How long was it before you got your first customer? I know this depends greatly on how much advertising you do. Maybe give me an idea of how you got the customer. I.e. using soley Adwords and forum advertising.

Mark

I got my first customer by word of mouth, the other ones came from Forum Advertising.

@energizedit
We were lucky to have our initial clients way before our launch due to demand. However you should be able to get at least 1-5 clients within your first month of service it marketed right, I always say starting locally is the best way to tap into the market and get your feet wet.

We got our first client within 2 weeks of opening. Just by doing basic advertising.

Greetings Mark:

Within days because we did not rely on the myth of "if you build it, they will come."

Thank you.

Hey,
I got 2 in my first month just by doing free advertising in forums. I read a good ebook which helped with handy forums to post on. The ebook is what lead me on to WHT lol :)

Hey,
I got 2 in my first month just by doing free advertising in forums. I read a good ebook which helped with handy forums to post on. The ebook is what lead me on to WHT lol :)

which ebook did you get?

Got two in one month time by forum advertising.

Got our first customer years ago by google adwords - costs a bit more to appear top of that list now!
Also placed an advert in a magazine - got a couple from that, but in my opinion, a complete waste of money.
We now rely on word-of-mouth advertisement. Offer a good service and your customers will treat you well.

We dont want to take over the world and we started with hosting friends pages and then one thing led to another. But that was a long time ago now.

i got one with in five minutes of advertising ... maybe i am lucky

had 15 by the end of the month

i got one with in five minutes of advertising ... maybe i am lucky

had 15 by the end of the month

Your lucky!

I got my first client within a month or so. It was an international customer not directly related to any advertisements. How do I know? Because I did not start advertising until the 3rd month

Under one month thanks to Web Hosting Talk. :)

Getting a first customer is always a challenge but having got him give a first class service and they will soon tell others.

We got 3-5 clients in our 1st month.

we got it on the first day of launch. I must say it felt good. He stayed with us for a few months (don't remember the exact amount) which was nice. It was a long while ago but feels like it happened just the other day. I still remember his name (won't say it though) but I don't remember his site but I could always look it up in our billing system later.

Still waiting to get my first customer but we have only been live for about 3 weeks now. It will come soon, I can feel it.

Still waiting to get my first customer but we have only been live for about 3 weeks now. It will come soon, I can feel it.

You will soon get a client, don't fret.

Within a week. Cost me more than it was worth though :P

When we start offering hosting to public last August (prior we are only hosting our local clients privately since 2004), I think we got first couple of clients on first day by just posting on forums especially WHT. Now i think we are getting new sign-ups at rate of 1-3/day on average, mostly VPS!

Ok, one secret is to buy adspace on relevant web hosting/web designer blogs :) normally they just cost $10-80/mo per slot, don't waste your money on google adsense/adword! just give back the money to the customer and give them good discount.

Word of mouth is the best, and it's free.

We are going to try local newspaper next week and see how it goes, so in short try to experiment what will works best for you, always analyze which one is working and abandon those which aren't otherwise you will be wasting time and money.

I had 2 in my first week.

We haven't gotten any customers yet since we opened up our hosting to the public. We've been hosting for a number of customers for a long time but it wasn't until very recently that we've shifted our focus from other services to primarily on hosting.

You will soon get a client, don't fret.

Jacob,

Thanks for the support.. :agree:

I tried to buy traffic from ebay, but it was the worste thing that i could do!!I stressed my server for nothing!!Over 2000 visits (maybe bot) and only 1 page viewed for visit!!Now i will use more common advertising method, like forums and twitter...
Someone have tried facebook advertising?

Have never advertised. Not ever. When we started our business 12 years ago, we got 3 signups the first day. We wrote our own billing software and it wasn't finished [not by a long shot]. I remember making the welcome emails by hand. Took about an hour each. Good times those :)

Hi

We got our first client through add campaign.

I got my first customer by word of mouth, the other ones came from Forum Advertising.

How can you get good word of mouth if you don't have any previous customers?

We didn't receive a customer for 3 weeks. That was from calling people and Businesses in the local phone book.