Paid advertising for your hosting business?

Do you pay for advertising? Does it help anymore than just advertising for free on forums?
I have tried paid advertising for my sites in the past and it helped a bit more and now I want to get back with this one because i have a budget for it

Yes paid advertisement will always give you more exposer than free stuff, but it depends which media you use. Presently good options of social networking sites like FB, twitter, Linkedin, on all of this google ad-words is best for web hosting industry.

If you can make good optimization then Google Adwords is great..

I never actually bothered in getting paid advertisements for a web hosting business.
Getting clients is not hard if you provide phenomenal service to your existing clients, they inturn refer others

We utilise paid advertising in areas we feel will offer decent returns. We currently have a sponsored offer here, we post on WHT & LET.

Tried FB & Twitter ads with good budgets but those were relatively unsuccessful. We've found industry forums the best place to advertise and build up recognition of your brand.

Go with google Ads if you have much budget to spend on advertisements. FB ads are worthless i believe but you can promote your website but don't think about a customer will come your way on FB ads.

It is better to pay main online hosting forum, so that they will give importance to your Ad and make visible i the their front page itself.

Experience each and every options and choose the better one that you think you should buy. k:

Anyone know any good place for advertisement other than Google, Facebook, Twitter ?

Absolutely, paid advertisements on social media is a great way of exposure and creating impressions. Otherwise there are communitys such as forumweb which also offers sponsored advertisement placement.

Paid advertisements do work. In a previous life I was a Paid search specialist (still am in my personal time), don't know if that adds to the credibility or bias... D:

However, it doesn't work straight away and it never will just work straight just like that.

Paid platforms need a plan a structure to it, and most importantly, a methodology. Trial and error that sort of thing.

You have to think about the journey the customer takes that contributes to the purchase. The entire, discovery, research, compare and purchase cycle and design your campaigns around that.

Paid advertising could help you pull in new people to discover your brand, but then you might want to run a paid campaign to pull them back in to remind them that you are competitive. This is important if the person advances to the next stage like research and compare. Everything contributes all to that final sale. However, without a budget to compete against some giants, you may struggle to gather enough data to work from...

I tried adwords too it gave good results but not phenomenal, you need to optimize the keywords good and dont add keyword not related to your service just for getting more traffic, it wont work ! you will end up paying CPC for invalid/not related traffic and no realo conversion to sales here !.. less is better than nothing

Whether it is a paid advertising or free one, for a consumer, lot of things come into mind when buying web hosting, especially those customers who are completely new to hosting or servers or domains. For a visitor to turn into paying customer it takes an average of 10 visits to your website and a chat conversation to clear his/her doubts.

Simply put, running ad campaign does not bring business, if you are brand new in the market.

People look the following things

1) Online reviews
2) Online ratings
3) Guarantees
4) Ease of on boarding
5) Website trust factors
6) Ease of purchasing
7) Livechat or other means of support
8) Press or other mentions and recognition
9) Social media presence
10) Their own decision, what their gut says..

This is what happens before a visitor or complete stranger becomes your customer. They go through all or some of these 10 steps. In order to sustain in online businesses, we need to put our legs in customer shoes and think like them, then we know what to do.

Paid Ads on Google or Facebook or Twitter or anywhere will work, if we fulfill the above 10 steps and make sure that our landing page copy is perfectly optimized. Its just not about how much money we spend, its about how many customers we convert from our paid ad campaigns.

Most business owners, do not even consult a digital marketing company before they setup campaigns, the result is loss of budget and no leads or conversions. No matter we have a product better than our competitor, if we fail to make people know about it, we will not be selling it.

So as a digital marketing expert, I suggest you that spend your budget wisely and Ads will work, if you do them properly and for that you need to spend on consulting for better results or learn something from blogs over there that deal with digital marketing, if you cannot spend on agency consultation.

Testing is important, Test Test Test, no other option. Track your results, improvise and optimize, repeat. All this needs time, efforts, money and people. Its good, if you have budget set aside for all this, I am assuming selling to a complete stranger, just using ads.

If you sell through other mediums, then things may be different. Hope this helps you. Thank you.

JoeTaxpayer said:

Do you pay for advertising? Does it help anymore than just advertising for free on forums?
I have tried paid advertising for my sites in the past and it helped a bit more and now I want to get back with this one because i have a budget for it

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Well, paid ad is he thing right now. Will give you more returns of course than the free ones.

I rarely get customer from paid advertisement so I decided to never use paid advertisement but If you have good budget and you advertise it on your niche forum which is so popular and have a lot of traffic comes on their site then I can recommended you to buy paid advertisement.

FB, Adword only give fake type visitors.

Make sure you also have something like google analytics or Bing Webmaster. Look at bounce rate and time spent on your site. If they are going to one page and leaving then your current advertising is not working somewhere. Either it's junk traffic or visitors are expecting to see something else when they get to your page. And as we all know, web hosting is one of the most competitive industries on the planet. Cost per click is going to be very high.

With web hosting forums, advertising on those is not a bad idea. BUT, how many visitors are hosts themselves

Also, be very careful with contracts. If the results are not good, it doesn't matter since you signed a contact...

We're currently advertising on this forum and Facebook. Since we just launched today, I don't expect any results until the end of the month. So, if you're looking for "super quick results," it won't happen. It will probably take a month or two of advertising before getting a few clients. However, it's 100% worth it in my opinion.

PS: To touch base on "Quickness" obviously, you may not get any new clients on the first day.

I'd stay away from social media advertising unless you have a massive budget. We have spent thousands on Facebook ads and as you will read else where, its pretty much worthless exposure. You'll get nothing but illegitimate traffic.

We have found better results from sponsoring trade-shows / conferences then anything else. This puts you directly in front of the target audience and allows you to get direct feedback and learn the clientele. The ROI from this has been way higher then any other type of advertising we have tried including FB, Twitter, Adwords, Forums, etc. Your payout is in large chunks, but when you average it over a year you can often spend less then what you would on the other methods.

There are lots of ways to advertise your business some are free other are not. As many have mentioned one of paying advertising methods is google ads and it's good if you can spend enough money on it. I heard about ebay listing but haven't really tried it you can check it out too.

These steps are a good start for new hosting brand but it doesn't help more because it lacks of promotions.

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David, I did not said these steps are only thing that hosting company should implement.

I said that these are things that involved when a stranger(customer) comes to a company to purchase a hosting via PPC or Paid Adverts on search engine.

I said, these are steps that take places in ad campaigns success. You probabily did not read the full post or did not get my point. I am talking about sales funnel, may be you are not into marketing, so it natural to unable to interpret what I discussed in my previous post.

Paid Advertising means PPC pay per click ads we see on Google. That is different from promotions in forums and else where, ppc is selling completely to a stranger, who does not know anything about your business, the visitor lands from your text ad or display ad and comes to your sales page. So I was explaining the OP that simply putting ads will not give much results and he should also ensure that the customer sales funnel is fulfilled.

Hope you understand what I meant now, I did not said promotions and advertising is not helpful or not needed. Thanks.

Okay. In some countries some niches work well, which may not work in the other country. For example, in my country, people spend countless hours on facebook and quora. Those are best places to meet potential customers on most niches. So it depends on where you are living.

You need to check your target audience interest, demogrpahics and much more parameters and run highly targetted campaigns. Remember longer the campaigns run, more insights you will know and you can analyze if things are working or not. This applies for PPC (Google Adwords and Bing Ads) as well. Unless, the budget is alloted enough, to see some results. Paid ads will not work with low budgets.

I will simply say, low budgets? stay away from paid ads. Better, invest that low budget on local directory or marketplace like website specific to your niche. That makes more sense.