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Web Hosting Company Promotion 101
Though Simpli gets a fair amount of business from referrals, I thought April would be a good month to experiment with various online advertising methods. My goal was to find the most cost-effective advertising out there. Since web hosting companies advertise pretty much everywhere, I’d like to tackle new areas where other hosts may not have saturated the available space.
I knew that press releases are one of the most cost-effective forms of advertising, so I wrote up a press release advertising the opening of 10for10.com and its tagline, “Host up to 10 websites for $10/month.” I submitted it first to HostingTech.com, which a lot of other sites (including WebHostingTalk.com) syndicate. After about 48 hours, HostingTech pushed the press release live and it also appeared on WebHostingTalk. So far, we’ve gotten just over 100 visitors from it. No signups, but the visibility can’t hurt.
TheWHIR.com called today to seek permission to syndicate the press release from HostingTech, which I gladly approved. I also found the media contacts for TopHosts.com’s press section and got my press release submitted there (on the front page, no less!) It’s too early to see stats from those last two, but I fully expect them to bring at least 200 more visitors to 10for10. Cost to post all those press releases? Free… it just required diligence on my part. Press releases are definitely a no-brainer for good publicity.
Another low-cost advertising option is writing news articles. Since I love writing, this is something I definitely want to do. This could actually be a net positive in terms of cash flow to Simpli (or me), as most companies pay for good articles. I’m thinking about this now and may write an article and submit it to websites in the next few weeks.
I’ve so far managed to avoid hosting directories and the like, though I fear that if we seek a large amount of growth, we’ll have to go to them. To get around this, one of the things I’d like to do is create my own hosting resource website. Obviously, it would have to target a specific niche market, as the “hosting directory” market is almost as saturated as the web hosting industry itself. I’d place my first priority on writing articles and my second priority on this; I’d hope it would eventually showcase my articles as well as others’.
I also want to let you guys know about a special we’ve been quietly running for the past week: Dedicated Pentium 3 Servers for $69/month. There are only a few servers available, and I expect them to sell out within the next couple weeks, so get in now if you’re interested in having root access on your own server for $69/month. There is a $1 first month special if you wish to pay quarterly. That makes these $139 for the first quarter. It’s a bargain. 
We’ll be introducing some 10Mbit unmetered specials within the next week, so be on the lookout for that, as well!
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3 Responses to “Web Hosting Company Promotion 101”
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It seems like the lower end *nix web hosting market is starting to move towards virtualized servers, using technologies like Xen or vmware. This appears to offer customers most of the management features of a dedicated box (such as a shell and the ability to install lightweight but custom databases) at a much lower price point due to hardware savings.
Article suggestion: do dedicated host customers know what they are running, categorized by traffic volume? You run some stats brokend out by port for your customers, you show some of them their stats, and ask what they thought the answer would be. Not terribly heavy, but probably informative, and helps push your dedicated servers.
You may want to check out the article at the wordpress site that pimps some providers who are easy to host WP with. I maintain my own, but can’t you install it with the control panel?