Promoting my web hosting business... How to get clients?

Posted offers on lots of forums, bought ads on a couple of sites (one which has about 800 people online at the same time), tried Google Adwords, etc. No success!

Atm its looking like the biggest waste of time. Can anyone help?

 

Well you will first I all make sure you have a professional site (design and content wise) and that your hosting plans a priced well (not too cheap and not too expensive).

Also try word of mouth. It is very effective.

 

well how about giving us a link then from there we can see what is wrong and what isn't etc.

 

http://www.layerednetworks.com

 

Well you don't have any actual backlinks going to your site, the design is nice and simple makes me want to purchase the hosting to be quite honest. You should invest in strong backlinks and maybe even blog reviews or submit your host for a review at hosting review sites.

 

You want to do paid advertisements like cpc etc ? It depends on your budget but overall the site is really nice and simple

 

Yep, the site is excellent and would urge someone to purchase the hosting, however for advertising, it really depends if your reaching your target audience? Look at your adverts again, look where you have posted them and think whether if it's going to reach your target audience. However, i must say Hosting is a very big industry which is growing on a daily basis, so you might need pull out something which other hosts do not do.

I hope this helps.

Ultralite.

 

A way that I find very effective of getting clients is to offer free hosting for 30 days (limited space & features) and then once it has ended, offer them a chance to upgrade their account for $ and to receive more space and features.

Edit: A Trial basically

 

Rent signature links in webmaster forums . You may get some targeted and potential customs.

 

try posting on classified websites like craigslist. You also might want to try offering a special at places like dp so people come and try ur host first

 

Well when I used to advertise for my friend's hosting company, the best place was Web Hosting Talk. Most of his clients came from there.

 

I think that the best way to advertise hosting company is posting in websites building related forums. Find as many forums as you can posting on, start threads about your company at it's marketplace and communicate with everyone in these threads. Then add your hosting web page link and a link to your company thread in your signature and go to posting. Try to help everyone who needs any help with coding or something. It could be very good advertising strategy after a while and you would got some clients as well.

 

In the online world the market is sooo saturated... but how about trying offline?

Your friends? Friends' friends? Parents... relatives... their friends? Local businesses and so on...

 

Try offline marketing. Webhosting is a saturated business (online), but offline people don't know you from godaddy. Place a few ads in the paper, that will bring the business in.

 

You can also try contacting local small business owners. Cold calling sucks, but it can be worth it. If there's a local Chamber of Commerce, join it if you can. It's a good place to network offline.

 

with all of the competition these days, perhaps try and find a niche group of persons (business owners, schools, communities, etc) and cater your product/service specific to said niche. once the ball gets rolling, please the heck out of your clients and encourage them to refer their networks.

outside of that, incentives are always great, especially during these tough economic times.

 

the only thing that will help you is SEO try to improve ranking of your website and also start some affilate programs that will help you to increase sales . for seo realted plz read SEO froum of dp

 

Get the word out about your services in several ways. You can do it by offering free information, e-mailing people who may be interested in your services, buying ad spots on Google, etc.

Persistence is key here since clients won't come in by the thousands on the first months of your business.

And since I'm a copywriter, I also noticed the copy of some of your site's pages. It's all about your services, your servers, how cool you think your product is. But the truth of the matter is that people don't care about you, they care about what your product can do for them. So show them the benefits they'll get by availing of your service. You have fast servers? How do you think your customers will benefit from that? Think about it.

I hope that helps.

 

The most important part is your own brand. How can you make your brand a buzz and peoples do talk about it? The fact is, many peoples do not buy because of prices, quality but they bought it because of the feeling the brand gives to them.

 

webhosts pay out over $100 in affiliate commissions per signup, so as you can imagine, it's VERY competitive. I'd advise finding a niche within webhosting, and concentrating on that.