Having a form on your website is a great way to get feedback from your visitors. It makes it easy for someone to send you a message, and they can do it from any computer, they don’t need to open their email program.

One problem with online forms is they attract spammers. Automated spam bots (bots are really just software programs) search the web looking for forms, then they submit them with their unwanted message.

One method of stopping spam bots is the CAPTCHA, a challenge that is easy for a human but hard for a spam bot. Here are a couple of examples:

The trouble is, often humans have trouble reading them as well as spam bots, and humans also generally find them an annoyance, which can deter them from submitting the form at all, which is not good for your business.

A simpler style of CAPTCHA is to ask a simple question, such as “What colour is an orange?”. This is much easier for most humans than trying to decipher distorted letters. The form will only submit if the answer is correct, in this case “orange”.

Leads. You know, potential new customers. Leads allow you to deliver your sales message and hope that it works (that’s another story). But you need to generate the leads first.
Here’s three of the best lead generation techniques.

Referrals

Nothing beats this one. One of your happy customers has recommended your services to a friend or associate, who then contacts you. This is great, as there is already a level of trust in place, and you can generally go ahead and do business. Don’t forget to thank the person who gave you the referral! To get more of these, keep giving the best service to your customers.

Online Advertising

Google dominates many things in the internet space, and online advertising is one of them. Google Adwords is a guaranteed way of getting people to your website. And not just any people, but ‘qualified leads’, that is, people who are already searching for what you offer.

Once they get to your website, you want to make sure it has been set up effectively to capture the details of the lead, so you can follow up.

These cost money, but the idea is to ensure a return on your investment. You can do this by consulting an expert and creating an online advertising plan.

Capture form

This ties in with online advertising, but it’s also very relevant to just about any business website.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get the name and email address of most of the people who visited your website? You could build up a database of those contacts and then market back to them.

A capture form is a small online form, placed in a prominent position on your website, and usually offering a free download as an incentive to complete it.

It is a totally automated process, including a personalised response to the lead.

Summary

I can’t help you with referrals, they are entirely up to you. But the combination of online advertising and a capture form is something that requires expertise to set up correctly, and Arrowsmith Websites can put you on the right track. We aim to generate more than $1 for your business for every $1 spent, and increase that profit over time.

Contact us today for a free consultation.

2010 will hardly be a revolutionary year for the web hosting industry. Nobody can say for sure, but it is hard to expect that there will be radical changes. In a sense, no news is good news. Similarly to almost any other industry, the development of the web hosting industry will be a function of the economy. This means that if the global economy finally manages to get back in shape, the web hosting industry will also benefit. However, even if the recovery of the economy doesn’t happen the way we like, here are some trends which will most certainly dominate in 2010:

• The wide scale adoption of virtualization will continue. Virtualization has already become part of the web hosting industry. Even now top 10 web hosting companies’ use a lot of virtualization but it can be adopted in many more web hosting companies, which are presently not using it. This will lead to cheaper website hosting, especially cheaper VPS hosting.
• SaaS will gain more ground. The SaaS (Software As A Service) model will conquer new territories – there will be more clouds not only because it is cheaper but also because this model is more efficient. Again, this will lead to cheaper website hosting, which is good for customers.
• Shared hosting prices will hit the bottom of $2-3 a month. The trend for cheap web hosting is endless but for some segments, namely shared hosting, the bottom is near. $2-3 a month from a major web host (i.e. a company from the top 10 web hosting companies) is reasonable and even though there are offers for even less, usually lower than that is at the expense of quality.
• Reseller hosting might become more popular. Reseller hosting is still relatively less popular than the other types of hosting but due to its benefits, such as that it could be a great form of cheap web hosting with many more advantages than just shared hosting, reseller hosting now finally stands a chance. However, since the major market for reseller hosting is web design companies and IT consultants, who later resell to their clients, the overall gloomy business climate might make it hard to find end clients to sell to.
• IDN’s will make their debut. One of the really new and exciting things in 2010 is IDN (Internationalized Domain Names). For many web hosting companies, which offer domain name registration in addition to web hosting, these domain names in world languages will become another source of income. Well, IDN’s will hardly bring in more money than the hosting itself but still it is something new for the hosting companies to try.
• Moderate to no investment in new equipment. 2010 will hardly be the year for major capital expenses. Even if a miracle happens and the economy starts its recovery, web hosting companies will be cautious to spend a lot of money on new equipment.
• Mergers and acquisitions. The process of slow enlargement of web hosting companies will continue but still since many of the Top 10 web hosts are small to midsized companies and bigger is not necessarily better, there is no reason to panic for one man shows and small companies with less than 5 or 10 employees in web hosting disappearing.

2010 might be the last year for the global recession but less optimistic predictions say it might not be so. Since web hosting is not a cheap industry, it is not possible to underestimate the money factor, which inevitably will block many projects. Still, even pessimists will agree that 2010 will be a quiet year for the web hosting industry and no major trouble is to be expected.

*This post has been submitted by a guest contributor.