Advertising Ideas for Your Web Hosting Business
Advertising Ideas for Your Web Hosting Business
Stuck for ways to get the word out about your web hosting business? Keep reading; this article features a number of them, including some you might not have thought of before.When you’re too close to something, you sometimes get caught thinking in one particular way. That’s why you hear the phrase “think outside the box” so much, especially when people are trying to solve problems related to business. Often there is the sentiment that “this is the way we’ve always done it, so this is the way we should do it now.” Sometimes, though, it makes sense to tackle a problem in a number of different ways at once—and that’s very true for advertising your web hosting business, the topic of this article.
For the purposes of this article, I’m going to assume your web hosting business is already a “going concern” – you have the technical skills and the server in place, you’ve at least started to hire (or think about hiring) customer support people so you have some breathing room, you have your company’s website set up, and so on. Naturally, you need customers, or more customers. To get more customers, you need to reach the people who might be interested in your service, and convince them that you can offer them something they want that they can’t get anywhere else. How do you go about that?
Start by honestly considering what it is you have to offer that they can’t get somewhere else. Are your hosting packages larger than anyone else’s? Is your service better? Do you have some special knowledge from which they can benefit? If you’re having trouble figuring out how to answer this question, ask yourself what you would want someone to remember about your business after they have had contact with it, whether it’s through poking around your website, talking with customer service on IM or over the phone, or interacting with you in person as you go about your daily life. Once you know what makes you different from the rest of the pack, you have a focus to keep in mind when you start promoting your web hosting business to people.
Advertising Ideas for Your Web Hosting Business – Getting the Word Out Online
While we do want to think outside the box, we’ll start our brainstorming about advertising with the obvious. Most people will first come in contact with your web hosting business through your website. In that sense, promoting a web hosting business is no different from promoting any other website, so you can use the same techniques.
For openers, you will want to get a few advertising campaigns started. While you should at least consider other forms of advertising, online advertising campaigns are a good place to start. Many people have used Google AdWords with some success, so you will probably want to try it. Be prepared to adapt if it doesn’t seem to be working for you, though.
Another way to promote your web hosting business in the search engines is by naturally ranking near the top of the listings when people search for certain keywords related to your site. Searchers can still tell the difference between sponsored links and sites that make it to the top of the listings organically. The art of getting your website to score high on the search engine results pages (SERPs) is called search engine optimization. You can read up on how to optimize your website over at SEO Chat, which features many articles on various aspects of that topic. You can also hire a search engine optimization expert or company, but be warned: some of them engage in so-called “black hat SEO” practices that could get your website banned from the search engines entirely.
You will also want to get your web hosting business listed in various directories. I’m not talking about phone books, of course. There are plenty of web hosting directories online, and you want to get listed in as many of them as you can.
What about web hosting forums? Well, you can give that a try, but there are some caveats. Check out the other companies that advertise in web hosting forums. Do they sound like they’re offering way too much for way too little? That’s your competition. If you think you’d go broke trying to match their deals, you might want to stay away. It doesn’t matter so much whether they can actually deliver on what they’re offering; with so many companies offering those kinds of deals, people begin to expect it.
Advertising Ideas for Your Web Hosting Business – Offer Something for Free
Here’s another way to promote your web hosting business online that you might not have considered. Remember what I said earlier about reaching people who might be interested in your service? A lot of people who need web hosting are going to be regular visitors at certain kinds of websites: informational sites which offer valuable tips about running a business, being a webmaster, and web hosting (such as this one). You might be able to work an exchange with a number of those kinds of sites: offer to host them for free or a significantly reduced price, in exchange for the right to run a “hosted by yourhostingbusiness” banner on every page of their site.
Make sure you’re clear with them about the kind of banner you want to put up, and where you want to put it. No one in their right mind will give you space to put a large banner at the top of every page of their website, so forget about that right now. But you should be able to get something small and discreet that doesn’t detract from the entire effect of the page, yet lets people know you’re there. You might consider asking for a small space in the navigational area of their website; that usually gets plenty of eyeballs.
Offering something for free can be a great way to get noticed. You can offer a free trial of your web hosting service at your website. Or you can go to a business with lots of regular customers, such as a restaurant or a private mailbox service, and talk to the manager about offering free web hosting accounts to their clientele. Again, these would be free trial accounts lasting for only a few months, after which they’ll have to pay to continue the service. That should be plenty of time to hook them into wanting to keep the account.
If you don’t want to offer your actual web hosting service for free, how about something related to your business? Over on SEO Chat, there are a variety of software tools that visitors to the site can use for free. All of these tools help SEOs see how well they are achieving their goals. If you can create a tool that gives a user some information they need, especially if it’s related to your own service (bank websites offering mortgage calculators is the classic example), visitors will come to your site to use the tool. They’ll think of it as a free service, rather than obnoxious in-your-face advertising, and that’s a great way to leave a positive impression.
Advertising Ideas for Your Web Hosting Business – Give Your Customers More
As I mentioned, the goal of advertising is to get customers. You do that by giving them something they want that, preferably, they can’t get anywhere else. What do your customers really want? Or more precisely, what can you, and only you, give them?
One way to answer this question is with your own expertise. There are a lot of ways to communicate this to your customers. One you might not have considered is through tutorials. Writing some really good articles that contain the kind of information that would be useful to anyone who owns a website will help you attract traffic. You can even build each article around a certain key phrase. After you put the article up on your website, the search engines will pick it up, thus gaining you a greater presence on the SERPs. And of course, if they really are good articles, the word will get out, and you might even attract people by word of mouth–people who aren’t coming directly from the search engines.
In fact, word of mouth advertising in general works well, but it is certain to backfire on you if you don’t offer good customer service! Bad news always seems to spread faster than good; one disgruntled customer can poison the well for tens or hundreds of other potential customers. So treat all of your customers with the kind of care you’d extend to your very first (or very last) customer.
People expect prompt, 24/7 customer service and support from their web hosting service these days. Odds are you can’t offer that by yourself. Ask yourself how much time you can put into the business, monitor your help desk and support emails, and you might still be able to impress your customers with good service—at least for long enough to build up the business to the point where you can hire a customer support person or two to give you a break!
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Advertising Ideas for Your Web Hosting Business