Four Building Blocks for a Web Hosting Business

Four Building Blocks for a Web Hosting Business There are many things to consider when you begin building your web hosting business. One of the most important concerns how to attract customers. This article discusses four areas you need to pay attention to if you want to get visitors who need web hosting to your site. . .and turn those visitors into clients. There are a million things to consider when you decide to start your own web hosting business. You need to think about what company to buy your package from (if you’re a reseller), make sure you have the technical skills, create a business plan, deal with the bookkeeping, and so on. Some of these points are the sorts of things you would need to think about no matter what kind of business you decided to get into. But some challenges are a bit more peculiar to web hosting, especially as an online business. In this article, I will discuss four key areas that deeply affect how well you attract customers to your fledging business. Let’s start with the design of your website. This is the first thing that any prospective customer sees. As you’ve heard before, first impressions last. On the Internet, that’s even more important; if you make a bad first impression, you won’t get a second chance. So how do you want to be seen? Your website should be easy to navigate, of course, because nobody is going to take the time to learn how to maneuver around a confusing site, especially since there are a million other places a web surfer can check out for the same services (just enter the phrase “web hosting” into Google to see what I mean). It also shouldn’t look like the thousands of other web hosting sites out there, which seem to have been built with generic templates. How will you ever develop a professional corporate identity if you look like everyone else? Someone who is looking for web hosting for their website wants to feel as if they’re dealing with a professional. If you come off looking like an amateur, you will lose their business. That’s true whether the site they want hosted is a small hobby-style site, an educational not-for-profit information center, or a large commercial e-tailer. You offer various web hosting packages to your clients. You provide customer service via phone, email, and IM. You answer their questions about what software will work with your hardware. You’ve streamlined your billing process so that it is quick and painless for both you and your customers. Guess what? You could be doing a whole lot more. There are very few website owners who know everything, and the ones that think they do are wrong. You could do your clients a great service by posting articles and tutorials that help them get set up. If you’re targeting your service at small e-tailers, some articles that talk about what to look for in an online shopping cart, how to set one up, and organizing an e-commerce website would certainly be in order. Prospective customers who see these articles will know that you understand the needs of their business, which will weigh strongly in your favor. You can go beyond phone, email, and instant message in customer service if you start a set of forums. Support forums not only let your administrators address issues in a more informal setting; they also let your customers communicate with and help each other. You could see a community start to grow, which would be all to the good. You might even start getting suggestions about ways to serve your customers better. These might be in the form of complaints, or they might be phrased more like, “I’m trying to do X, and it would be really helpful if I had Y to support it. Is anybody else having the same issue?” Nobody likes to feel as if they are an island; support forums give you a potentially more proactive way to communicate with your customers, and both you and your customers stand to benefit from this. Besides, many website owners check out various support forums when they are considering what web hosting company to hire. All of these services provide additional content for your clients and prospective clients. Think of them in part as opportunities to prove that you are a profs e sional who is serious about his business and about helping your customers. Remember also that the extra content will bring extra traffic to your site, and quite probably result in more sales. That can certainly make it worth the extra work! Actually, the heading of this section is an understatement. Since more than 90 percent of your business is likely to come straight from the search engine results pages (SERPs), you must understand how search engines work. The success of your business depends on it. What this means is that you need to learn how to learn to optimize your site so that the search engines will index it and give it a high ranking for your chosen keywords. But keep in mind the points I discussed in the previous section; you must also build your website so that it is friendly to visitors. Fortunately, it is possible to build a site for your web hosting business that will appeal to both search engine spiders and flesh and blood visitors. Remember, if you have the greatest hosting plan in the entire world, it’s utterly useless if nobody knows about it. So how do you learn about search engine optimization (SEO)? Well, you could start by doing a search on the phrase in Google. Or even better, you could pay a visit to SEO Chat Either way, you will find more information on this topic than you can shake a mouse at, much of it free for the viewing. If you decide you would rather hire someone else to optimize your website, you will also find plenty of SEO companies. Please be cautious when choosing one, however, since many of them are somewhat less than honorable. Some even engage in practices that could get you banned from the search engine indexes entirely. Google has some webmaster guidelines that talk about SEO and what to watch for when you consider hiring a company. Especially when you are just starting to build your business, you cannot be all things to all people. As with the search engine business, the web hosting business is highly competitive, with a number of highly visible players that get a lot of customers. That doesn’t mean, however, that the little guy has no chance at all. It does mean that you may need to think differently. Rather than catering to everyone, think about the market and the kinds of people and organizations who want web hosting. Not all of them have the same needs. You may be able to cater to some needs better than others. Think about this, and be honest. If so, you can turn this into a virtue, and specifically set yourself up to sell web hosting to those whose needs you could fill best. Catering to a niche is a great way to set your web hosting business apart from others. For example, there are web hosts who cater to the special needs of those who run online forums and communities. Others offer web hosting to podcasters, who have technical concerns that include eating bandwidth for breakfast. Still others cater to small online e-tailers, while others enjoy handling the web hosting needs of not - for-profit organizations. While the four main points that I’ve mentioned in this article aren’t the only things you will need to succeed, they will certainly help to get your web hosting business off to a good start. You need a website that projects a professional image and includes extra content that attracts visitors. The site needs to be friendly to both search engines and web surfers .And finally, you need to cater to a niche to help set you apart from the thousands of other web hosting companies competing with you. Good luck!

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