Advertising Help

Well I have Google Ads running, I advertise in forums, I try to advertise on Twitter, but business sucks. What other suggestions can you folks give me to advertise my web hosting company? I know the market is VERY saturated, but my 'niche' is managed hosting, even the shared and VM plans. I just need to get the name out there.

Have you tried looking at your conversions to understand why the people who sign up do and why those that don't may not want your service?

There are tons of little things that can have an impact - for example does your site appeal to your target market?

Just as a small design suggestion for your site...

It took me four clicks on your menu system to work out that the content under that HUGE standard page header was changing. As I have my browser set to 1024x768 for designing things as "correctly" as I can, the header took up the entire window, and I couldn't see anything else. If a normal user had that same problem, they'd think the same thing as me "Boy, this site doesn't do anything, why would I trust them to sell me managed web hosting?".

Fair enough. I assume I should do some sort of "?page=dedicated#content" type of linking then so it goes right down to the content?

Even so, I don't get many hits. I have no clue how to change that aside from my normal methods that I already listed.

My only suggestion for advertising would be to change where your advertising, experiment a bit, and see what works better. I haven't tried Twitter advertising before, but I doubt that there'd be any sort of targeting on there like that. I'd asusme that my add for web hosting would be getting shown to 2,000,000 semi-illiterate people that wouldn't know what hosting even was, let alone want it.

Most times you're better off with having the add shown less times, but to a more targeted group. I'd hazard a guess that adds on tech blogs and sites, like this one, would attract more hits then non-targeted adds.

I guess you should also just accept that advertising on the web just doesn't cut it for that many people, and when you're in a marketplace like hosting where people will jump ship for a 5c/month discount, cut-throat doesn't even begin to describe it.

You can sort of target on Twitter, most of the people you follow, and vice-versa, are in the "genre" you want. I follow other hosts, host rating companies, ColdFusion stuff, and etc. So I get those types of followers. I typically post things like: "Hosting from $2.50/month, shared, reseller, dedicated, virtual." and post my site URL in bit.ly form. Another better way to say it would work maybe? I'm frankly 100% out of ideas at this point.

I can't say. I haven't tried advertising on twitter before, so I don't know what it's like. The only thing that I have inferred from what you've said, is that your twitter advertising is not actually paid adds, but tweets about what you're offering? If that's the case, I can fully understand why it's not working. If your followers, and the people that you follow are in the hosting business too, they aren't going to want to buy hosting from you.. they'll want to do the same as you and sell hosting.

Right and wrong, not all my followers/followees are in the hosting industry. A lot are developers, and such. Should I just follow regular people? Other non-related companies?

i agree about what was said with the design. i took me a few clicks to figure out that the bottom was changing because the header never changes and from the buttons, the "HOME" button is always highlighted.

and another pointer is that in your contact section you have no phone number. i would personally never sign up for any sort of hosting service with a company that i can't call and get a hold of someone.

How many of the developers have their own hositng serivce? How many of them have contracts with other hosting firms? That's probably the biggest thing that you'd have working against you for those ogranisations. The up side to that is that they probably have followers that don't have any sort of hosting set up and might be looking. There's nothing easy about it, and there's no hard-and-fast rules that you can apply. Bigest question is how many hits you are getting out of the social networking sites? You ARE measuring that, aren't you? If you're getting no links, look at the advertising methods, make some changes and see what happens. If you are getting lots of hits, but no signups, look at your own site, and what needs to be changed. There's a few million variables as to what might and might not work.