I have noticed several replies saying that spending tons of advertising would do this... I would highly suggest to not spend tons on advertising, rather you have tons to spend on it or not. For advertising, it is all about finding that right place. I know several people who have went and spent 10,000+ dollars for banner advertising and came back with about a 5/100 conversion.

I think that the best way to advertise and still not get 100 clients a week, although sure beats the heck out of spending all your money; look for small websites that will allow you to put a banner up for about $10.00 a month. I'm talking, anything related to web masters, websites, hosting, or anything! There is one hell of an industry out there and all you gotta do is take the steps that the big boys don't.

Which brings me to another point! Why do people try so very hard to compete with the top hosts? #1 - You can't. #2 - Why would you want to? #3 - LIARS. People go to great leanths to get there ad's in the same places that you will find "HostGator, JustHost, HostMonster" and what ever else! Why not take the smaller markets that these big hosting companies wont touch? Eh, Eh?

Try it. Trust me; it's not hard to do everything right. (of course that made no sense, because then again... it's even easier to do everything wrong.)

Advertising should always be calculated risks on money. And for that matter it shouldn't be a "risk" at all. When I say spend money on advertising, I'm not saying hire people on the side of the road to hold up your sign, I'm saying targeted marketing. With the right amount of targeted marketing and the right amount of dollars, you can dominate a sector of the market.

The reason that we compete with the big hosts is because that's where the market is! There's no point in being king of the "underwater basket weaver" hosting market if there's not that many who actually want to host. Another hosts domination of a niche should not cause you not to also seek the business. That's the beauty of free market and small hosts in particular. If a dominating competitor was the reason not to enter the market, Cricket, Virgin and Boost Mobile would not even be in the business as AT&T and Verizon dominate the majority of the US.

Targeted niches are nice, but a small dog CAN run with the big dogs. There's different levels of competition, but they can certainly run side by side on many instances.

For hosting is takes about 7k per month in ads highly targeted to get 100 signups.

100 per week - lets say 400 per month and you're saying that it'll take $7k/month in advertising to get 400 customers? So that's $17.50 of advertising for each customer you bring in?

I think the math is off, as there's no way we're spending that much money on our advertising. Even if you were to say $5 per customer, that's $2k in advertising (if you were to get every customer).

What market are you targeting with $7k/month? Dedicated servers, shared hosting, reseller hosting, VPS's? I can do some serious damage with a $7k budget. We spend less than $1000 currently.

I think allreseller was giving just a raw number that the acquisition cost of each 100 clients equals to an investment of $7,000 (roughly I presume). So 400 clients will cost $28,000.

It would be interesting to see what kind of clients we are talking about (shared hosting, VPS, resellers) and how he came out with that number (direct experience, case study, etc).

Yipes! I wish I had $7K for advertising. Our real focus is colocation, followed by dedicated servers and then shared hosting, so our sign ups don't fit into this model. Even so, we don't spend nearly this amount.

The way you market and sell a customer is how you gain traffic which eventually turns into paying clients, I can't tell you the strategies we have over here at Eleven2 but anyone can do it.

Yeah, I'm just not seeing how $7k was arrived at. And if it was bumped to be $28k that's even worse!

Be like GoDaddy and hire Danica Patrick or another celebrity like figure to pose with large chest on SuperBowl commercials and then maybe you'll get hundred sign ups haha? Pretty hard to do - if you find out please fill me in.

I love your all of your answer guys.


-If you think you can, or you think you can't you are right.


I would like to invite you to think that we can... let see what happen.

Further more, I would like to know what you think about it now.

Steve, you are genius!

How is your marketing ROI so far?

Imagine you 've got 100 sign up per week. What did you do?

I don't know about anyone else but I wouldn't have time to think

Of course, there are natural ways to go about this such as getting your site in directories, but if you're pulling 100/week, im assuming there's some type of heavy funding in advertising on popular sites/networks.

Popular sites?vWiz?