First post here, I've been "lurking" for a while, seems like a nice forum!

I've tried Google Ads, but they really haven't worked all that well for me. Forum ads have helped a little bit, but not much. Anyone have any good articles, or advice for a managed web hosting company to market its name?

Welcome to Hosting Discussion, bfhosting
Are you at least getting clicks to your landing pages? If your conversion ratio is not good, then you might want to rethink your call to action or your prices - because Google Adwords and forum advertising does work. You might also try text advertising on the forums or directory sites. Good luck.

Thanks for the reply. The prices aren't an issue, they're really low compared to most providers, especially with every plan being managed.

I'd post a link but I think that's against forum rules or something.

According to Google Analytics, I'm getting hits, but only a 3-7 a day on average, sometimes less... I have a pretty high per-day quota for Google Ads, and my forum posts on devshed, and others are getting views...

If you really want to put yourself on the map, I would suggest:

(a) advertising in hosting magazines, such as PingZine or theWHIR;
(b) participating in networking social events, as well as conferences as exhibitor/sponsor;

These are expensive PR channels, but they place you in the good seat of people knowing you.

Yeah I like theWHIR, I have subscriptions to that. But I'd rather go the cheaper route at first to make sure I actually have a good, marketable product.

Gotta crawl before ya walk, right?

Absolutely, I forgot to mention that these conferences and advertising in print, while well targeted and expensive, are great if you have a product that can be sold to other vendors. I am not quite sure how many actual regular customers visit these events.

Yeah, I mean it's an option for the future. But right now I don't want to drop all that money. I want to stay with ads for now. But Google, and various forums have proven to not be effective.

I'm not seeing a Bright Fuse Hosting Facebook page or Twitter account - social media networking will help. Search the keywords related to your services, then try some advertising on the sites that show up in the top ten results. Typically, there will be at least one directory site there. The sponsored text links on the forums will produce clicks as well.

Your site and pricing looks fine. You're not getting a lot of traffic, so you might try publishing a blog too. Or publishing a newsletter.

Yeah I'm on Twitter and Facebook under the company name, not sure why it didn't show up...strange.

Anyhow, yeah a blog might not be a bad idea, I assume just keep blogging about relavent things in the hosting industry? Newsletter the same?

Sure, just be relevant - your posts don't have to be long, rather consistent. Give your site a pulse.

Yeah, and I also added tiny icons under the logo text on the company website for the Facebook and Twitter pages, maybe that'll help... I don't know at this point. Been going for a little more than seven years and not much has changed, client-wise.

First you should make sure your service or products are potential in the market,then advertise them in some famous search engines or websites. In addition,you could build some professional original articles to attract people to your website.

Well that hasn't worked.

brightfusehosting.com

As far as what we offer, how does that look? Let's start there...

The hosting industry is a saturated market. So you need to put in a lot of extra work these days to get noticed and generate sales.

A company blog is a must now days. A blog is great way to generate backlinks since systems like Wordpress get the attention of web spiders very easily. Just make sure you use good and relevant tags and post on a regular basis.

Backlinks are everything if you want to rank higher in the search engines. Create some informative articles and submit them to blog networks. Within those articles make sure you have some keywords that relate to your business that link directly to your site.

Make sure you also submit your company to all the web hosting directories. These will also provide you with backlinks to your site.

Twitter and Facebook are priceless now days and are a great new tool to communicate with customers and attract attention to your company. You just need to make sure you are active on these social sites. Especially on Twitter you should post a few times a day. You cannot just create the accounts and then let them sit.

These are just a few ideas that are free and work very well. Surely there are many more out there. In today market it takes a lot of manual work to get noticed and generate traffic. One you have the traffic the sales will increase.

Good point kevin. Hosting is a saturated market. You can always try for new products like cloud hosting. It is not yet available for small plans. I always have a thought in my mind that VPS always goes to the ones with big pockets. You can analyze with the problems are prevalent now, and come up with a better product and marketing strategy.