Selling reseller web hosting is a very lucrative business and the ROI for a successful reseller is an attractive proposition for many entrepreneurs. For only £29.99 a month (with us:)) anyone can resell web hosting packages at prices and specifications of their own choosing. If a reseller creates a package priced at £4.99 per month (which is cheap) they only need 6 customers to break even each month, and then each new customer beyond that becomes a profit.
But this all relies on a reseller being able to attract traffic to convert in to customers, and that is the tricky bit. Search engines are most sites’ primary source of traffic, and one of the most important ranking factors for a high position is the quantity and quality of links pointing to a domain name. If you have aspirations of setting up a dedicated web hosting business your marketing strategy must include search and link building. Here are a few ideas to apply, some are quick wins and others are medium to long term commitments.
Quick wins
CSS gallery submissions
CSS and web design galleries are a great source of traffic and incoming links but there are literally thousands of them to consider. There is a solution with CSS gallery submission services which will do it all for you (for a fee). The three I am aware of that have a good depth and breadth of sites on their list are http://www.thecssgallerylist.com, http://galleryrush.com and http://www.cssgallerysubmission.com.
Online press release
Announce your launch, promotion or new product through an online press release to raise both awareness and build incoming links from web hosting news resources. Generic PR distributions services such as prweb.com ($200) are picked up by web hosting news publishers and http://www.pressadvance.com specialises in distributing web hosting news ($85) and will even write it for you ($135).
Free resources
People love free things and a lot of companies have used this to create link bait by giving things away with no catches. Areas to look at as a web host to attract relevant incoming links are free icon sets, a WordPress theme, CSS template etc. If you do go down the free web template path add your URL in to the footer as well.
Get involved with the forums
Research the relevant web hosting and domain name forums that do not add “nofollow” to links or signatures and get involved in discussions. In no way are we recommending creating spammy posts, in fact they will backfire on you from a branding perspective. Become a genuine part of the conversation but use your domain name in your signature.
Write an article for a high PR site
There are more web design blogs that anyone could count, many of them with a high PageRank and quite a few open to contributors writing for them as long as it is original and useful content. As part of the deal the author will often get a small biog and a link back to their site.
Directory submission
As with anything when it comes to SEO, directory relevance is key here. Generic directories that will take anyone for a fee will pass next to no link juice but niche/ industry specific directories who care about creating a genuine resource are definitely worth submitting to.
Long term link building
Write a blog
Blogs with useful and insightful articles are a fantastic source of building links, blogs with dry content, nothing new to say or full of press releases are a waste of time. If you have the time and the drive to commit to writing regular content, go for it, if you don’t, stay clear.
“Hosted by…” buttons
If you provide a great service some customers will be happy to associate themselves with you and carry a “hosted by…” button or link to you in their footer. Not all customers will go for this, but if you don’t make it available then none will.
Being known as an expert and/ or leader
You would be amazed how many sites will link to a service recommending them or using them in a “top x” list having never used them themselves. The old saying “success breeds success” is true for link building. If you become well known enough within your niche people will link to you because you are perceived to be a market leader.
Are there any glaring oversights or tips you would like to share? Leave a comment below.
Another great article!
I often find encouraging other websites with similar target markets but different products writing blog posts about each other works a treat!
Good article Matthew – another one similar to your tip on forum posting, is to post in comments on blog articles. But as with posting on the forums, use this technique to get involved in the conversation rather than for directly promoting yourself or your business.
You will find that the majority of blogs use ‘nofollow’ for any links created in the comments, meaning that link juice isn’t passed on through the link, some don’t even allow links. But if appropriate, you could post to an article on your website, but make sure that it will give even more value to the post that you’re commenting on.
If you think it’s appropriate to post a link, then it could help in promoting your article/blog/website to others who may link to it without a nofollow from their own blog. However this should not be your primary use of blog comments, you should use comments to build relationships with the blog author, other comment writers and the blog visitors. You never know which of those will give you a good link in the future, but of course to do this they have to see value in what you have to offer.
Good Post Matthew – The problem I find is educating clients in the importance of website SEO and maintenance: we have a client that pays only £50 a month for her maintenance and wants to stop it so that she can advertise and I have told her that she has the best for of advertising, her website. Getting round this we are finding hard at the moment
Davide,
That must be very frustrating. Maybe you could put together a small “Beginners guide to SEO” brochure (as a PDF) for people who are new to the topic to explain in simple terms why SEO is so important?
Matt
Nice article
Here are few more:
Article submissions
Blog Commenting
Social Groups – Twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc
Social Bookmarking
Directory Submission
Classified ads
3 way Link exchange
Forum posting
Press release
Just a re-iteration of Marks comment, a lot of people think by posting comments on blogs, they will get link juice, but most competent blog owners put ‘nofollow’ attributes on their blog comments – just like Heart
S
Hi Matthew, sound advice, and glad to hear that online news releases are part of you overall strategy. Thank you for mentioning PRWeb in this piece. Here’s a link on the impact of news releases on search that might be of interest: http://bit.ly/D3znk
Great article, especially since I’m on the brink of offering hosting to clients. Certainly makes it easier for me to deploy/content the sites if im fluent in the hosting arrangements/features.
Maybe thats an extra +ve about reseller hosting you should add to your list. I’ve had heaps of trouble creating websites for clients clients sites, and then not working on their choice of (inferior) hosting. The <3 Reseller just makes much more sense to me.