Hi,

Just a quick question really :

Which would you recommend out of - spending £200 on an advert in a internet magazine OR would you spend the money at google on adwords.. ?? to advertise my hosting co.

Or has anyone got any other ideas for advertising that does well ?

Thanks.

Oli.

I would say a magazine over ad words ... what site is it that you are going to advertise

Why pay for what comes free?

http://www.promotefree.com
http://www.selfpromotion.com
http://www.webupright.com/business.html

Problem solved:)

The site is http://www.dalehosting.co.uk

Cheers for the links :)

Am I thinking DonHost or fasthosts?!?!

Think what you like, doesnt bother me!

i can suggest you ad in web hosting directory, google adwords, pay per click search engines like findwhat.com.
at least it works for us...

magazine ad won't really work over one month..to get good sales you need to be in for at least 3 months.

Originally posted by dalecom
Which would you recommend out of - spending £200 on an advert in a internet magazine OR would you spend the money at google on adwords.. ?? to advertise my hosting co.

Or has anyone got any other ideas for advertising that does well ?

Thanks.

Oli.

Presumably £200 on an Internet Mag would buy you an eighth of a page in something like that Internet Works. The circulation is pretty high but I have no idea how many people would visit your site from it. In saying that 3/4 years ago I found my first host from that mag.

An option for you would be to combine the fixed fee of £200 for a mag and the targeting of AdWords with a Spotlight or Showcase ad on one of the few top directories. On most sites you should get between 100-200 clicks to your site and it would come within your budget. You would get a fixed ad for a month and also the tangible result of trackable visitors.

what about the hositng-specific pay per click engines.

ispcheck.com, ppcforhosts.com, findyourhosting

has anyone used them and can report results?

The signup rate from magazine ad's is not that gr8. The best advertising is word of mouth. But it all takes time.

Magazine advertising= 6+mths advert run to start seeing anything decent.

Word of mouth can take 6 - 18mth b4 you start seeing results and that all depends on how you treat your customer.

Unfortunatly there is not get rich quick method with this business as there is too much competition. However if you stick it out and sustain good customer relations, you will find the orders will come wether you advertise or not. But it takes time.

Adwords: Common 'easy' keywords like hosting are mucho expensive these days. Less frequently thought of words will come cheaper, but maintaining click-thru can be a problem. (Google has probably made a good $40 of us in the last 3 weeks, just 'restarting' our campaigns after modifications to try and get our clickthrus up, and since they charge $5 a pop after the first two I think, it adds up).

Magazine: Can't speak for it, haven't tried anything in print yet for our hosting business. We'll most likely go after some local targetted print campaigns first (college newspapers, local business journals, etc) as opposed to the 'big and expensive' mags.

Word of Mouth: INCREDIBLE Our single biggest source of new clients. There are two things that absolutely make our day, when someone says "Oh, Bob sent me over." or even better, when Bob himself comes back to us for a second (or third, or fourth) site. Definately lets us know what kind of service we're providing, and how our clients feel towards us.

Hosting Specific PPC Engines: We signed up with FindMyHosting a while back, and it was great. Great as in, return on investment great... we had about 5 signups the first month from them, and a fair bit of interest, and no upfront cash outlay. Paying based on sales generated is a great concept, no paying for windowshoppers or game-clickers. However the last few weeks we've seen a rather significant drop in the amount of traffic (and in turn sales) generated by FMH for us. I would tend to believe this is just a natural occurance as the number of hosts listed there has grown (and the recent spat of "$5 a year" hosts of course get listed first in the "Budget" category, which we all know is the one 97% of visitors go to first!)

it's true that a lot of people use the budget search - out of interest here is a breakdown for people that use the FindMyHosting preset searches (not including the use of the actual search tools - which gives an almost infinite potential for ordering of search results)

Budget 45.75%
Win2000 8.75%
Linux 7.60%
PHP/MySQL 7.45%
FrontPage 6.53%
Resellers 6.17%
ASP 5.63%
Adult 5.57%
MS SQL 4.28%
Dedicated 3.40%
ColdFusion 2.88%

So - the budget one is by far the most significant. This mix is also biased by the makeup of our traffic - so shouldn't be read as a indicator of the market. We are No.1 on Google for "cheap web hosting" - but although we were No,5 for "web hosting" last month - we are No.20 (sometimes 9) right now - this will have an impact short-term on the type of sales generated through the system. Our traffic will change in make-up & level significantly over the next 6 months - whilst remaining targeted.

FindMyHosting is new (just over 4 months old) - so we have a lot of growing to do yet :D - as the system reaches it's potential it will become more of a true competitive marketplace where hosts can differentiate. We are adding to the system constantly (for example we just added a "wizard" search that will give a greater variety of potential results returned) and our aim is to give hosts more & more ability to differentiate in real time without any upfront costs or risk.

Andrew,

Please don't mistake my writeup on my FMH experience as complaining, or in anyway negative towards FMH. I'm very happy with our FMH experiences so far, as I said, Pay Per Sale is definately preferrable to anything PPC or impression based.. and the very way FMH works (hosts entering their plans, then letting users come and find the one that works for them) is great. Much preferred over the old "Top 10 Host Providers (aka: Who paid us the most to be listed first!)" lists. ;)

I know some people will look at my post and go "Only five sales in a month? why bother?" but to put that in perspective, during the same time we only recieved 4 from Adwords. (Yet another reason Adwords will be slipping off our Marketing Plan)...

Adwords = $70 in clicks, 4 sales.
FindMyHosting = 5 sales, 5 commissions, no more.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see which is worth our time and money. ;)

Findmyhosting.com has been the best thing for our hosting business since we signed up. We have gotten large increase of traffic from FMH than we were originally getting before we listed there.

Its free to sign up, and you pay 15% commission on your sales they refer up to 12 months. Heck, I would give anyone 15% to bring in sales and FMH has done just that!

Not only did they increase our revenue, their site is full of information and statistics that is extremely useful in finding your position in the market. As they grow the stats on their site will be extremely valuable and should be a guiding hand in your future hosting business decisions.

All other hosting search directories, IMHO, are a big waste of time!

John
http://www.displayhosting.com