Hi all,

Again being one of the new kids on the block we are deciding where to invest our monies between my partner and I. Should we go with putting in for domain registration abilities (either a $100 deposit for enom or $99 fee from WildWestDomains) acquire ModernBill or go with marketing?

I have been doing some marketing on the side and spent about $60 over the last week and now we average about 1-2 signups a day. In which case I am now debating over ModernBill or phpManager since signing people up manually is very time consuming.

Now pretend we don't have venture capital or a outlay of cash, and if it boils down to it we are doing either domain registration abilities, site redesign, or more marketing.

What do you guys think? Thanks.

I use PHPManager and really like it. Not confusing and affordable. Easy to set up and has the ability to customize the look of the client side to match your site. I looked at MB and although it looked really good, couldn't justify spending that amount after all of my other costs.

As far as offering domain names, why not? Why send your customers away to reg their domain and maybe find another host in the process. There are many reseller programs out there, so do some research.

I would always have a marketing budget to spend over a period of time. For the first month or so, go ALL out and see what works best. When you find that out, target those over the next 6 months.

Originally posted by breaweb
I use PHPManager and really like it.

I may decide on that now, thanks for the tip.

As far as offering domain names, why not? Why send your customers away to reg their domain and maybe find another host in the process. There are many reseller programs out there, so do some research.

You make a very good point. I must research the matter more. But a very good point.

I would always have a marketing budget to spend over a period of time. For the first month or so, go ALL out and see what works best. When you find that out, target those over the next 6 months.

So one week of marketing is not enough to find the most succebtible user base? :) j/k I was thinking of doing it for a month but you are right why not 6 months it will definetly give us a more "accurate" picture. Thanks.

I noticed (by placing a fake order :) ) that you don't have any sort of online payment processor.

In my experience with services/products purchased online, 85% of people will leave if they can't pay for it online as well. I would say the best place to spend your money right now would be a payment processor such as Revecom, WorldPay, or similar.

There is a lot that you can do online that is free... get listed in directories, reciprocal linking, working on search engine placement, etc. I just think online ordering is a must, especially for an online service business.

It'll be hard if you're on such a tight budget that you only have $100... there is so much to spend money on! Advertising, incorporation (if you decide to do so), SSL, servers, payment processing, technical support / employees, 800 number, etc., etc., etc.

Good luck, just remember it's a business. It's just as hard to succeed in hosting (maybe harder) as it would be to open a brick and mortar business. If you treat it as you would a brick and mortar business you'll be much, much more likely to succeed.

CDHost thanks for your input the reason there is no online payment processor is because when users sign up I thought it would be great to give them a 15-day trial with no CC info req'd. Give them a little more security, as we are not asking for a CC number. We are hoping this pays off more in the long run than someone jumping host real quick to send off a ton of SPAM :(

After the 15-day trial they log back in (still under construction I have 12 days to finish it since we had our first customer 3-4 days ago :) ) and enter their information and then use our CC processor (HostCharge) to pay, PayPal, or mail in a check.

I'd like to hear any thought you may have on this, and the budget is not strictly $100 I'm just cash flow conscious with just the 1-2 signups we have a day (average from the last 5 days) I can't see justifying putting $100 (domain registration) into something that not many people sign up for or purchase...yet.

Also I was wondering why my cell phone kept going off with a new order :) and it said test.

We currently have the toll free number, tech support, SSL, etc... and we did shoe string it a lot, but it is because I wanted to invest more money into customer satisfaction (i.e. buying more books on *Nix, PHP, MySQL, PERL, etc... and one book on making happy customers).

But I'd like to hear your response CDHost or anyone elses. I was thinking of adding at least validation code to ensure a correct email, and if the domain is registered to warn the user to make sure they own it.

I think your strategy is definatly unique... there aren't many people out there doing what you're doing. But there's a reason for that too...

Once people know who you are you'll start getting the spammers... they use stolen credit cards now, but oh boy when they can get hosting for free! :D

You'll have to put a system into place to make extra sure you don't open your box up to hackers or spammers because it could bring your entire server down and cause you to lose countless other customers...

That said, I think your idea could definately fly in the hosting industry if you could keep secure. There are so many people out there who have been burned by other hosts so bad they'd jump at a chance to see your uptime and level of support before having to pay anything.

As far as what to invest in now, I'd probably suggest local advertising. For $100 you can design some pretty simple postcards or letters and mail them to a lot of businesses in your local area. Getting local customers is much easier than getting them off the Internet, IMHO.

You could also cold-call people from your area... unpleasant at first but very profitable! A great book on cold-call selling is "Successful Cold Call Selling" by Lee Boyer.

You could of course collect the credit card information in advance to verify the order, and not charge it until their trial is up. This is in practice many places and it is what I do if someone asks for a trial on their account. It has worked out fine for me so far.:)

There are some enom resellers who may be able to let you be a reseller of them for close to the prices you would get if you pay $100 to enom. You should see some info on the "Related offers" message area, or post a request in there. This would allow you to offer domain registration without a down payment.

Also, I'm curious as to how you invested your first $60 of advertising money? Some people have wasted alot more than that with 0 signups, sounds like you did something right to get 1-2 signups per day.

Mark
tqhosting.com

I'd go for $100 for more advertising, this way, you get more clients and maybe more money to buy your billing software :)

Actually I'd recommend doing this survey among your customers - ask them what they think requies improvement - if everything is A ok than go for marketing - if not try to provide a better service.

Good luck

IMO it would be good to get a client manager system that sets up accounts automatically now, or atleast handles all of their account info. Otherwise you will have to spend a lot of extra time entering existing customer info into the system. I'd recommend Perlbill - it has a great whm/cpanel integration system.

If you don't mind me asking, where all have you advertised or been listed?

No problem we are all friend here :)

Here is exactly what I did for advertising the exact amount, to be honest came to $70-$75. And most of that came from a PPC (Google) that after looking at the logs doesn't seem to me that any of my customers so far have signed up from. So I canned that early last week and we were still getting signups go figure.

I then took up lotsofissues offer:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=67663

and did 50K of banner impressions mostly for branding and awareness, but I did a test on the categories it was in and got a 0.8% return in one of the categories. I started to target that category. Then in the middle of the night my phone went off, I use SMS to notify me of new signups, new support tickets, etc..., and that was our first customer I believe 1- 1 1/2 day after I started marketing.

I then saw one of the post here about webhost directories, started placing a lot of our stuff in the new ones. the directory Find My Hosting (http://www.findmyhosting.com) actual sent us 2 sales from 18 people clicking on our details page not bad.

I also took up the free advert on the UK guy and put a banner there, and actually got someone from the UK to sign up. But since our system is connected to my phone we are able to promptly determine whether or not we recieved a compaint and we pounce on it immediately.

Most of our customers after that came from the people we signed up. Here's a happy customers website who we didn't ask to do this, but he did, and give us a great testimonial http://www.casslin.com.

If it wasn't for this weekend, no sign ups go figure, we were averaging about 1-2 signups for the first week. I have some other marketing plans as well, but I think upgrading the site and fixing it should be of the utmost priority looking still into ModernBill and phpManager. Because Chris is right sometimes when I'm out on the golf cource or racing my RC Car it stinks when the phone goes off (happened already) and you have to drop everything because we do have a within 3 hour response time.

Another thing to also make sure is good. Is your website get a descent site. Your website is your office, you don't have to have a great office, or drive an expensive car all the clients see of you is your website so make a good impression. Also invest in a mobile phone and 800 number. It is important in your clients impression of your company. When I decided to host with a company it always turned me off that they didn't have an 800 number or direct dial number. Our whole 800 number costs is about $10/month plus usage and we have an auto attendant with it. So people call and it asks what department you want to be transferred to, and then it transfers the call either to my cell phone or home office phone, and the same in partners case for sales.

Let me know if anyone else has any questions about my marketing tactics, I'd like to go over them with anyone, but the one thing I learned is treat your customers well and they will do better advertising for you than you can by spending thousands of dollars.

Thanks :)

I'll let you know what routes I take and if they're successful or not.