How To Start A Successful Website Hosting Business

Posted in Internet Marketing on 11. Mar, 2009

Starting a website hosting company is difficult at best, some people will tell you that you have no chance, and that the market is saturated. While others will tell you that if you find a specific niche for your website hosting company and then specialize in that niche, you might have a chance. Yes, this is all true. The website hosting industry is, in my opinion, over-saturated. However, if you find a unique and specific enough niche, you can overcome the odds of competing with the big companies and do quite well for yourself! For example, if you start a website hosting company that specializes in blogs, well, you will probably fail due to lack of capitol to do an effective advertising campaign, but if you specialize in a blog based ecommerce website relating to the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) industry, your chances of success will be greatly increased. Now, because of how diverse this can be, I will not be able to list out specific steps relating to your specific industry. What I can and will do is layout steps for the generalized industry and you can narrow it down with a bit of logical thinking. Lets quite speculating and get down to business:

Step 1: Domain, Website Reseller Hosting, and Script.

Find a good domain from your favorite domain registrar (Your Domain Registrar Company Here). Try to find a domain with one or two of these keywords: Hosting, website, site, or anything relating to your website hosting niche. Next, you will need to find a good website hosting reseller, this is a company who will lease you space on their servers to re-sell to other people, thus making you look like a professional full time company. The best company I know that will also provide you with unique and powerful tools is the StartYourSever.com. Here is a link: StartYourSever.com. Finally, you will need a script, and by using SYS (Start Your Server.com) they will provide you with a few choices for some good website selling scripts, but not only that, they also sell you a fantastic billing manager called WHMCS, this billing manager will automatically sign up clients, bill clients, send clients invoices, change clients passwords, and terminate clients accounts when they don’t pay. It does everything you will need and more! I highly recommend it!

Step 2: Develop Your Niche

As I said in the opening paragraph, you will need a website hosting niche in order to compete successfully with other hosting companies. You will need to figure out what you want to specialize in, whether it’s Get-Paid-To websites, proxy websites, Incentive Freebie Websites (IFW), or even a specific type of ecommerce website! In order to do this you will have to research the industry your clients will be in, find out exactly how the website works, find a good script to sell to your clients, and figure out how they will be successful with their websites. You have to remember, that happy clients will make your work so much easier. So if you can become an expert on your industry, you can pass the knowledge onto your clients! Not only that but the more money you can make off of them as well! All the hard work that nobody wants to do, you can make money off of! For example: Script installation, link building, meta tag re-writing, content building, SEO work, XML Sitemap creation and updating, or even XML Data Feed creation and updating! I guarantee you can find many ways to make money off your clients, more so than just hosting! And if you do all this well, your clients will love you!

Step 3: Get Yourself Known!

Here is one of the best ways to get clients, website hosting forums and webmaster forums. Try a few of these and get yourself known in the forums! Then start posting a few advertising threads in the appropriate areas around the forum, you will get good clients from just doing this! Another great place to advertise is webhostingtalk.com. Next, try posting some classified ads, this will give you some great traffic as well as future sales, and back links. Now another great way of getting yourself known is by having other people do it for you! I am talking about a press release; a press release is an article about your company sent to news papers, magazines, and other news related websites. I suggest using prweb.com, these guys are great! They will write an article about your company and send it to a bunch of different companies around your local area as well as very big websites! This will generate tremendous traffic and will generate good sales as well! After you have done this, I suggest furthering your website hosting company by joining affiliate programs as an advertiser, have more people bring you sales, and only pay them when they do! Sound too good to be true? It’s not! Joining an affiliate program can bring hundreds or even thousands of people together promoting your products and services from all over the web! This can even further your already nice and steady income!

Step 4: Grow, Grow, and Grow!

After you have conquered your industry and have leveled off on your income (your client base is steady, incoming clients are replacing the ones that leave), you will need to move to a second industry, if you want to grow your income some more. This can be just as easy as adding a new banner to your website telling members of your new product or service, or it can be as difficult as starting an entirely new hosting company website! This choice is entirely up to you! But either way, you will probably have to start over from scratch: Creating new ads for your new product and services on webmaster forums, adding more classified ads with the new services, and even telling all of your affiliates about the upcoming changes to your line of products!

That’s about it! Don’t forget, that when you start an affiliate program, its important to start sending out special deals to your affiliates telling them of the latest discount you are offering, this will give them some advertising leverage over the competition! Just start a coupon with a ½ off deal or even a month or two free! You won’t believe how much this can increase your sales, trust me! Now a few other important issues to talk about before I end this article:

1. Provide the best possible customer service that you possibly can! I don’t know how many times I have stopped using hosting companies because they provided terrible customer service. It’s really bad sometimes!

2. Relating to number one: “A happy customer will tell 3 friends, an angry customer will tell 1,000.” So just be nice!

3. “If at first you don’t succeed, try a different strategy because the one you’re working on clearly doesn’t work.”

4. “A clear conscious is a soft pillow.” Don’t do anything sleazy. Don’t scam people. Just be ethical, and your business will be better off, and so will your conscious.

5. And the last proverb: “A friend’s eye is the best mirror.” So get a friend of yours to check out your website and its services, and get their advice, and be sure to act upon it!

Well that’s it for this article! Just remember to be nice, even to the meanest clients. And to always be promoting, as soon as you stop, your income will eventually follow suit. That’s why affiliates are so useful, if you get a bunch of them, chances are at least one of them will be very active in promoting you! Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you stick around to read some more fantastic articles! Please subscribe to my RSS feed at the top right! It will notify you of any new articles to the website so you can keep up-to-date with all the new fantastic websites to make a fortune off of!

Thank you very much!

Sincerely Your

Internet Income Teacher

-Galen Schneider

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