Wanted to know what form of advertisement works for most.
Also, which, do you feel, are the best sites/newsletters which give the best results?

Hi zsindhu,
Local advertising has done wonders for us. I would suggest you not overlook that market. Hosting directories are always a good place to start, as well.

We are currently advertising locally and yes, it has done a great deal to boost our image and sales.

I was more interested in knowing which form of on-line advertising has worked for most as we were now contemplating the launch of a small on-line campaign.

Good search engine positioning will also bring you a lot of clients. But don't try to get top positions with words like hosting or webhosting, you won't get anywhere. Try to use more targeted words. For good positioning your domain name can also be relevant to what are you offering.

I also believe that local advertising would be the best wya to go with a company, but if you live somewhere desolate and totally computer-illiterate, it may be tough :) . Try posting your company in ComputorEdge magazines.

Also, word fo mouth has been an undoubtable source for new clients. This is a very effective way since you don't have to pay for the persuasion. It is like a huge referral chain: one person signs up, then he or she tells another person, and so on until you have a whole family of clientele for your new business!

What are some good campaigns to run locally>

I'm also interested in hearing about local campaigns. I tried a classified ad for a week but saw nothing from it. I'm hesitant to place a "regular" ad in the newspaper, pretty expensive around here.

Mark

I also tried advertising locally and saw absolutely no customers from it.

I gave up in the end because it just didn't seem to be going anywhere.

lohosting.com and .net still point to the dns for the resller account I no longer have :(

O well's, I'll monitor the scene for a while and then make a big comeback. Shouldn't someone setup a site full of tips for advertising web-hosts???

I also tried to run locally, but most old people are not open mind to internet. They get their clients and profits without internet. Even they can get more income with the net, they don´t want to handle more expenses. Only if one of their relatives of friends talk them about the advantages on the net, then they may change their minds and go for internet services.

I decided to try online in the international market soon.

One of the most effective ways I have ever seen to gain customers in the local market is to do just what someone suggested above, except in real life.

Hold a one-day "training session" or "roundtable discussion" at a hotel. Pay the 500$ for the conference room and a couple of hundred for snacks and contact a load of local businesses about it. You should be able to fill up 50 spots no problem, and maybe even more (plus you could drop your conference room costs by going cheaper, not offering food, whatever).

Anyways, I have seen this work wonders for many companies, specifically web development companies. Make a real presentation with real information about a certain product, but just make sure people know that you are the best company for their hosting business. Heck, you could probably recoup a tonne of your costs by getting a local web-dev company to sponsor that side of things and speak on that subject in the afternoon.

Hosting directory and other online ad formats work great too...

Hello,

Well as some friends here mentioned, I guess search engines ( if you've got a very good ranking ) and web hosting directories has got the best potential customers.

I start advertising with 3-4 web hosting directories and the best one which works for us is HostPulse.com. We pay them about US$ 400.00 per month for advertising, and during first week we get it back straight away from them !

PS: you get what you pay for.

Local Advertising in computer magazines, bench advertising, newspaper advertising, yellow pages advertising, all types of advertising can work. It all depends on the time of year also.

We go into businesses and offer web hosting solutions. I also have a ton of friends that want web hosting over, 200 of them, i've built a connection from when I use to run a small freeware archive back in the day. Plus, they refer to their friends, etc, etc.

You just gotta keep blabing around about it, dont' spam though, obviously. We are also starting a web hosting directory advertising campaign soon, you guys should be seeing "HostingPlex" on some of the biggest.

Hope this helped a bit to get an idea.

Oh, Newsletters help :)

Not a bad start.

Originally posted by Refsoft
Hosting directory and other online ad formats work great too...

No...They don't works :(

Search Engine even bring more clients...

No...They don't works

Why do you say that?

I agree... There are just so many people circulating through those sites that a majority of your visitors are more likely to come from search engines or other sources.

We've been trying to market locally quite a bit lately. We have ads running in the local herald and on the radio. It hasn't helped much lately, always thought our town was up on technology, perhaps just too up on technology where they don't need our services. lol. :stickout

We've be worried about some programs where you can purchase so many hits worth of advertisements from companies, but lately we've been doing it quite a bit as we found a few good companies that we are amazed with.

I guess my recommendation would be that whether you go one way or another to advertise, once you find your nitch, stick with it...

Pay per click search engines like overture.com is the fastest results-getting advertising method imho.

But you pay a heck of a lot... upto $6 per click. That's really crazy.

Originally posted by hostingplex
But you pay a heck of a lot... upto $6 per click. That's really crazy.

Yes, you are right. This is for very expensive keywords. I meant for more specific, much cheaper keywords.

From our experience, general keywords like 'web hosting', gets less results and costs a lot more. But more specific keywords such as 'php web hosting' are much cheaper and more targeted. That makes it give better results.

I spent much money in banner ads and hosting directory, and they generate few results to me, so they actually don't work, that's the fact :(

Originally posted by NovaW


Why do you say that?

Originally posted by nozol


Yes, you are right. This is for very expensive keywords. I meant for more specific, much cheaper keywords.

From our experience, general keywords like 'web hosting', gets less results and costs a lot more. But more specific keywords such as 'php web hosting' are much cheaper and more targeted. That makes it give better results.

That's really true. The keyword "Web Hosting" is infact too "Broad". We own a Pay Per Click Search Engine, and to let you guys know something, which is common sense. Affiliates are driving traffic to the engines, and the affiliates want more $$$ for their traffic, so they link to "web hosting", "casino" and any other high bidded terms. While they are sending targeted traffic, its not all that targeted. Stuff like "dedicated hosting" "frontpage hosting" etc would do pretty well. Even for overture, its still too expensive. We work closely with Findwhat.com and they are good also. 2nd in the business I believe.

I spent much money in banner ads and hosting directory, and they generate few results to me, so they actually don't work, that's the fact

Ok - I understand what you were saying. Several posts have said a similar thing about advertising in directories.

In the discussions on what marketing methods work - there is one factor that isn't discussed a lot here, but is also a big variable on what works or doesn't work.

Different methods can work or not work in terms of bringing "targeted" traffic to your site. But there is also a factor of how well a hosts site converts traffic to sales. Getting sales being the true test of what works or doesn't.

The conversion is obviously also impacted by how targeted the traffic is, but a sites ability to convert is a huge factor.

We see this with FindMyHosting - if you assume that the targeted nature of our traffic is a constant - some hosts convert this traffic into sales by the bucketload, some don't convert any of it to sales.

For an individual host it's hard to ascertain if conversion is a function of the traffic (propensity to buy) or a function of the hosts ability to close the sale. We have the data across many hosts to evaluate this in more detail - which will be one of the areas we focus on in the near future.

I'm not listed on google yet (in the process of being added). I've only listed myself on hosting directories (around 30 - 50), and I have quite a few clients. I don't really pay for advertising, the only other place I get clients from is the Web Hosting Requests forum on this board.

Forums, search engines and directories are great. Even for free.
Need a lot of work.

;)

Originally posted by megagente
Forums, search engines and directories are great. Even for free.
Need a lot of work.

;)

I second that.

Yes, forums are great, indeed, just need to find the right ones... :)

Yes, forums are great, indeed, just need to find the right ones...

Any suggestions on what some other "right" ones maybe besides this one? :D

Originally posted by dk2002
I spent much money in banner ads and hosting directory, and they generate few results to me, so they actually don't work, that's the fact :(

Hello,

We are also advertising with some web hosting directories such as HostPulse.com, WebHostDir.com, FindMyHosting.com and etc. however we are quite happy with them, especially HostPulse.com

Maybe something with your packages is wrong, try to change, but remember do not change everything all together, try to add more bandwidth, or e-mail boxes, disk space, add free domain or something like that.

We used to have your problem as well, the reason was the e-mail boxes, we used to offer only 10 e-mail boxes with our Basic Package which is US$ 7.95 per month. We were selling that package very rarely. However, once we increased the e-mail boxes to 150, we saw the results... Change, change and change !

PS: Well designed site. Wish you tones of lucks.

I dropped $720 advertising on kanoodle, search123, ppchosts, google adwords and hostsearch.com with no results. The first $23 spent on google took in 6 customers (none from the usa and 2 of which dropped out after the first month) and that was it. Paying per click and advertising online wont get you far. Word of mouth is the best, and local advertising is the next best thing. Hosting friends and people you know get them very excited and are willing to help you out. Online advertisements are the scum of the web. I feel dirty for what i did.

Local always worked for me. Search engines are just there to gooble up your $$$..except for google... everyone likes google ;)

I dropped $720 advertising on kanoodle, search123, ppchosts, google adwords and hostsearch.com with no results. The first $23 spent on google took in 6 customers (none from the usa and 2 of which dropped out after the first month) and that was it. Paying per click and advertising online wont get you far. Word of mouth is the best, and local advertising is the next best thing. Hosting friends and people you know get them very excited and are willing to help you out. Online advertisements are the scum of the web. I feel dirty for what i did.

When you say no results - do you mean no sales or no prospects? - I'm assuming you mean no sales.

Google, PPC, directories etc will all provide prospects - the targeted nature (propensity to buy) of traffic from different sources is always open to debate - but the only result that any online marketing method can bring you is

1. Qualified prospects
2. Exposure (branding) - although unless you have a big budget this benefit is small

No online marketing method can bring you sales. Only you can convert prospects into sales.

Any discussion of what works & what doesn't work often forgets to take into account the hosts ability to convert a prospect into a sale. There is a huge difference host to host in terms of ability to close a sale. $720 with no results is a bit discouraging I am sure, but there is some valuable business info in that - it gives you a good indicator that your sites ability to close a sale could be weak. This is hard data you can act upon. You may also find that one source converts better than another - but for that analysis to be significant you need some good data (at least 30 - 40 sales)

In terms of different sources of targeted traffic the real question is for any method - how much does it cost to bring in a qualified prospect?

I do fully agree that word of mouth is best - a growth via word of mouth means you are doing everything right in terms of customer delight. It's always far cheaper to keep a customer than to gain a new one & customers via word of mouth are the fruits of a well run business.

A lot of folks replying to this post have mentioned local advertising. We have not tried this yet, although we are placing display ads in several local newspapers for September.

We are actually doing ok with PPC and online advertisng, so I agree that different hosts will get different results with the same campaigns.

I was wondering if anyone can share what kind of local advertising works for them? Display ads? Direct mail? Anything else?

Good luck with your venture. I am sure if you stick with it, you will find what works for you. Any web host on here will tell you that sticking to your guns and hanging in there is key.

Best regards,
David Harris

Hrmm ... Golestan ... how are you advertising on findmyhosting when they completely dont allow ANY ads? :confused:

FindMyHosting collects a recurring percentage (15%/mo for 1 year) of any sales incurred through the site. It's a nice set-up. Also, I agree with Andrew - closing the sale is of enormous importance. Respond to any inquiries promptly and honestly, don't pressure potential customers to sign-up, just answer their questions and encourage them to ask more. WHT works well, post responses to every request you can match - quite a few potential customers scroll through those looking for hosts.

Oh yeah .. I know that ... was just confused by your statement :P

Personally ... I prefer FindMyHosting over all the other hosting directories ... nice, clean, and powerful

Our WHT banner ad started running today, that should be interesting. I've always been curious how this form of advertising stacked up against the "requests" section, directories, etc.

Well here is my view on the whole thing. You need two setup two websites :)

1) Local Market - Local market is always more expensive in the long run. They want more support etc. because generally you seek them out instead of them seeking you out meaning they probably don't have great internet skills. Also, local market is great for the sheer fact that you can sell the web design and make a fortune off it. When you are starting your company this is where you nail them and get some capital flowing.

2) Internet Market - Google etc. etc. We look at everything over a 6 month period (which most brick and mortars look at things at a 12 mos period). If we don't see a return on our investment within 6 mos (just break even is all we try to do) we kill the advertising. We have around 350 keywords that we are top 5 on with overture and spend quite a bit of money with them. I see a bunch of inquiries from them but don't see a whole bunch of signups. Advertising on forums like this is worth it, you are finding tech savvy people who don't require much support and know what they are doing so you can offer them better prices and generally they will help improve your service b/c they yell at you to get things installed so they can improve their websites :).


No one strategy will work and advertising as every company knows is just a huge vacuum no matter who you are that sucks all your money away. You do it for brand awareness.