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So you want make an impact online? You??ve created a website and it??s beautifully designed. You??ve written a sales letter. You have Pay-Per-Click ads and lots of traffic, but no business is coming in. Why? Maybe your website doesn??t work. Could it be missing that personal touch? A website can be a very impersonal experience. Can you brand your website to give your user a more personal experience?
Let??s go shopping for a minute. Imagine entering a store that has no salesperson. No one greets you at the door. No one acknowledges your presence. No one answers your questions. No one seems to care that you have come to visit. If you have a question who do you ask? You will probably leave to find someone who does care and can answer your questions.
Does your website provide the best customer experience possible? I like to think of the website like a salesperson. The components of your website represents you when you are not there. What does your salesperson/website look like? What does your salesperson/website say? Is your salesperson enthusiastic or boring? Compassionate or Firm? It is important to build a website for your targeted audience. What does your targeted audience want to hear? Start thinking like your customer.
I have put together some questions to help you start thinking about your website??s components that may need to be changed or modified.
1. Does your website have a crystal clear vision of who you are?
2. Have you included photos that give your targeted customer more visual information? A personal picture is a great idea, but maybe you own a large yoga studio. Adding some studio pictures would bring warmth to the website.
3. Is information about your background included?
4. Do you have testimonials with valuable messages? Add testimonials with energy. Everyone loves to read rags to riches stories.
5. Do you want your audience to HEAR your message? Have you thought about adding audio to your website? Why not explain your service to them. Save them the time of reading a long message.
6. Have you included an email address opt-in form box? Most web visitors aren??t ready to buy, they are just gathering information. Give them what they want. Inform your visitor with articles and give them the opportunity to receive email newsletters or ezines from you.
7. What does your site REALLY say? The copy on your website is extremely important. It should be clear, concise and to the point. You may want to consider using an informal, you-are-my-best-friend tone. I try to picture one person and write to that person.
-- Jen
After spending over 13 years in Internet Marketing, Advertising, and Web Development, I left my corporate career to teach others how to build and brand their internet business. My development and internet marketing expertise has been utilized at Dell Computers, Siemens Medical and Emerson Process Management.
Learn more about me on my website at: ibrandweb.com
By : Jeneth Blackert
There is a new fad in the web hosting market. Reseller hosting. Where individuals like you and I can become web hosts (sell web hosting) without having to buy all the infrastructure and do-hickeys that go along with setting up such a business.
Becoming a web hosting reseller for a web hosting company is becoming a very profitable past time for a lot of Internet marketers. Being able to earn a monthly on going income selling a service every webmaster needs with out huge setup costs is a hard business model to ignore.
So what exactly is reseller hosting and how can you get started?
Reseller hosting allows you to sell a web hosting companies services as your own. This is called private labelling. Basically they offer you a discount rate on their web hosting services and you sell it off as your own at any price you want.
Reseller hosting can start for as little as $20 a month. That means you can have a full featured web hosting business without any major start up costs.
The great thing about some companies offering reseller web hosting is that they do all the technical work for you as well. They provide around the clock support for you, they manage your servers and they can even bill your customers for you, so all you have to sell is focus on selling their products.
There is more to it but you can find out more about a web hosting companies reseller program by asking them directly. In this article, I want to focus on how to make money by selling web hosting.
So how can you make money selling web hosting? Here are my favorite methods.
#1 - Create And Sell Businesses On Ebay
This is my favorite method of generating sales for my web hosting services. In a nut shell, what I do is I create turnkey businesses (businesses built just to be resold to other people) on Ebay and charge people a flat monthly fee to host the site they just brought on my web hosting service.
If you go to Ebay and have a look in the website/businesses for sale section, you will see people doing just this. It might look strange seeing a website sell for a few dollars. I never use to understand exactly how they made any money, then I realized, they were not making money from the sale of the business, but on the back end. They would create good clean website site, sell it on Ebay for a few dollars and then charge the buyer to host this site on their hosting service.
This is perfectly legal, as long as you tell them up front that they must continue to host their website on your web hosting services for a certain period of time.
You could easily sell 100 small websites a week on Ebay. On average, you could sell hosting for $10 a month. So every week, you could be making $1000 a week. But that's not the best thing, since web hosting is paid monthly, you get paid monthly for as long as they stay with your web hosting service. This is as close as a steady pay check as you are going to get with Internet marketing.
You get paid every month whether or not you actually even work.
#2 - Become A Dedicated Hosting Service Just For Blogs
Blogging is hot right now. Very hot. There are an estimated 40,000 new blogs started every day. EVERY DAY. Can you imagine that? Sure, most of them are hosted for free, but there are a lot of blogs and bloggers who want the control of having a domain name and their own web hosting for their blogs.
The great thing about blogs is that they take up very little disk space and transfer (bandwidth) allowance. You can host many, many blogs with very little resources and you can charge a good price for your services.
Another great thing about blogs and bloggers is that most successful bloggers have more then one blog. This is great because blogs take very little technical assistance on your part which means you can grow your business quicker and have more paying customers without the need for costly and time sapping technical support.
So how can you market your blogging web hosting service? Good question! Here's an even better answer.
Forums! And not just forums about blogging. Any forum, any topic could be perfect for a blog, and there are a lot of people in forums looking for a way to express their interest in their hobby or passion.
You could easily position yourself as the service to go to for niche blogs. You could target forums that talk about any subject. Fishing, gardening, dog training, pie eating, you name it.
Posting in forums with helpful answers will no doubt bring you a lot of qualified business. Just make sure you answer with helpful posts and not just blatant plugs for your business.
The way to really make an impact with this type of service is to offer something no one else is doing. Maybe you could get an ebook written about the secrets to niche blogging and give that away with every hosting sale, or maybe you could give away free unique content that they could use every month on their blogs when they sign up for 6 or 12 months of hosting.
There are many ways to make money reselling hosting, and as you can tell, it is quite the lucrative business model.
To your success.
Bedrich Omacka is responsible for maintaining web hosting reviews site which is full of customers experience with big web hosts. By : Bedrich Omacka
Your web hosting plan is based on several components: disk space, traffic, number of email boxes, and other services. Why pay for more than you need? If you ever need more, you can upgrade to the next web hosting plan.
The question is, what level of these do you really need for your website?
DISK SPACE:
If you have the files for your website on your hard disk, use Windows Explorer Folder Listing to look at the folder(s) containing the files. You may need to do this for several folders to include all the website files, and add up the totals for each folder. (You can also do this at the MSDOS prompt). If you don't have a copy of your website on your hard disk, then you can either download it all with you browser (File - Save as...), or use an FTP program to view the files and folders on the remote server.
TRAFFIC:
This the volume in kilobytes of your files that are being downloaded to visitors screens. If your website is live, then your host can provide summaries through traffic analysers like Webalizer or AWStats to show how many kilobytes of traffic your site has. But if you are not yet at that stage, once you know the total size of your files, you can estimate your monthly traffic by multiplying that size by the expected number of visits per month. This can be a little complex, because all visitors may not look at all files on your site.
Small websites:
Say you get 1,000 visitors per month (33 per day) looking at web files totalling 300 Kb. That equals 300 Megabytes (300,000 Kb) of traffic per month. What could make up 300 Kb of files? Well, an A4 page of text can take 6Kb. Adding a picture averaging say 50Kb on each page makes 56Kb per page, multiply by 5 pages equals 280 Kb. Add 20Kb for some javascript and style sheets and you have 300 Kb for 5 pages. If 1,000 visitors looked at 300 Kb of web pages your traffic is still only 300 Mb per month.
Larger websites:
Our own website averaged 17,000 visitors per month over the last 6 months, but the traffic averaged only 1,075 Mb per month for that period. That is because most of our 120 web pages are text only with no graphics. The header for each page has graphics but these load only once per visitor, not for each page opened.
HOW TO OPTIMIZE FILE SIZES:
HTML text files are very small, although we have seen files created in MS Office programs four times the size they need be.
Image files can be large in terms of kilobytes. Check their size in Windows Explorer. Our image files average less than 50 KB. If yours are larger than 100 Kb then try optimizing them by compressing with a graphics program like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro.
Website with a large number of images optimize for traffic by displaying thumbnail files which click through to the full sized image file. Then only the image required to be viewed in full will add to the traffic.
A 150 Kb image viewed by 1,000 visitors adds 150 Mg to your traffic. Compress it to 50 Kb and you save 100 Mb traffic.
ONLY A VERY SMALL PERCENTAGE of our clients need more than 100 Mb of disk space for their websites, but most need more than 1,000 Mb allowance for traffic, due to graphics, sound, video or flash animations. If you don't need the traffic or disk space allowances of your current web hosting plan, you could save money by shopping around for another plan.
Ken McKay is an Australian web designer. More information on web design and web hosting for small business is available at platypus websites - http://www.platywebs.com.au By : Ken McKay
