So, you have set up a professional web hosting reseller business for free. That is a great start. But you won’t get any clients without marketing. No marketing = no earnings. Good marketing = great earnings!
Motivated? Good! Because it will take some work. The great news is that once you have got clients to your web hosting business, they are likely to continue to pay you revenue year after year after year after year! Once you get them in, they are usually in for long. Even if you would stop making marketing efforts, money will continue to come in from the clients you already have.
Here is some great advice how to market your web hosting business:
Consider both online and offline marketing
There are basically three ways you can get clients to sign up for a web hosting account with you: By talking to people, by Search Engines, and by online recommendations and referrals.
1. Talk to people!
Tell people about your offer in the real world. Get to know the advantages of your web hosting offers. Why are your services better than others? Here are some advantages to mention:
- Faster and more intuitive hosting control panel
- The Domain Manager is included in the control panel, unlike many hosts that use different logins
- Automatic Pre-installation of WordPress, Joomla and lots of other popular applications
- Option to set up automated Recurring Payments for critical domains and services
- Easy to upgrade all the way up to Dedicated Server
I have brought in many new hosting clients completely offline. For some of them, I even filled in the signup form myself. So go for it! Get a business card with your website address clearly printed on it. When you get to speak about hosting to someone, take their number so you can call back and ask if they need help to sign up.
2. Spend some time learning SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Ok, you have set up an online store. But how will people find it? Every day, thousands are searching for web hosting services on Google. So you need to have your website showing up on Google when they search for web hosting. They don’t know your brand or domain name. They search for a service. You need to ask yourself: What are they searching for, and how can I place an answer to that question high enough on Google’s SERP for people to click on it.
The competition on web hosting search is huge. So you need to be smart. In order to get on top when people search for ‘web hosting’, you will need hundreds of hours for SEO and probably thousands of links from other websites to your site.
Go for other search terms
The easier (and cheaper) way to successfully market your web hosting business, is to optimize for keywords and phrases with less competition. Instead of going for ‘web hosting’, be more specific and optimize a landing page for ‘WordPress web hosting’ or even better, write a guide ‘How to set up a WordPress website in 5 steps’. People are keener to link to an informative guide than to a selling product description. Of course, at the end of your guide, you will give the reader reason to sign up for your hosting service.
So think about what guides you can write. What phrases concerning web hosting can you explain in an article in such a way that people would want to read it and share it? An FAQ section is a great tool for SEO, or call it a “Knowledge database”, “Tutorials Section” or similar. The more content you create, the greater the chance that you will catch googlers out there searching for anything that is hosting related. Once they’re on your website, you have them in your hands. Your generous sharing of knowledge will make them trust you, and you will lead them by links to more useful information, always with a noticeable option to sign up for a hosting package. You will soon recognize that this is lots of fun too!
Go for local searches
Another very good idea is to go for the local searches. Form a hosting business for your own country. Translate the content to your own language. Note that the control panel is multi-language. Check if your language is represented. If not, there is usually no problem for people to use a hosting control panel in English. But they want their business partner to be local. So be their local hosting provider.
You must write your own unique content
When you install the hosting reseller plugin, it publishes almost 200 pages of content on your website. You can of course use that content, but Google will recognize it as “duplicate content”, since the same content is already found on hundreds of other reseller’s websites who probably did not care to write their own content. You will not be able to make duplicate content climb the SERP. You must rewrite it into your own unique content. Note that the plugin uses many of these pages for internal links. So it is a good idea to use the original pages and rewrite them rather than creating new pages. Just make sure you go to the reseller plugin’s ‘Pages’ page, and mark those pages ‘Don’t Update’. If you don’t, you will loose your content when you update the plugin.
As said already, you can still leave some pages as they are, being aware of that they will not function as landing pages. If you do, you should discourage search engines from crawling them. An SEO plugin like SEO Ultimate or WordPress SEO by Yoast will help you with that.
Read more about SEO:
- Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide
- The complete guide to WordPress SEO
Read also: Get reseller affiliates and earn 10% of all what they sell!
