How to advertise your reseller hosting store
Having a successful online business is all about one basic thing – popularity. And this holds true especially for the web hosting business. After all, making a good profit is the main goal in every business, and in the web hosting business, to make profit, you need to have customers. To have customers you must provide decent offerings, a good looking website, a solid company background, and most important – a popular web site . Today’s theme in our blog is online popularity and how to advertise your reseller hosting store.
If you are a novice reseller and the Free Reseller Program is your first online enterprise, then a good way to start is to advertise in your local community – among the people you know and people who know you. And while the results may not be that great, getting some customers will boost your self-confidence, and will help you gain a valuable marketing experience. A good way to attract your first customers is to create custom hosting plans just for them, especially if they know you – the custom plan will show them that you treat them as special customers.
Once you have your first customers, you can try more website popularization methods. A simple and effective method is to advertise through forums and bulletin boards. However, if you are using this method, your will have to keep away from just posting your link all over a forum – this will most likely have a negative effect on your website image. Use a link or a banner to your website in your signature, or, if you are posting in a web hosting orientated forum, you can advertise in your posts, making comments on how this feature is incorporated into your site. This is a more effective method for attracting customers, especially if the forums or the boards you have chosen are very popular.
Another way to promote your website is via a link exchange. This is a free and very effective way to advertise, and in addition to attracting customers, it will also improve your site’s ranking in search engines. However, a link exchange will also have to be done carefully – throwing your link at every website out there will not attract that many customers at all. Think wise and choose between sites that offer content, similar to yours, so that the people who visit your website will be actually interested in what you offer. This will give you better chances to make a sale.
Similar to the link exchange is the banner exchange. The advantage of the banners is that they can store more information, which will give you more possibilities in advertising and promoting your website. Emphasize on what you offer – Free Domain Name, Free WebSite Builder, Easy to use Script Installer. If you also offer web design as a custom service, you can put it in a banner too. A very important tip about banners is to keep them as simple as possible – a flashy banner may push away your potential visitors. If you want animation, you can limit yourself to a simple .gif animation. Do not cram you banner with information or pictures – the more user friendly is a banner, the better click-through is its ratio.
These are just a few simple strategies on how to easily promote your site. You can find out more on our support page, where we have prepared a very detailed article on how to advertise your website.
Originally published Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 2:09 pm, updated May 13, 2009 and is filed under The Free Reseller Program.
Tags: The Free Reseller Program, promotional banners, website builder, reseller tips
May 14th, 2009 at 7:44 am
Google is penalizing duplicate content on the web. If the text on your site resembles that of one or more other sites on the web, then you can totally forget about ranking. I tested my site http://google-friendly-hosting.duoservers.com/ in http://www.copyscape.com in my PAID account with Copyscape and there are 17 duplicate text competitor sites. So I can forget about any high rank in Google, whatever I do. Free resellers: a free reseller can change most text on his/her about page (website template – about us). And even that text cannot be changed completely. It’s about time that Resellerspanel gives the opportunity to free resellers to modify text completely on at least one page. This way the reseller can escape duplicate content penalties and try to optimize that one specific page for the search engines. Now it’s totally impossible !
May 18th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Hi dyderik,
I can understand your concern. However, the templates are made this way for a reason. As you may be aware, the more complex a system gets, the more likely it is for something to go wrong. We are on the road to making the templates more and more customizable, if you look at the first and the last template, you will see a noticeable difference. However, we still haven’t reached the point where all text areas on a template will be customizable.
Until this happens, however, we have ensured an easy way for you to use our program and have your own custom site – the remote order forms. They are the most essential forms on the templates – the order form, the domain search form and the login form. You can easily include them with any custom built website, with FrontPage or Dreamweaver by simply using the link in your control panel. This way, you can easily optimize your page for search engines and try to achieve higher rankings there.
Before doing that, however, you can take a look at the current hosting market to see that there are a lot of competitors out there, ready to invest much more time and resources in advertising than any of us. This is why, in my article I have suggested a more local approach, to advertise in a community where the people already know you. Customers will always prefer the services provided by someone they know, rather than the services of a major company, located god-knows-where. This way you can very easily attract customers to your store.
Victor