Before I sold my hosting business a little over 2 years ago, I had just over 200 local business customers, each paying a premium rate for the specialized customer service that my company provided.

Getting those customers wasn't easy, but not quite as hard as you would expect. The method that I used to gain my first 10 customers was simple. I gave them free hosting for the first 3 months. After the first 30 days, I asked them for feedback, and implemented any suggestions that they asked for, if they weren't too outrageous.

At 60 days, I asked them for feedback again, and let them know that I would extend their free hosting for another 3 months if they would refer 3 paying customers to me.

I repeated that process with the original 10 customers over the next year and it worked better than I expected.

It was simple, didn't cost me much more than a little time, and effective.