I've gotten several customers from the forums. What other forms of advertising does everybody use?

Thread moved to Running a Web Hosting Business.

I believe most of the free advertising methods usually work the best. Get yourself listed on the major hosting search sites such as hostsearch.com.

Many people will recommend google adwords, however you really need a fairly large budget to make this work due to the signup rate being around 0.5-1%

Best form of advertising is setting your site up correctly and using your meta stuff.

You should also watch your referrers and search keywords. For instance, somehow i've gotten really high on the list of SLA searches and escalation procedures. I don't know enough about meta to understand how to target that stuff but you can bet I'm working on getting someone to work on SEO with me. I'm getting 4000 to 5000 hits per week on people searching those keywords. What I don't understand is I don't mention that stuff anywhere on my site except the docs themselves. Go to google and search for 'escalation procedure' and I'm number one. How???? I've got NO clue.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=escalation+procedure

Anyway, that showed me that if your site is optimized for the search engines you'll get more traffic.

Not really advertising, but it's something to increase traffic which is the goal anyway.

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Many people will recommend google adwords, however you really need a fairly large budget to make this work due to the signup rate being around 0.5-1%
from what I've seen on WHT, many people DO NOT recommend adwords for the hosting industry, mostly because the top is like $5/click. (unless you have a huge marketing budget)

Classified ads/Press release/cold call/referral program are few method that you can implement.

Signup rate of 0.5 - 1 percent? Is that post-click?? jeez

I believe most of the free advertising methods usually work the best. Get yourself listed on the major hosting search sites such as hostsearch.com.

Many people will recommend google adwords, however you really need a fairly large budget to make this work due to the signup rate being around 0.5-1%

I thought that's what I heard a couple months ago. If I'm wrong somebody please correct me. I would expect it to be higher as well.

It's probably about right for a majority of the small hosts.... definitely no way to make a dime off those numbers.

hosting directories seem to work well for a lot of hosting sites. Plus they are not as expensive as the major PPCs like google adwords and overture.

i would also recomend hosting directories, helps better target your audience. and most dont charge $5/click like you would have to pay with adwords with an extremely low turnaround rate.

Starting your own Affiliate Marketing Strategy is also a good option. This will help spread your business out using others (your affiliates) to refer customers to you.

Similar to what amazon and many others do.