Radical Idea

[lcwmedia]

Hi all,

I am a little frustrated about how little people go on my website. I have tried everything, Facebook ads, Google ads, banner exchange, auto surfs etc etc etc and nothing sticks. I get a few visitors but that is it.

Also, I am in Canada and when I mention Web Hosting, I get a blank look. So I am thinking that if people really knew what the heck hosting was, they would find that they need that and order. I think that, especially here, it's an untapped market. I mean, there is no real advertisement that is made anywhere.

So here is my radical idea. What if 3 or 5 us get together and create an information flyer explaining the key benefits of having a hosting account and basically how it works. It can be really brief and have all our websites listed on it. Then we can have it printed and we can all distribute it in our local areas. The reason why we should band together is that I have a very very limited budget and I think that most of you also have that same problem. This would be a good way to get the word out there about hosting and offer equal oppurtunity to anyone that participates to get their website known.

It's not a small task, but for some, word of mouth is not enough. I am willing to take the time and help create something that is easy to read and understand. Anyone interested, let me know. If you have other ideas how to advertise cheap, please let us know.

 

[xzbackup]

Leveraging online advertising is pretty difficult, it's all about capturing and generating demand in your respective market. My advise to you would be to first look at a business development methodology called Customer Development. CD is a process of creating a product by first measuring demand, and allocating resources to bring that demand to life through development. Think of it like this, instead of creating the product first and trying to sell it, try the steps in reverse; which is to say, figure out the demand, then build the product once you have an established customer funnel which is repeatable and scalable.

Here are some resources:

Steve Blank - 30 years in Silicon Valley, formulated the basics of the Customer Development methodology.

Steve Blank Blog - Goes into a lot of war stories and anecdotes about how Customer Development came to being, the details of how it is flows, and some prime examples.

What is Customer Development

Other then that, I think your issue maybe that your copy just isn't converting necessary customers, and you just need to modify how you pitch.

Remember, hosting is a pretty saturated market, so web hosting itself may not be the best place to compete. Some people call these types of markets "red oceans," meaning everyone is in a race to the bottom trying to cutthroat the competition.

What you may want to do is go for a "blue ocean," in that you may want to attack a market that does not have a lot of other vendors, and where you can exploit the phenomenon of exponential growth and returns because of the markets relative immaturity.

 

[bermuda]

I believe your website can get successful if the real customers in Canada, definitely hundreds or thousands of firms, admins and domains managers find your homepage. The current problem is that your site is still not getting accessed by the potential customers. Using Google AdWords is great but may be a bit costly in the long term. Your website in the .CA Google portal needs to have better ranks via proper SEO packs.

 

[hosthop]

First thing you have to look at is your product.

But even more importantly I went to your website and all I see is ads for everything else. If you want to be a hosting company be a hosting company if you want to be an advertiser of other products be that or do both but use a different domain, then to my surprise my antivirus went off, one of your advertisers is on the malware list.

Second thing I noticed is your design, you have to have credibility and that starts with a first impression. I recommend you do a little homework and maybe get a partner (to design the site). and from personal experience .com, .net work for hosting companies .info is not a TLD and is not recognized by people, or the major crawlers. You might get indexed but your ranking will not be at the top of the 2 million results the search produces.

We were built from 1 customer, find your niche and you will be successful. If you are not sure where to start what are your expectations from your site? Advertising will work, it works for us! But people have to see that you can deliver what you offer, then once you have them as a customer you have to actually deliver what they expect.

Good luck!

 

[HostMantis]

First thing you have to look at is your product.

But even more importantly I went to your website and all I see is ads for everything else. If you want to be a hosting company be a hosting company if you want to be an advertiser of other products be that or do both but use a different domain, then to my surprise my antivirus went off, one of your advertisers is on the malware list.

Second thing I noticed is your design, you have to have credibility and that starts with a first impression. I recommend you do a little homework and maybe get a partner (to design the site). and from personal experience .com, .net work for hosting companies .info is not a TLD and is not recognized by people, or the major crawlers. You might get indexed but your ranking will not be at the top of the 2 million results the search produces.
We were built from 1 customer, find your niche and you will be successful. If you are not sure where to start what are your expectations from your site? Advertising will work, it works for us! But people have to see that you can deliver what you offer, then once you have them as a customer you have to actually deliver what they expect.

Good luck!

Agreed. Aside from the ads, the site is not very attractive or professional.

First impressions are very important (especially in the hosting business), so improving the design should be a top priority.

Hire a good designer or at the very least, purchase a template.

Also, for SEO reasons, buying a .info was not a very good idea as most search engines do not rank .info's very high at all. So it will take much more work to get your domain ranked high for your keywords (which is hard enough with a .com).