How did you come up with the best way of promoting your website or online business? Did you have to learn it the hard way, wasting lots of time, money and work with no result before finding the working methods?

I'd never say that the methods that didn't' work best were failures. We learned something from each market and type of advertising that we've done. Some worked, some didn't. Traditional advertising for an online only business can be a hard one to figure out some times, but as long as you learn for each experience, the results are always positive.

Every mistake is an experience you can build from - it's only a waste if you keep repeating your mistakes. This is why test marketing works - you throw out what doesn't work and keep what does.

Exactly! You're going to have to break a few eggs to make an omelette!

Well, previous hosting companies I had (but failed) were all advertised on WebHostingTalk. That got me a few clients. Most of these companies all started on forums like HD and WHT.

Trial and error mostly, still experimenting.

The various web hosting forums are nice to get into, however you'll convert very few clients to your company given that the majority of visitors to those types of forums are web hosting companies themselves.

If you target a niche forum, or a forum that revolves around webmasters in general rather than around web hosting, you'll often find that you will have a higher percentage of signups.

Whenever possible, I give back to the communities that have helped put me in the position I am today. This doesn't mean just advertising the company and a discount for those members, but providing actual information and answering questions users might have. So many new people are starting on the web and forums such as phpbb, vbulletin, joomla, magento, interspire, general HTML and otehr informational boards can be helpful to bring in new business. Again, you're providing information back to the users, and MAYBE you might get a few signups, but this is a very laid back approach to gaining new clients.

And I mostly agree with Conor, except when you're offering colocation. A lot of these hosting providers only offer shared, VPS or dedicated and from time to time start comparing data centers - what are they paying now versus what they could be paying somewhere else - and is it worth the move? Of course, not many start ups offer colocation, so we're somewhat different in our history.

What I like about webmasters is that there's an ever increasing supply of them out there - from schools and new businesses. Every weekly list I got of new businesses had at least one new web design firm. One partnership with a good designer can generate tons of hosting opportunities.

That makes sense. You can find more (potential) web hosting users on general webmaster forums. Yet, I think that web hosting forums which provide sections for general webmaster discussions is great places to find potential users of web hosting servers as they may find the forums when searching for web hosting services through search engines.

Mistakes give you a lot of experience better than what success give twice.For that I don't want you to get fail all the time.so that you will be aware of your mistakes and go ahead whats work with you.

Well, if you are not going to spend money and hiring the professional services of some leading SEO companies, you naturally are going to go down the hard way because you would need to learn everything all by yourself, trials and errors would be your companions in this road but after some time you would find some great hidden treasures.