What do you do to get more/new customers?

1. Banner Advertising
2. newspaper ads
3. Email
4. Forums
5. other

Well, google adwords is a good choice though hosting keywords are a bit of a crowded field.

You should also consider email marketing to cross and upsell your current customers. You can also start a referral program, whereby you give your current customers credit for each customer they refer to you. You send out an email marketing announcement touting the referral program.

These are enough ideas for this post but I am more than willing to post more if you respond to this one. Good luck!

BTW, I have found that things like newspaper ads, bus ads, etc., do not work very well. Traditional advertising type things have limited usefulness in the hosting world.

The best way, I think, would be banner advertising in many diffrent places. This way, you target any kind of customer.

Try searching for hosting yourself or think on what you did when you purchased your hosting solution. Sometimes the answer to the question is staring you in the face and requires a little self exploration.

I dont agree with newspaper and emails. Usually what i do most is to buy online ads. It will boost your trraffic significantly

I have gotten no real business from ads placed in papers. Not to mention it is not cheap to run a decent ad in the paper.

A major drawback I see to the newspaper's ad is that it has no shelf life, rarely people read yesterday papers.

While advertising on magazine as per your targeted audience can be more significant and effective as compare to newspaper, usually magazine has a shelf life for 15 days or 30 days likewise, people come and read it again and again, your ad get several time exposures to the readers.

However if you want to build-up your brand image the “banner advertisement” is an effective way for creating brand awareness among the viewers, it increase attentions among the viewers by its visual effects and boost-up the individual’s memory by its effects to the mind of the viewers and enable him or her to recall or recognize particular company through the banner.

Agreed on the shelf life. If you are going to use dead trees advertising go with direct mail, though that requires a followup cold call from your sales team if you are going to close them. A very small percentage will call on their own but often they will at least recognize your company name because the direct mail piece at least got them interested.

Actually, a follow up call is considered a warm call, not a cold call.

I've found that the best form of advertising is word of mouth, or network marketing. I tell everyone I meet what I do, and they in turn tell other people about my services.

Works great!

Right, a warm call. But I would say that it is only a luke warm call, because often people don't read their direct mail.

Another part of networking is, of course, to get three referrals from each of your current happy customers. You can offer incentives (such as credits).

I agree with the referral program. You could offer them a free month of hosting for so many people they refer or something like that.

yeah, most happy customers are happy to help with a referral.

If you give them a free month they are even more happy to help!

I was even thinking of running a special for two months credit for each referral. That would supercharge our referral program.

That's a great idea, manatee. Let us know how you do, please :)

I will. In fact, perhaps I will post it here. I have other priorities that need to be done first but this is definately on the list.

Basically:
1. Design a nice looking email.
2. Send out to customers offering the referral program.
3. Ask sales to follow-up on leads generated.
4. Sit back and measure the results.
Note: as an added benefit, if a customer is unhappy for some reason this is a way to find out by them saying, "no way am I giving you a referral". Then you can find out if they need support or something.