What's the best proven way to get clients?

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Hey Guys,
This surely has been posted around what 2’000’000 times around the web?

But I was still wondering if you guys could give us some tips for a good start we have around 60 clients for now but we are struggling a lot to get more clients (mainly big sized clients).

Currently, by my side, I do a lot of SEO rework on our website, and I am always looking to help on FreeLancer and UpWork. I am also googling around for forums or such. But I didn’t found any proven way to find clients in an “easy” way. I know that the hosting provider market is crowded but maybe there are some secrets.

I would love to get more information on how you guys do your marketing? This is also intended for other users as well that are intressted to grow up !

Thanks for your awesome help c: !

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I’m not a hosting provider so I can’t give actual experience but I have been around various hosting forums for nearly a decade so I’d say I’ve got a reasonable grasp of what seems to happen.

It seems to me that selling any type of hosting can be difficult as it’s hard to have a unique selling point in a pretty saturated market. Everyone claims to have good uptime, fast support, great hardware etc. and it makes it hard to stand out, so this often leads to one easy thing that is nearly guaranteed to attract customers - undercutting the competition.

I don’t think undercutting is the best way in the long term as a lot of providers end up price hiking unsustainable packages down the line (and ruin some of the reputation they made early on when they offered plans that weren’t sustainable). Or deadpooling or offering shit service.

I would look at what other, longer term, providers are offering. See if any of it is unique (or at least less common) and see if you can tap into those areas while they are under saturated.

An example of this would be BuyVM offering free DirectAdmin, Blesta and Softaculous. Or Nexus bytes offering free IPV6 backup VPSs with purchase of their other products. You might not be able to offer everything - especially if you’re still early on in your companies journey - but you could decide on one area and take a chance.

For example, if you wanted to offer a free NAT backup VPS with every purchase of a paid VPS, would you be willing to pay for a server every month (and risk the loss if it didn’t work out) with the hope that it would be of interest to potential customers that they would be incentivised to choose you over the competition?

Could you roll the price of DA into other services you offer where the price wouldn’t be as noticeable to then offer it on cheaper products for free?

Do you have a special skill or some spare time to contribute to something to give back to the community that will also raise brand awareness?

I’m sure there are plenty of other examples but these were some that came to mind.

There’s always tradtional advertising via paid adverts or even just by posting on forums like this to raise brand awareness for free will help. I’m sure some providers will know more about this than I do and could chip in.

As I say, I’m no expert but I think any type of online business operates on similar principals. Hopefully this helps.

Edit: good god that was a long post. Apologies in advance. :man_facepalming:

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What SEO work are you doing? Shoot me a PM with what you offer :slight_smile:

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Be there. Be everywhere. Make it obvious that you provide services but not the reason you’re there. Offer insights, help, advice. From WHT to StackExchange. Be a real person and not an alias, make yourself known.

A faceless brand is a dime a dozen. Hosting providers are notoriously anti social and want to hide behind a logo.

When people know your name and that you’re a resource they need, they’ll find their way to you.

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Honestly my man, everyone has their own things.

Build your brand and try to stand out of the crowd. The industry is already saturated and it is really hard to break in.

Treat hosting like you would treat any business. But with one difference, in a real world brick and mortar business, your customer comes to you. But here, you will need to go to your customer.

Shameless plug : https://lowendbox.com/blog/interview-qa-with-nexus-bytes-ceo-nahian-on-the-hosting-industry-and-a-customer-first-approach/

Also umm, study your competitions. No what they are good at and find what they are not and never talk ill about your competitions. It may take years to build up your client base. Don’t give up :).

Also be the brand and be proud of what your brand stands for :).

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Jarland? Antisocial? Liar.

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I remember getting in an elevator with a stranger at hostingcon and saw the guy’s lanyard with his company name. I said “Hey I haven’t heard of you guys, what do you specialize in?” He replied “Hosting” and looked away. I said “Alright good talk.”

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I know some guys in Sicily. They say they best proven way to get clients is to show up with an asp and a can of gasoline. It is rare for them to lose clients, except through unfortunate accidents.

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I get most of my profitable (bigger) clients for web design from local recommendations. They are paying good and having less expectations than someone paying 5€ on Fiverr or similar, surprisingly.

I also get sales from my forum activity in various LE/HB and other online communities where people would recommend me for a job. I’m not really trying to point out why I am (supposedly) better than the rest because I found that was a rather hard approch to market like @Will pointed out, and, honestly, I don’t even reckon I am necessarily better than all the others out there. I may be a better fit for some people due to my personal values, approachability or other.

I recently talked with @AnthonySmith and he pointed out to me that good communication can go a long way. This and trust is one of the reasons most people have approached or handed clients to me.

Honestly speaking though, doing this job part-time I take the liberty to decline jobs and accept those that either seem profitable enough for me to spend time on, or provide an extra kick of “yeah, this is gonna be interesting” (like @vyas recently described whatever has ridden me when I thought dealing with a 2.7 WordPress install was fun lol), or it’s some kind of special offer for one of the communities I am part of where I get my profit through the experience gained and not necessarily the pricing, which is still fair enough, often. Oh, and there is Fiverr. No idea if my logo creation gig will ever make it among the trillion others lol.

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My family owns a decoration company ,and I maintain some webpages of it. “Clients” come from their suggestion , but most of the time I can only earn lunch money. Small local companies not willing to pay too much money to maintain a website. Actually, I help them cut cost more often.
So it might not be the solutions you want. Just brain storming.

About the decoration company is > 7 years old now, the first two years was losing money. This industry is extremely dependent on friend recommendations, the company start profit at the 3rd year. Until now, there’s too much job we cannot take all.

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Whoops didn’t mean I sell SEO optimisation. But I work hard to have a high google page speed score and a high SEO score on a testing website and Alexa… It’s so damn hard to have a page with the best SEO score possible.

Thanks, you all for your help. I am going to read everything through the day!

And between I said “Hey guys” but I take every advice if it works :joy: :joy: :grin:

@Clouvider I just checked your website. To get an idea to what to optimise use google page insight and use the light house utilitiy in the dev tools they look the same but they aren’t the same. Here is your report https://jolly-fermi-eb5fc7.netlify.app/

To give you and idea here is the one of my site and as you can see I still need to work SEO omg…
https://quirky-heisenberg-61976e.netlify.app/

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