Advertising your web hosting site

Any new web host will realise that there is a lot of competition in the web hosting industry and it can be hard to establish yourself in the market. I think to succeed as a host you must offer a quality, reliable low cost service to your clients.

No matter how good your service is, if people do not know about your hosting business you will find it hard to break even each month. Every successful hosting company has a well thought through advertising plan. There are many types of advertising available for a host to use to generate new sales.

Search Engine Advertising

Many internet users have used a search engine before to find information, a product or service and for a web site search engines can generate a lot of revenue. As a hosting company it is no different, many new clients can come from search engines.

To take advantage of search engines a host must receive top ranking for popular search terms such as hosting, web hosting, shared hosting and reseller hosting. However this can be a very difficult task, as these keywords have a huge amount of competition for the top ranks.

There are two main types of search engine listings, all search engines offer listings where the rankings are decided on a number of factors such as backward links, web site content, inbound links etc,

Some of the search engines offer paid listings, where the rank of a web site listing is based on the amount paid by the advertiser either for a set time limit or every time a user clicks on the advertiser's ad.

Web Hosting Directory Advertising

Like search engines, advertising in a web hosting directory can bring a lot of revenue for your hosting business and the cost can be fairly low. If your company offers a quality service you should have no problem being added to all the top directories, I would like to say that different directories have their own rules for submissions, and some do have continual operating requirements.

On the whole many hosting directories allow free submissions for your hosting site which can directly bring in traffic to your site, and can also in-directly improve your search engine rankings which will in turn bring more traffic to your site.

Along with free submissions, many hosting directories also offer paid submissions, and/or paid advertising on the web site.

Cost-per-click Advertising

This type of advertising involves placing either a text based or image based advert, and the advertisers' states an amount they are willing to pay for every click their ad receives.

The best places for a web host to use this type of advertising is on web hosting related web site, such as web design, programming or a hosting form site such as Web Hosting Complete.

CPC advertising can be very cost effective, normally only users will click on an advert they are interested in.

Web Hosting Forum Advertising

A web host can usually advertise directly and in-directly on hosting forum web sites, an example is Web Hosting Complete (http://www.whcomplete.com). WHC offer different advertising programs, such as text link and banner based advertising, which can be very effective for hosts.

Advertising on a hosting related site should lower your advertising costs but still generate revenue. Along with the direct advertising, there are subtle ways to generate free traffic from a web hosting forum.

Many of these forum sites do not allow links to external sites to be placed in posts, however normally you can place a link to your web site in your signature. By posting on a forum site, you can place a huge number of free links to your web site in your posts. This can generate a lot of free traffic, and because it is from a hosting related site, it can be highly targeted as well. However this can take a lot of time, because you cannot just post nonsense, your posts must be relevant to the discussions of other members.

Conclusion

In conclusion there are a number of advertising methods a web host can use to generate targeted traffic, some are free but take time and other methods can take money.

I would recommend creating an advertising plan before you start putting money into any form of advertising, the plan should set out how much per month you can spend, and where the money is best spent.