What do you prefer for your web hosting business. And what is less expensive? Can you share your experience?

Personally, I find word of mouth to be the most effective.

Though I would vote on SEO first, because organic search results tend to be more effective, and if you know how to do it yourself, you're avoiding cost all together

I think you should combine SEO with SMO (social media optimization), it could give you some good result, however by any means SEO should be first.

SEO is cheaper, but both are essential to your online business.

SEO is definitely better. Though difficult to achive this is one aspcect which should be considered seriously. Over time if your website is coming up on organic search results, you are not incurring anything on advertising or SEM.

SEO is important, of course, and can keep the traffic coming even when you are not doing any other promoting. There's nothing better than word of mouth, too so some sort of incentive to refer friends is good. Not necessarily an affiliate program though - people see that as the person just trying to make a buck. I think it would be more effective if you gave them a discount or extra features instead.

SEO requires more time achieve the ideal result that we expect. Maybe 3 months to 1 year.

Applying SEO will greatly improve the traffic amounts to our sites. In the mean time, we can do some SEM activity.

Both combination of SEO and SEM will be great for your site traffic.

You need SEO to improve your search engine and also site page rank. Moreover, you also need to market and advertise your business with SEM.

They will help you grow and succeed

Refer a friends definitely seems like a good idea. But I don't know if it will be effective. Has anyone ever used it?