Where did you get the best results from advertising? And what type of advertising you recommend? Newsletter/ Offline/ Standard etc.

Looking forward to hear from you.

Speaking as a consumer (as I have never signed up for hosting, but I am tommrow :)) I say that internet magazines are a very noticeable form of advertising. The last mag. I bought had a 7 page ad for oneandone.co.uk and I have two friends who signed up with them for it. (They are awful btw) That may be expensive but it certinally catches the eye. Almost all of the hosts I have looked at came from reccomendations from these forums. Getting a good reputation is the key to getting more customers. The problem is that you have to maintain that reputation, but as a customer and not as a host, I can't really comment on that.

It all depends who your target market is. But without going through too much detail, some favorites are:

Google.com
Free listing in host directories
small local newspapers
word of mouth (from happy customers!)

Good luck!

We do very little advertising - but we get about 5 - 10 new customers per day. The ABSOLUTE BEST form of advertising is word of mouth from happy customers.

We've also had good results with webmaster targetted newsletters.

Hope that helps!

--Tina

Hello
Those ads in UK Internet magazines cost thousands of pounds.
I once lost a sale because the prospective customer wanted to know what magazines I had advertised in.

In a "previous life" I bough a lot of magazine advertising space and I can tell you categorically that you will not recover your money from it.
You can only do it if you have large amounts of capital to burn on long term campaigns (the more regular the ad, the more effective it is).

Here is an example:

£1000 for an ad.
20,000 circulation.
2,000 people see or read the ad.
200 people think its a good product
20 people think about signing up.
10 do

Thats a £100 customer aquisition cost.
Does your product make £100 profit?
If it doesn't and you go down this route you are heading to oblivion.

We get a lot of customers by word of mouth or through our refer a friend (and get a month free) offer.
We also do a lot of Pay per click things like Goto.com which do very well if you are **sensible** and don't bid $4 per click for "web hosting" that gets 20,000 clicks per month.......

Not one of our visitors comes from Goto.com directly but their content is syndicated across things like Dogpile, Askjeeves and various others.

Gordon

Those ads in UK Internet magazines cost thousands of pounds.
I once lost a sale because the prospective customer wanted to know what magazines I had advertised in.

In a "previous life" I bough a lot of magazine advertising space and I can tell you categorically that you will not recover your money from it.
You can only do it if you have large amounts of capital to burn on long term campaigns (the more regular the ad, the more effective it is).


Thats really very true. Advertising is very costly, especially for us, web hosting company. It cost up to few thousands for advertising on newspaper, banner advertising...etc and it doesn't seems much effective.

Advertising just suitable for those company with a lot of capital to burn on long term campaigns. Or those who are selling more valueable products (at least sell at few hundreds $) like softwares, electronics, cars...etc or for those who seriouslly want to upgrade their company's image.

For a webhosting company selling an average $15 - $35 hosting plans, it is not really worth to spend few $K on advertising.

There are a lot of better way to promote a company instead of spending $K for advertising.

I believe giving out a free hosting plans (for example: 500MB, 20GB traffic..etc) for a limited time period to customer will have a more signup compare to spend $2K for advertising.

In conclusion what is more important is the quality of the services/products you provide to your customer. If your products/services really worst then you spend $10K on advertising also no points.


:)


:D

Originally posted by logus
Where did you get the best results from advertising? And what type of advertising you recommend? Newsletter/ Offline/ Standard etc.

Looking forward to hear from you.

Logus:

I will suggest not to spend any money on ads.

1. Start with listing your company on web hosting directories for free.
2. Write useful articles and press releases and submit them regularly on these directories and other free press submission sites like prweb.com
3. Submit you site to various search engines. i will suggest to submit your site personally on one search engine at one time (following all the terms) rather then using any software.
4. List you company's link every where possible - there are thousands of sites which allow you to list you links for nothing.
5. May participate in banner excahnge programs. But make sure you choose the right category to get maximum exposures directly by your terget market.
6. Offer some discount to your referals.
7. Serve your existing customer and keep them happy (most effective)

Common Internet stats for your interest:
- 85% of all web traffic originates at the major search engines.
- More than 50% of all US households have computers and 43.5 million have Internet access.
- 38% of all E-Commerce customers spent $500.00 or more online in the past 6 months.
- 87% of all E-Commerce customers stated that the most important component of a commercial Internet presence is the quality and presentation of product information

(source: copied from somewhere from this board itself.)

Get a large and popular site to host on your server. And they can advertise you say to everyone else how good service you have...