Web Hosting Box

Reselling web hosting services can be a difficult task, especially for an inexperienced webmaster that has never successfully built a hosting business. However, by creating appealing and unique hosting plans with reasonable profit margins, promoting to targeted audiences, and proactively marketing your services through a variety of avenues, it is possible to establish a significant client base rather quickly. Unfortunately, most resellers are only able to generate a small amount of income each month, as they are unable to find a large amount of clients that are willing to trust their hosting services. If you’ve been experiencing similar problems, then you may want to consider the following three ways to efficiently market a web hosting business.

Creating a Blog with Quality Content

It is well known fact that the best way to generate consistent web traffic on a residual basis is to utilize the immense power of the search engines. To do this you’ll need to populate your web hosting site with quality content related to various hosting topics. By building a blog within your hosting site you’ll not only attract search engine traffic based on keywords embedded within your blogs articles, you’ll also provide useful information to your visitors and thereby establish trust and professionalism more effectively. In fact, if your blog posts are informative enough other webmasters and web surfers will link to your site on their blogs, and will link their friends to your pages when they are in need of information. To maximize your traffic generating efforts it is important to ensure proper keyword density and usage within each blog post.

Newsletters and Press Releases

Another way to proactively market your hosting services and expand your web presence is to publish high-quality press releases on popular websites. A press release is simply a news story that professionally describes the products and services offered by your hosting company. This ultimately improve search engine optimization efforts and generates a significant amount of traffic originating from the sites that the press releases are posted on. After soliciting a client base and collecting a large number of e-mail addresses it would be beneficial to market additional services to your pre-existing and former clients, as you can be sure that this is a targeted audience that will bring high conversion rates.

Purchasing Banner Space

Another great way to attract prospective customers and expand your market outreach is to purchase banner space on established web hosting review sites, and the websites of other hosting providers. These sites are frequently visited by people that are most likely interested in purchasing hosting services on an ongoing basis. By marketing to a targeted audience through custom designed banners on websites that have significant traffic levels you can begin seeing significant results within just a couple of weeks.

Apache’s mod_rewrite module solves several typical Search Engine Optimization (SEO) problems. It is a module which provides a powerful way to do sophisticated url manipulations. Not only can mod rewrite be used to avoid duplicate content, redirect moved urls or non existing inbound links, and create search engine friendly urls. It can also be used for to gain higher PageRank and search engines rankings, get your web site indexed by the search engines, and receiving more visitors. Here are some the most popular url manipulations.

Avoid duplicate content

RewriteEngine On
# Redirect non-www to www.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

# Redirect direct requests for "<anything>/index.html" to "<anything>/"
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index\.html http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Redirect relocated URLs

RewriteEngine On
# Redirect relocated old urls to the new urls
RewriteRule ^oldpage\.html$ http://www.example.com/newpage.html [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^directory/oldpage\.html$ http://www.example.com/directory/newpage.html [R=301,

# Redirect relocated directories to the new directories
RewriteRule ^olddir/(.*) http://www.example.com/newdir/$1 [R=301,L]

Redirect non existing incoming links

RewriteEngine On

#+---------------------------------
#+ - BEGIN: URL fixup redirect routine
#+---------------------------------

# Get the requested URI, query string and hostname.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(/[^?]*)([?].*)?$
RewriteRule . - [E=myUri:%1,E=myQuery:%2]

# Replace hmtl, htlm, and thml file extensions with html extension.
RewriteCond %{ENV:myUri} ^(.*)[.,](hmtl|htlm|thml)$ [NC]
RewriteRule . - [E=myRedirect:yes,E=myUri:%1.html]

# Replace comma(s) or multiple filetype delimiter periods in the url
# with a single period.
RewriteCond %{ENV:myUri} ^(.*)([,.]{2,}|,)((s?html?|php[1-9]?|aspx?|pdf|xls).*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule . - [E=myRedirect:yes,E=myUri:%1.%3]

# Remove invalid trailing characters
RewriteCond %{ENV:myUri} ^([/0-9a-z._\-]*)[^/0-9a-z._\-] [NC]
RewriteRule . - [E=myRedirect:yes,E=myUri:%1]

# Remove trailing punctutation
RewriteCond %{ENV:myUri} ^(.*)[._\-]+$
RewriteRule . - [E=myRedirect:yes,E=myUri:%1]

# Do the external 301 redirect only if needed and the resource exists
# at the corrected URI.
RewriteCond %{ENV:myRedirect} ^yes$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{ENV:myUri} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{ENV:myUri} -d
RewriteRule . http://www.example.com%{ENV:myUri}%{ENV:myQuery} [R=301,L]

#+---------------------------------
#+ - END: URL fixup redirect routine
#+---------------------------------

SEO-friendly URLs

For example, your urls look like this: http://www.example.com/widgets.php?cat=blue&page=1

Obviously, you want to transform it into something that look like this: http://www.example.com/widgets/blue/page1.php

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^widgets/(.*)/page(.*)\.php /widgets.php?cat=$1&page=$2 [L]

Good luck! You can find more info about seo at http://www.seocentro.com.

A large client base is the key to becoming a successful web hosting reseller, and is usually the most difficult step in establishing a successful web hosting business. Every other aspect of reselling is covered within the control panel of your reseller hosting account, including site/hosting plan creation. To solicit a significant amount of clients you’ll need to put in some hard work and creative thinking. The best way to increase profit margins and ensure continual residual income is to target demographics and audiences that are relatively unsaturated and inexperienced in the Internet industry. Thus, targeting store owners and service providers that operate local businesses is the best way to bridge the gap between your online services and the real world.

The Advantage of Targeting Physical Business Owners

By targeting people that already own businesses, you can guarantee that your target audience already has an interest in expanding their marketing outreach. As a self established hosting provider you can meet this need by offering comprehensive website creation/promotion/hosting packages that will streamline the process of placing their business on the World Wide Web. Business owners also have a lot more money to invest than the typical audience, and many of them are inexperienced when it comes to online operations. Since your target audience will not be familiar with typical hosting prices and protocol you’ll be able to demand a higher price than you would if you were to target online customers instead.

How to Find Prospective Clients

The first step in finding a group of prospective clients is to browse through business directories, as these databases are full of business owners that are already trying to market their services. Ideally, you’ll want to target business owners that do not already have a website or hosting plan. You can do this by searching for the business name in Google; usually any business that does not have an online presence will not appear within the search results. After conducting these simple steps you’ll have a two-tier prospective client base to target – one group of business owners that are trying to market their services online and already own website, and another group that are trying to market their services online and do not own website. Although you’ll probably receive higher conversion rates from the latter group, both will bring sales if your services are promoted properly.

Properly Promoting Your Hosting Services

Most business owners are more susceptible to custom sales pitches than predesigned sales pages. This is because they like to feel as if they are important and valued before spending their hard-earned money on your services. Thus, while it is ideal to create a web hosting site that advertises all of the main features of your web hosting packages, it is also wise to approach each business owner with individual selling points that are based on their specific industry. For example, you could approach an owner of a bicycle shop and tell them how beneficial it would be for their shop to be listed in various online directories and to have their own professional website that can effectively target tourists and generate additional income.

Google recently released an enhancement for their Docs feature called “Discussions” in addition to the announcement of a new not-for-profit program. Discussions is an enterprise collaboration extending the comments feature within Google Docs. This enhancement combines the following important features:

• Structured discussions
• Time stamping
• Profile pictures
• @ mentions
• Unified stream discussion
• Email alerts

If the discussion stream becomes too large, comments can be archived as opposed to deleted. This ensures no information that may need to be accessed at a later date is lost or missed due to deletion. At this moment, the Discussions feature is only applicable to newly created documents and will not be applied to existing files. Discussions is currently available to all users with personal Google accounts and Google Apps customers.

Bundled with the release of Discussions is the announcement of Google’s new nonprofit program which is based out of the United States. The primary objective of the program is to assist U.S.-based nonprofits with reaching more donors, raising awareness for a specific cause as well as improving management operations of the organization. Basically this nonprofit program is helping improve other nonprofit programs.

According to Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives, Google has learned that many nonprofit organizations in the United States need hands on assistance with the optimization of Google’s many tools. Therefore, the Internet tycoon is attempting to provide that assistance.

There is another helpful feature working in conjunction with the program: Google Nonprofits Marketplace. This connects various organizations with certified providers that are offering their assistance for free or at a discount. In 2011, Google is looking to help nonprofits make a positive change to the local and global community and is excited about being available for support. Those that work for a nonprofit can apply to see if Google can help.

In 2011 Google is attempting to make serious changes to the way in which they do business and others help the world. By continuing to add features and upgrade the many software programs Google implements, the entire world will continue to become closer and more connected.

Since Google is such an industry giant, it is commendable for them to take corporate social responsibility and apply that to those that help others in crisis. It is unfortunate more large corporations do not have Google’s heart to give back to the community that supports them.

Aggregate Markets teamed up with Webtrends to develop and publish a study that examined the effect social networking and mobile sites have on regular website traffic as well as the rise of Facebook commerce by several leading online retailers.

The White Paper Report

The report entitled, “The Effect of Social Networks and the Mobile Web on Website Traffic and the Inevitable Rise of Facebook Commerce” analyzed unique visitors to websites of Fortune 100 companies in addition to their associated Facebook fan pages. The result is an interesting industry trend.

The Comparison

By comparing brand websites with corresponding Facebook fan pages across a three to five month period, 44 organizations revealed that 40 percent had higher traffic their Facebook fan page than website. The study was then split into two categories: e-commerce and non-ecommerce which disclosed these same companies have lost approximately 25 percent of unique visitors.

The number of Facebook fans has significantly grown since the platform’s conception. There is a noticeable distinction on Facebook between businesses that are engaged in e-commerce activities and those that are not.

In general, non e-commerce brands have more Facebook traffic than website traffic when compared to e-commerce brands. Webtrends believes this is due to the common misconception that Facebook marketing is unproven for online retailers; therefore some brands do not choose to invest in this medium.

Reliability of the Facebook Platform

This begs the question: Is Facebook a reliable platform for e-commerce? Since Facebook has proven to be constantly selected over regular non-ecommerce websites, traffic continues to find fan pages. However e-commerce websites also continue to generate traffic. Therefore, as the report suggests, it is only a matter of time before Facebook catches up with traditional websites.

Therefore, to answer the previous question, yes it currently is a reliable platform for e-commerce. However, due to the stigma from marketers of the reliability, traffic is not quite booming. As Facebook continues to expand, online retail professionals will witness the value of the platform thus beginning e-commerce at fan pages.

This report does not completely prove that Facebook will become the king of e-commerce. Instead, the report provides evidence that Facebook is here to stay and businesses cannot ignore its power. Given the industry, Facebook can be a significant advertising mechanism. For those that understand there is an entire world outside of a single website, Facebook e-commerce is a significant step.