I am a small startup with little to no capital

Chris, I'm not trying to be a wise guy, but I'm a little confused. Maybe I am mis-reading what you are saying. You mentioned

"I would love my primary company focuses to be Inbound/ Social Media Marketing and Consulting, to best utilize my skills from a background of Management and Marketing" and "Developing Web Presences, and utilizing Social Media and Inbound Marketing to drive clients success."

If you are going to consult your clients on the use of inbound marketing and social media to drive their success (ulimately more qualified leads and closed business), wouldn't you use the same techniques for yourself? I personally believe inbound marketing is a powerful tool for lead generation. Use what you know and make it work.

Good luck. Shawn

without capital now, how do I really drive new Web Hosting clients to sign up

The first place you should start is your network: friends, family, colleagues, etc. Ask for references, referals, names, whatever. Depending on who you know and who they know, this may bring you some clients.

You can also roll the dice on a Press Release, There's not a whole lot of chance that this will get you anything, but it's not a huge effort, either. There are plenty of places to post for free, and most of them give you exactly what you pay for.

But the only sure-fire way to get new clients without spending anything but time is with a pick and shovel. Find out who your target clients are, pick up the phone, and start calling. Or email. Whatever. It's a lot of work, and it's not very fun work, but it works. Slowly but surely.

The main problem you will have is, how quickly can you scale, if you start to get a lot of requests. If your hosting computers get bogged down then you will start to lose clients and develop a bad reputation.

You may want to concentrate on the consulting side, and develop some cash flow from there.

You could also start with helping companies to develop a better presence on the common social networking sites, this way you don't have to worry about your servers being overloaded.

If someone needs more than the public sites then you can show them how your own hosting can be beneficial.

But, this depends on your ability to sell not only yourself but your company. But, you are mainly selling yourself to the client.

The best way to show what you can do is to have a very strong, very active presence on the networking sites you will help with.

This way people will see what you are doing, and may find it interesting.

What would be useful is if you could write an application (I don't know if this has been done), to monitor and update your sites from one location, so, I have news, it gets pushed out to Twitter, Facebook and Myspace, and if appropriate, to LinkedIn and SecondLife, for example. But, the first three would be helpful, as it deals with the issue of how to ensure they have the same info, as, it may look bad if one site has info the other doesn't.

Chris,

ReadWriteWeb has a great article on the Capital-raising Ladder. But it seems like you're questions are more about marketing, sales, and conversion for a web hosting business.