Every company starts off small I know but what I don't know is where to begin.

I've advertise and submit HostWQ to some of the most popular directories out there. I even spend time posting in forums and be active but it's not helping me pulling in any customers. At least not at a stable rate.

The first few days of advertising really paid off. I was getting around 20-30 customers a day...but now that number has decreased dramatically. So what am I doing wrong?

Should I spent some money on ads campaign or should I be patient? Where do I start?

Please give me some pointers,
Pete.

I personally would recommend search engine optimization or just paid advertisement.

Yeah, SEO is best source for getting traffic ( i think you are already doing some part of it ) Keep on forum posting, directory submission etc....

You may also want to participate in some of the forums dedicated to free Web hosting to help promote your free Web hosting service.

As an aside: were those 30 new customers a day paid, free, or some of each?

Hi

You can always try Social Bookmarking, Article Directories, Press Release etc. Write a good content, if you can write good article, make it SEO Friendly, use Meta Tags, Nice Tags, and start posting. Find Some good forums like this one with good PR and good Alexa ranking, then talk about your service or business. But I think Forum's Signature will bring less traffic depending upon what are you selling or providing services

Katie

I started out advertising in banner exchanges free traffic so I would recommend that if your first starting. Paid advertising can be risky but I also recommend that to. Sites such as Google Adwords and clicksor.com or Bidvertiser.com are some paid advertising sites.

Forum and Blog Participation will give you a good result for the traffic you are expecting. Also its better to take care of the keywords used and the website should be content rich for the visitors.

Before you start throwing money at advertisements, you have to make sure you differentiate yourself enough to make the banner ads effective. Think back to before you knew anything about hosting... Would seeing "50GB of disk space and 750GB of data transfer" mean anything to you?

The key is to target a specific audience and branch out to other audiences from there. There are several other forum threads on this topic, and a common theme is "word of mouth." If you can provide great service to the customers you have, they can easily become your best salespeople... and it doesn't have to cost you a penny.

so far learnin alot from u guys thanks alot for ur opinoins

For getting more signups you can also try discount coupons for your clients or can start an affiliate program so that your clients will work for you. Mouth publicity is best source for getting traffic and business.

Most host have some affiliate program with them so as to attract more clients and increase business.

Keep in mind that the time of day that you post is very important for articles, social bookmarking and forums.