Many IT students graduate from college thinking that instead of working for someone else, they can make a go of web developing on their own. With the hundreds of thousands of websites out there, even with the intense competition, you’d still think it would be pretty easy to make money by providing web services. This should be true, but then why do so many web developers wind up going back to work for another company? It’s not because they have time management issues or lack of motivation like many articles that you may read will suggest. The reason why many web developers don’t make money on their own is because they don’t sell enough related web services along with their web development. As a web developer, in order to make money, you need to sell your clients the whole package, including hosting services. In case you don’t know anything about reseller web hosting, it’s the perfect way to make money along with selling web design, SEO services, content writing, graphic design, and even links and advertising space. So, consider this article to be your intro to reseller web hosting and how you can make money at it.
If you are going to make money reselling Internet services, there are many cheap web hosting companies that will help you out. There are different ways to go about reselling cheap web hosting packages, but if you have the IT skills from a college degree, the best way to make money is through private label hosting. Private label hosting means that a web hosting company will let you resell their hosting packages under your company’s name. This means that your clients get all of the benefits of a shared hosting package, except for the fact that they don’ have access to the customer service department. That would be your job. Private label reselling is the perfect set up if you want to start your own web development service. This is because after you sell someone web design services, it is only natural that you become their web hosting company as well.
There aren’t a lot of web developers that make money off of web design alone, and there are several reasons for this. First, you can read articles about how many businesses don’t have web sites and how many would benefit from having them. These articles try to make it sound like all you have to do is set up a web site offering cheap web development services and people will all of a sudden realize how important it is that they have you develop a web site for them. Not true. The chances are if someone doesn’t already have a web site by now, they aren’t going to get one. There is also enough free site builders that come with cheap hosting package that people figure out web development on their own or take a continuing education class at the local college and become an expert in FrontPage. Then, you as a web developer or reseller are totally cut out of the loop.
The next thing that new web developers don’t understand is how long it takes to develop a web site versus how much you can charge. If you are just starting out, you may be able to charge a fair amount, but how many billable hours will it take you to actually design the site? Remember, your client has to like the website before they pay you, and you’ll be surprised at how picky people become when they are holding your final payment. Many web developers wind up spending enough hours on one site to barely break even, much less make minimum wage.
Web development on its own is really a one shot deal when it comes to making money, and on its own it isn’t enough to make a living at if you are all by yourself. This is why reselling is important if you want to make money as a web developer. In other words, in order to make money with your own company, you need to become a salesperson. Web site development may be a one shot deal, but web hosting is forever. So when it comes to web development and reselling, you have to sell the whole hosting package in order to make money.
Think about it. With a reseller web hosting package, you can sell someone their domain name, their monthly hosting service, their web site design, their rankings report, their sub domains, their monthly security, and other services as well. This can include an entire SEO package including keyword research, content creation, and link services. Selling all of these services on an ongoing basis is how you make money at reselling. If you think that people won’t pay for these services above the mark up value from a cheap hosting company, you are wrong. Most people will sign up for a web hosting service, try to get an ecommerce site going on their own and fail. These are the people you should be selling to in order to make money because they are the people who are serious about ecommerce, have the money to spend, and know that they can’t do it on their own. Once they sign up with your private label web hosting company, they will be paying you money every month for as long as they have their site. Having a web site for many people is like having a car. They would rather pay someone else money to change the oil every six months than do it themselves. This is how web reselling becomes a steady income for you.
To get started, you need to set up you own web site, which you may already have. Check the major low cost web hosting companies to see who has the best deal and become an affiliate. You can either get a private label deal or you can become an associate. If you do private label, it means that you can mark up more services, but you also have to do the customer service. Once you sign a contract with the web hosting company, they will usually give you contracts for your own clients, the ability to take credit cards, and an automatic billing system for your clients. Again, it depends on the hosting company what you will find, but they are usually fairly generous when it come to setting you up with everything you need to sell their hosting packages.
You will then need to get your site ranked for web hosting. This means writing content with advice about web hosting and putting this content on your site and getting it out to article submission directories. Start a blog and start answering questions. If you live in a smaller town, you can also advertise locally and pick up some accounts that way. At any rate, rack your brain for all of the information that you learned in IT school and become an Internet and web hosting expert. The higher your site gets ranked, the more traffic you will get and eventually you will get some clients.
Make sure to always sell the benefits of Search Engine Optimization. Not everyone will go for it at first, but when they don’t get rankings, they should come back. Hopefully, at this point you will have some examples of how you have gotten other sites ranked, or at least how your site is ranking in the very competitive world of web hosting. This is when you can sell them key word research, new content pages, article submission services, and links. Don’t worry about having enough time because this isn’t something you have to do yourself. Especially with the content pages, you can find someone online to write them for fairly cheap. Again, these are all services that you mark up, and if someone is selling a product of their own, they’ll pay you for the services. Think about it, with about fifteen or twenty clients of various sizes, you can actually make money at reseller web hosting, web design, web development, and the associated services.
If you want to make even more money without much effort, you can set up an affiliate site for your clients who want to go it on their own. Almost every budget web hosting company will let you act as a sales person on their behalf. They will all give you the right to set up a free link to their site if you sign a reseller contract with them. With this kind of situation, whenever someone clicks on the link on your site and signs up with your code, you get a commission. There are a lot of people who may not want your services, but they do want the confidence of signing up with someone that you recommend, because you have established yourself as an expert with your other web development site. You can make really great commission from this, and you don’t even have to do anything but direct people to the other site and collect the money.
So if you have an affiliate website or even a subdomain that goes with your original site, you will also make money from the people who just want a web host that you have put your stamp of approval on. All in all, making money from reseller web hosting is just a matter of going to the different cheap web hosting companies, finding out how to resell their product, and then adding your own product and services to it in order to make money.
