Any Marketing Advice?

1. Keyword Selection for your website. Example Term: Hosting
The first step to successful SEO is always keyword research. Without it, you are like a bull in a china store. Bob and Jane are a loving couple who own a web hosting business and would like to do much better on google. Bob says they should optimize their site for the word "hosting" because According to Overture there are 1,426,822 searches bi-monthly for the word this word.

2. Use your selected keywords in your website.
Use your keyword to use anywhere you can. But don't let the keyword density get too high or your site may become over-optimized. 5% is usually okay. Use the keywords in tags, heading tags, etc...

3. Website Relationships
Like the loving couple Jane and Bob, your website needs a loving partner too. It's time to step away from the cheap "link building" campaigns. Google is now looking at how good a link is by calculating how long website visitors stay whilst at a link. It's time to start building solid business relationships with other websites.

4. Content is King:
Write relevant, interesting content for your website. Write some stories, articles, anything. Try for one new content page a week, more if you have time. Employ someone if you need to.

5. Use experts for your Hosting, SEO and Relationship building:
A wise entrepreneur once said that their key to success was to "ask questions". That means, don't be afraid to get help. Don't be afraid to use services that can get you to the top. The difficulty is that the Golden 5 steps can only get you so far. There are 1000's of factors that effect your website ranking.

How is he monetizing the site? Is it a site for downloading like a torrent site?

Hopefully he did the front end work to see if there is a market for his site. If it get's lots of traffic he could sell banner ads on it to other sites/companies. Just a thought.

I agree with the SEO option.. it's really the only choice if you want to be around for long term.

Being such a wide area there's plenty of things you and your partner could be (and should be) doing right now.

Don't forget the power of press releases too, these can bring in huge volumes of traffic in a short space of time - and provide you quality backlinks. Stay away from link farms though!

HI,

Now using SEM marketing for your site

Depends really, if the content is warez/torrent related then get your link posted in your signature of warez forums and begin posting.

If it's not warez related then it's almost impossible to actually make any money from file hosting

What is the business model?

Making money from this could be very difficult.

The Internet has a "free" culture, none more so than for file downloads.

The easiest way of monetisation would be AdSense, but I would make it an opt-in service so you can at least collect names and email addresses.

You would need extra fields so you can sort on interest though to make it meaningful.