big city type area. focus in on a good type of client you want (IE business's, personal) there are tons out there.
Be consistant in your advertising though, if people see ad's in like papers all the time, they will know that your sticking around and not some fly by night company, keep track of where you advertise and make notes of your traffic as to where you are getting your click-through from, and if they have the option available, start putting more effort on those, but dont loose site on the ones that are getting you low clicks, at least you are generating from them.
This is the method i used, and its working kinda nice!

Originally posted by timdorr
Nowhere. Word of mouth is your best friend. :)

Yeah right...