Hi folks,

In this post I am going to share with you the results of my recent web hosting survey, divulge how I am doing the rest of my market research and what tools and resources I am using, and then finally I shall be begging you to fill out my survey if you haven’t or pass it to a friend if you have! It’s going to be a good one, so let’s crack on!

So in my last post I threw up a link to a market research survey about web hosting. It consists of four questions and all are multi-choice questions as well I believe. I thought I’d take a moment to share some of those results with you. I’ve had a couple dozen responses so far, but ideally, I am looking to reach a hundred. With that said, you can still take the survey by going here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/YPPQZ83

In the mean time, let me give you a picture so far of what I have found with the limited results I have.

There seems to be three things that are of the utmost importance to people buying hosting:

- Price

-Features (cpanel etc)

- Bandwidth and storage

These are the out-and-out front-runners at the minute, and to be honest I am surprised. Having done a little work in and around a hosting company last year, I fully expected customer support and it’s availability to be a much bigger player in this research. The last hosting company I worked with was having MEGA issues with support and was struggling (and still is) to keep up.

But here is how I explain that. All of the people who have responded on my survey thus far have used and do use hosting at some point. This seems to suggest to me that the kind of person filling out the survey is a webmaster, who has at the very least some experience of buying and using hosting. This kind of person doesn’t care particularly about an army of support staff working all night waiting for their call, what they’d like is a simple hosting service which delivered on it’s promises, was reliable and at the same time affordable. The last hosting company I worked for conversely had a lot of customers who had never used hosting before and this was their first purchase.

So, I am still looking for some more people to fill out the survey (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/YPPQZ83) but I already have some valuable information going forward. Customers broadly speaking fall into two categories; those who have bought hosting before and those who have not. Those who have bought before expect three core fundamentals from the service (as they rightly should) and the people who have never purchased before need a little hand-holding and guidance through the process. I know what that is like and appreciate the frustration.

If I go ahead with any hosting-related venture I’ll cater for both by focussing my energies on delivering the core three fundamentals of the service whilst at the same time setting up a comprehensive support structure for the newer-comers to the service. I’ll probably do this with free hosting video tutorials explaining the whole process, setting up a comprehensive FAQ section and setting up a seven-day a week email support system which will answer all queries (ideally) within one day.

I still need to go further with this though and gather some more data as I am falling short of my 100 person target on my survey. So, to try and get into the mind’s of my prospects I am doing a little more abstract research around the edges as well, and I am going to explain how I have gone about doing that in this post so as to perhaps help guide some of you with your future market research.

Firstly I am using our old friend the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to help me. I go there and type in a really generic keyword like “web hosting” or “hosting” into the keyword field and I arrange the results by average monthly global searches (in order of highest to lowest). If you are playing along with me as I go a long here, you’ll see the keyword “web hosting” gets 5,000,000 searches per month globally. The local search volume for me (UK) in December was around 550,000 searches. This gives us an indication that this market, and consequently the webmaster market is absolutely staggering and HUGE (no wonder the gurus are pocketing impressive amounts of dosh).

I then go deeper into those results and look for the long-tail keywords. This probably could all be done faster with a tool like Market Samurai, however I am a man of habits, and I am really comfortable with the Google interface now and like doing it this way. I look at the long-tail-keywords as they give me an indication of what my potential prospects and customers are thinking about.

For example; “cheap web hosting domain name” gets 4,000 searches monthly. This tells me there is a small segment of the market looking for some VERY specific packages. They want cheap web hosting and a domain name (probably a free one). These guys are highly targeted prospects, and although lower in search volume, they represent an excellent chance to make some money if you get the right offer in front of them at the right time.

I do for this for an hour or two and make a list of around 10 keyword phrases and use this to get a picture of the market and what certain segments of that market are specifically looking for.

If I am feeling REALLY fancy I look at the demographics of the visitors of some of my competitors and take a look at some of the sites my prospects might be visiting as well, and I do this using websites such as Quantcast and Alexa. This not only gives me excellent data about my target market, it also tells me where they are visiting and what they are interested in online. As a result, this gives me some ideas on where I should be advertising on the Google Content Network and banners ads.

So there you go, that should give you some insight on to how I am conducting my market research and what I have found thus far. I hope it has been helpful to some of you out there. The fact remains I still need some more survey data! I wish I could reward you with a commission or something for ever person you got to fill-in my survey. Thinking about it, if I had the time and money (I don’t) I could probably setup some kind of CPA offer to do that.

In reality what I REALLY wish I had done was actually made a good effort of doing the Rat Race Lab Newsletter and delivered a load of free valuable content in order that you the subscriber might have felt compelled (through the laws of reciprocity) to fill out my survey and pass it around. Kicking myself n0w. Hindsight is always 20/20 and there’s no point dwelling on it.

If you havem’t filled out my ridiculously easy and quick survey yet, then please do here —–>http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/YPPQZ83

If you have filled it out and know some one who could also fill it out then please send them that link, it would mean the World right now to me. I’ll be back with an update on things pretty soon and share with you some of my findings etc.

Take care of you and yours.