If you’re thinking of starting a blog, then there’s obviously some things that you would need to do in order to get started. While starting a blog may look easy, if you’re going to make some money from it, then there are a few things that you need to think about before you get going. Here are some things that you need to do in order to start a profitable blog:

• Decide on a Domain Name

Avoid using free hosting services that don’t give you your own domain name. It’s now possible to get a domain for about $8 and the most basic hosting service for less than $5 a month, even without paying in advance or taking a commitment with a web host.

• Install Blogging Software

There are a few blogging platforms that are now popular, however WordPress remains a favorite. Other content management systems that you can use for your blog are Joomla and Drupal. It’s recommended to go with WordPress if you don’t have too much experience as a webmaster, due to the fact that it allows easy customization and is also relatively simple and straightforward to use.

• Customize the Look and Feel of Your Blog

Actually changing the design is quite easy, since WordPress has a library of hundreds of free blogging templates. There are also many more commercial templates that you can buy and use together with your WordPress blog. The main issue is that these templates will determine just how your blog looks, so it’s important to pay close attention to them. What you can always do, is to install some templates, make some test posts and look at them one by one to see which of them would be the best suited for the type of blog that you’re going to be putting up. You can also ask others for advice about which blog theme would work best for you.

• Think of Your Content

Create a strategy to add content to your blog before you even launch it. This is because content is the most important element of your blog and what draws readers to it. The more interesting content you post on a regular basis, the more others are likely to find your blog informative, come back to it and also link to it from their own blogs.

Will it be something informative, something related to recent news, or will it be more of an opinion blog where you share your views on a variety of topics with your readers? Will you add other kinds of content besides text, such as graphics, diagrams and videos? How often will you post? Will you be doing all the content writing yourself, or will you hire a freelancer to do all or part of your blog posts? Before you launch the blog, these are the most important questions that you will need to ask yourself.

Tomorrow, we will see some more ideas on how you can get more traffic to your blog and optimize it to get the maximum amount of visitors possible.

Using social media safely for your business is possible. We’ve seen a few pieces of advice previously that will help you do this. Here are some few final tips on this topic that will help you make the most of social networking sites all the while keeping your business safe from hacking and other security breaches.

• Beware of compromised accounts

Just because your account is safe and you follow good security practices, doesn’t mean that everyone else in your contacts necessarily does the same thing, however. Be careful, as your clients, business partners, as well as personal friends accounts could be compromised. While most hacked accounts are used simply for posting spam, there are some other uses that hackers make of them. Beware of any strange links given to you by your contacts, especially if you don’t expect to be sent any links by that person. Very often, these would go to a phishing site, or a site that has been compromised by malware. Be careful about friends claiming that they need to borrow money or that they urgently need you to make a purchase for them on an e-commerce site. These are common scams that target social media users as well. If you’re unsure if the person that you’re talking to is really your contact, then get in touch with them in another way, such as by email, IM, text message or phone call.

• Avoid discussing sensitive information on social networking sites

Don’t publicly post information that should be kept in private messages. For example, don’t post on your suppliers Facebook wall that you’ll be making an order for such and such product. This just gives information about your business to competitors. If one of your clients or partners wants to talk about something related specifically to business between you and them, then it’s better to do this in a more private environment such as by phone or email. Remember, there is always the potential that someone is impersonating a contact that you know on social networking sites, or that one of your contacts accounts has been compromised.

• Keep up with developments in the security and social networking world

Read technology websites such as ZD Net, etc. They’re not just for computer geeks, but contain some very useful information about the latest technologies, in terms of online services, hardware as well as software solutions. You may learn more about a product that you’re currently using, or that you may find useful to get. But the most important reason why you need to keep up with technology news is that information about the latest security threats is reported a lot more quickly and thoroughly on these sites than on “general purpose” media websites. That way, if there’s a security threat such as a loop hole in site security that was found by hackers, or a piece of malware like a worm or trojan that is circulating through social networking sites, you will be the first to know about it and can find out ways to protect yourself from that security threat.

Now that you’ve created your blog and added some useful and informative content to it that is sure to keep your visitors interested in it, you may still have one issue: how to get more visitors to see your blog. We all know that in the online world, quality traffic to any website equals more money for the webmaster. But unless you send your blog to one friend and it suddenly goes viral (which can happen, though is very rare), you will need to take some action yourself in order to promote your blog to your targeted audience. This isn’t complicated and it simply requires that you follow a few tried and tested internet marketing tips. Here are some of them:

Establish Good SEO Practices

If you have a blog, then you’re already at a slight advantage over other sites, since search engines such as Google tend to love blogs. But you would still need to take some actions to give your blog “better SEO”. The first thing would be to think about the inclusion of targeted keywords in your blog posts. Optimize your posts for your targeted keywords by maintaining a density of around 1% to 2%. Try not to over do it, as it would look like you’re just keyword stuffing. Also, don’t force keywords in phrases where they would make no sense. Search engine algorithms have been updated recently to detect such things and you will end up being penalized for having nonsensical phrases in your posts that are obviously designed to boost your rankings rather than give your readers some useful content. There are a few plugins that will help you analyze the SEO qualities of your blog posts, for example SEO Pressor for WordPress. Use them to your advantage.

Link to it From Your Main Site

If you already have some steady traffic flowing to your main website, then including a link to your blog can be a logical thing to do. If you’ve just launched your blog, then including a mid size square button on your site or making an announcement on it can build some interest in your blog rather quickly and bring your some much needed traffic to it. After all, if your site visitors don’t know that your blog exists, they won’t visit it and will just stay on your website.

Announce it in your Email Campaigns or Link to it in your Email Signature

If your blog is new, having an entry about it in one of your email messages that you send to your mailing list is recommended. You already know the importance of linking to your main website in your messages by including a link to it in your signature at the bottom of the email. You can do the same thing with your blog in your subsequent communications to your customers. Of course, if you’ve made a new and interesting blog post, you can also make this the topic of one of your email newsletters. Rather than copying your blog post in your message, link to the relevant post on your blog.

You’ve probably heard about how effective it can be to build a blog to help you with your online marketing efforts. It is true that if you have a website, adding a blog can be very useful, as it will deliver interesting content that will be both useful for your readers and also will be well loved by search engines like Google. This will help you rank higher for your targeted keywords and ultimately lead to more money for you in the end. Building a blog is straightforward enough, but there are some things you would need to be aware of first. You will see some of the things you can do to make your blog a more effective tool.

Choosing a Good Blog Hosting Provider

If you already have a website, then your web host will probably allow you to add another website either on its own domain, or as part of a subdomain of your existing one. If you don’t then you should sign up for a basic shared hosting account to begin. Avoid using the free services like Blogger, as they’re not really a good choice if you want to make money from your blog. A paid hosting account gives you more flexibility and reliability over the content of your blog.

Figure out How You Will Make Your Blog Profitable

If you already have a website where you’re selling your own products, one of the ways to make your blog some money for you would be to link to the relevant pages of your main website from articles posted within your blog.

But there are also other ways that you can monetize a blog even if you’re not selling anything directly online. For example, you can include affiliate links to products that you provide information on in your blog, or that are related to its content. So if your blog deals with mobile phones, you can include mobile related affiliate offers on your blog. It is also possible to add some pay per click ads from a service such as Adwords or Bidvertiser, where you will get paid for every click that someone makes on one of the ads served on your blog.

Decide What Kind of Content You Will Have On Your Blog

Of course, you need to decide on a niche for your blog. But also, you will need to determine what you will be talking about more specifically in that niche on your blog. Your blog could, for example deal with new happenings in your niche/industry. Or you could provide product reviews of products that you sell on your own site or are an affiliate of. And then there is the possibility of putting up informational and educational content that’s related to your main niche. Of course, you can also combine all of these possibilities in your blog, but it is a good idea to know what kind of posts you will be making once the blog is up.

Many online marketing experts will tell you something like “the money is in the list”. Well, this is actually true if you have a mailing list of interested and targeted subscribers who actually see a need to buy the products that you are promoting. But having good subscribers and lots of them is not the only thing that need to be important for you if you have a mailing list and send out newsletters. Even having 100 000 subscribers on your list will not do you any good if they never click on any of your links or even read your messages. Here are a few tips that will help your interactions with your mailing list become more productive and profitable for you.

• Mind the Rate at Which You Send Out Your Messages

Unless you really need to send out daily updates for some reason (such as having a site that collects industry news each day), avoid sending out your newsletters too often. If they didn’t find anything too interesting in the first few days, many users will either unsubscribe or start ignoring your messages if you send them out too often. Remember, it is better to communicate with your list once a week and have some conversions on your products, rather than bombarding your subscribers with daily messages only to end up losing half of them before the month is over.

• Include a Calls to Action

This doesn’t only apply to items that you are selling, but also if you are just sending visitors to your website for something, such as to read one of your blog posts, or to watch a video. Including a call to action will make it more likely that they will go ahead and visit your site.

• Be Brief and Direct

Avoid making your email messages too long. People get dozens, sometimes hundreds of emails each day. They don’t always have the time to completely read each of them. If they see a wall of text, they just go into TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) mode and simply don’t pay any attention to the message. Keep your communications brief, direct and to the point. If you need to explain more or give additional information, link to a blog post or a page on your website. Websites and blogs are better made to convey longer information to your readers. Also, one of the goals of newsletters would be to get people on your site as well. From there, it is possible that they could buy something, or keep reading other things on your website for information on products and services that might be useful to them.

• Include Contact Information in Your Messages

It happens that subscribers sometimes forget who you are, especially if they are subscribed to many mailing lists. Include things such as your email address for questions, the URL of your main business website, as well as links to your social media profiles. It will remind your readers as to who you are and also will give a more “human” feeling to your message, with ways for people to contact you if they want to know more about something they saw in it.

Search engines such as Google sometimes change their algorithms which are used to determine the ranking of each web page in search results. Sometimes, these changes are very minor and go largely unnoticed. Sometimes, they create waves in the entire online marketing and webmaster world. Many are now asking themselves this: how can I keep up with all these changes that search engines make? The answers are actually quite simple. There are a few things that you need to be doing which will increase the chances that your website will not be affected in any major way by any changes that the search engines make to their algorithms. Here are some of these tried and true methods:

• Avoid Black Hat SEO If You Want Long Term Results

Well, the goal of this article is not a debate on ethics or whether using black hat SEO tactics is “evil” or not. Let’s simply stick to looking at the facts: if you want long term results, then black hat SEO methods are not your friend. Basically, black hat SEO involves finding loopholes and ways to game the system so that a website rises in rankings rapidly. This might be something desirable if you are launching a temporary website that will only be making you money for a few weeks and you don’t care about what happens after. But if you want to build a long term online business, then these tactics are to be avoided, since you will get slapped down by search engines eventually.

• Make Your Site Easy to Navigate

Both search engines and human visitors love a site that is well structured and has an easy navigation. Therefore, create simple menus that will lead your visitors to different areas of your website that they would want to see. Also, it is a good idea to create a site map and include a small link to it at the bottom. True, most visitors will not use it. In fact, it has been almost 10 years since I last looked at a site map when I was visiting a website. However, most experts on SEO would agree that including one would increase the chances on getting a good ranking with search engines. There are many software programs as well as scripts available which can create one automatically for you. Since it takes very little effort on your part, this is not a step that you should neglect if you care about your website‘s position in search engines.

These are some of the two basic ways that you can employ to keep your website ranking high in search engines, or to help it move up in rankings if that is your goal. Their advantages is that they will work, no matter what changes search engines bring to their website ranking and scoring algorithms. Tomorrow, we will explore some additional ways that webmasters can employ to control their websites search engine ranking, consisting of both on page and off page factors which have been tried and tested ever since search engines came into existence.

Previous, we’ve talked about using a content locker to make some money from CPA offers. Basically a content locker is an application which lets you require that users fill out a CPA offer before they can access your content, hence the name “content locker”. However, many webmasters wonder as to exactly what kind of site this type of set up would be appropriate for. Those who want to build a website may also want some ideas as to what kind of content you can put on a website to make it work well with this CPA tool.

Obviously, if you have an e-commerce site or a site, using a content locker would be quite dumb, since you want to make buyers jump through as few hoops as possible before they could buy something from you. However, if you have a site that provides content for free, then using one might be a good choice. Here are some examples of sites where such a tool would work quite well:

• Free video game / arcade sites

These are websites where people can come to play free online video games, usually games made in flash.

• News portals

Sites where visitors come to read some news, which can be general or which can be specific to a certain niche. It is much better if the news focuses on a specific niche or industry, as this will increase the number of visitors that actually fill out the offer rather than just click out and go get what they want somewhere else. Remember, there are plenty of general news sites, in fact there are hundreds of them. However sites that offer updates on a specific niche are fewer in number.

• Templates / graphics sites

There are a lot of people who search the web looking for free images they can put on their site, or some free website templates that they can use on it. This is a great way to monetize such a site.

• Ebook download sites

If you created an e-book and want to monetize it without actually selling it, you can use a content locker to require the visitor to fill out a CPA offer, and make a few dollars for you, before they can access the download link to get their e-book.

Some Other Considerations

Of course, these are just some examples of websites where such a tool can be used. There are plenty of other things that you can offer on your site as well. The key element here is that all sites that are suitable to use a CPA gateway with provide some kind of free content to the user.

There is also something else that you can do to monetize your site and that is require a small PayPal donation of $1 or $2 to access all the content without having to complete an offer. Some users may not want to fill out an offer over fears that they will get spammed, etc. However many of them wouldn’t mind paying $1 or $2, especially if they think that what you have to offer will be useful to them.

Previously, we have seen how it is possible to make money from Fiverr by selling your services. But there are other ways that you can profit from this unique freelancing site and this is by being a buyer. While making a profit buying things may not seem very obvious at first, there are actually some ways that you can make this happen. Let’s take a look at some of these ways:

• Buying Traffic and Social Media Promotion

Let’s say you have a product or service that you are selling online and could use some traffic to get some exposure for it. There are many sellers who offer social media promotion on Fiverr, such as sending out Tweets or putting a link to your website on their Facebook fan page. Many of these people have tens of thousands of Twitter followers or Facebook fans, meaning that your message will be seen by a lot of people. However, it is still important that you check the reputation of the seller, just to make sure that their fans or followers are actually real people rather than bots. You can do this by checking their feedback and seeing what others have left as comments about the service that they offered. Still, for just $5, you are getting a lot of potential exposure and are not risking a lot of money if you don’t get the results that you were hoping for.

• Outsourcing Services

While I have mentioned it in another post some time ago, I will say it once again: there is a lot of profit to be made from what is referred to as “services arbitrage”. What does it consist of? Quite simply, you would sell your services at another place, such as an internet marketing forum and then outsource it to people on Fiverr for a lower price. So let’s say that you get paid $7 to write a 600 word article based on an offer that you’ve made on an IM forum. You would then outsource that article creation to someone on Fiverr and have them write it for $5. You keep the $2 difference as a profit. Sure, the $2 doesn’t sound like much, however this can quickly add up. So if you are outsourcing 10 articles a day, this can generate a profit of $600 a month. Not bad, considering the fact that you could spend less than an hour a day managing this.

Here again, the trick is to make sure that whoever you are outsourcing the work to will do a quality job so that you can maintain your reputation as being a provider that offers great services to your client. Check the seller’s past feedback to see if it is good and give them a small assignment to begin with. If you notice that they do good work and follow your instructions well, you can then send them more regular work and you will have found a great partner that you can outsource your work to.

When you create a membership site, you need to promote it in order to get people to subscribe to it and thus make some money from it. We have already seen how using internet marketing forums could get you the members that you need to your site. But what about using your existing members to promote the site for you? This is indeed quite possible.

If you run a quality site that is very helpful and informational, many people will tell their friends about it and encourage them to join if they want to learn a few things about online marketing. Indeed, word of mouth marketing can be quite a powerful tool. But if you want to be even more successful with it, then you will need to give incentives to your members so that they recruit others to join. This can be done by various means such as:

• Giving a discount to the member being referred. If someone has been referred by an existing member of the site, they would get a discount on their first month’s membership.
• Creating a contest. By doing so, you can offer a prize to the top 3 people who refer others to your site. This will encourage members to get their friends to sign up for it.
• Giving a special bonus once someone has referred a certain amount of people to the site. This could be a product that you own, or maybe a one on one coaching session with you.

By doing these things, you will encourage members of your site to refer others to your site in greater number than what you would have ever though possible before. But if you want members to tell others about your site, there are also a few other things you need to remember:

• Run a good quality site. This means having useful and informative content on it. It also means that your site must be easy to navigate and function well. Nobody will like a membership site that goes down every few minutes and will definitely not want to recommend this kind of website to their friends.
• Update your site on a regular basis. This doesn’t mean that you will need to add new content every single day, however you should give your members the impression that your site is updated regularly. If members see that your site looks “dead” with no new information added to it in quite a while, then they are less likely to stay members and even less likely to encourage others to join.

Remember, that one of the best advertising tools would be word of mouth referrals. This works well in almost any business and it will definitely work well if you run a membership site. All that you need to do is to give your members the necessary incentives to promote your website to others and chances are, they will actually go ahead and do it.

Now that you have learned about what is necessary to run a membership site that you created, you now need to figure out how you will get members to join. Obviously, this means putting the message out there. People will not just magically type in the URL of your site in the address bar and join. There are a couple of methods that you can employ in order to gain members to your site. Each have their unique advantages, so it is a good thing for you to review all of them before you make your decision as to how you will promote it.

Here are some promotional methods:

• IM Forums

This is perhaps the best way to promote a membership site, as you will be showing your message to people who are already interested in learning about internet marketing and online money making techniques. The traffic is already there, all you would need to do is to get their attention and to convince them that your membership site is worth joining.

This can be done through various means. When a member of an internet marketing forum sees that a new membership site is being created, the first thing they will want to know if WHO created it. People who frequent IM forums have generally seen plenty of “make money online” products and are more likely to be skeptical than someone who is completely new to the industry and does not frequent any IM related communities online. In order to get better results, it would be good that you would be a reputed member of the forum where you are promoting your new site. This means having been on the forum for at least a few months and have made a decent number of contributions that are both useful as well as informative. Also, it helps if you get along well with other members and do not constantly get into flame wars with others. When a reputed member of an IM forum advertises their site, he is more likely to be taken seriously and listened to than a newbie with 4 posts that just joined yesterday.

It also helps to make some friends in the internet marketing community. This way, you will have some people who would be willing to review your site and vouch for its credibility in front of other members. If several well respected members of the forum say that a site is useful, then people are once again more likely to believe them.

Promoting via forums is simple and the exact steps to take depend on which forum you are in. All the big IM forums have a “Products for Sale” section. Some allow you to put a link to your site in your forum signature, while others will even let you purchase banner ad space on the forum that can be used for the purposes of promoting your website. This may cost a bit of money, but will attract much more attention to your offer.

Many internet marketers make their money by dealing with affiliate programs or with CPA networks that have various kinds of offers they can push in order to make money. Most of these companies are legitimate and will pay you the earnings that you have made on time, every single time. But there are a couple of bad players in the industry. Here are some ways to spot and avoid them:

• Do some research first

Before even signing up for a network simply doing a Google search for their name can bring you a lot of information about the company. You will often find blog posts, forum posts and articles that mention them. Read these. See what other internet marketers are saying about them and look at whether the general opinion is positive or negative.

• Be wary around “start ups” and smaller networks

If a company has not yet established their reputation in the industry, remember that things can go in two ways with them. Either they will grow to become a productive and successful network or they will fold. If it’s the second thing that happens, things are not likely to be pretty. There have been several cases of networks going under and skipping out on tens of thousands of dollars of payments to affiliates. The large majority involved CPA networks which were operating for less than a year.

• Be careful around networks who seem to approve everyone

While there are some notable exceptions to this, such as Commission Junction and ClickBank, which are very reputable networks, as a general rule you should be quite wary around a network that seems to approve every publisher that applies without giving them a phone call or emailing them to ask them about their marketing methods. While you may think it is convenient, this can cause problems down the road, if large amounts of fraudsters manage to sign up and merchants start dropping the network.

• Carefully check the terms of any offers that you run and ask questions if necessary

This is especially the case for “trial” or “membership” offers. While you may be offered a good amount for every sign up, some merchants have been known to use underhanded tactics if not enough of the sign ups that you refer have converted to full members on their end. Some may falsely accuse you of sending fraudulent leads or deliberately using bad quality traffic and refuse to pay you. For this reason, it is very important that you check the terms of the offer to see if the merchant has any special requirements with regards to the type of traffic you can send and its productivity.

• Work with multiple networks and run different offers

It is not a good idea to focus all of your marketing efforts for the month on just one offer or on offers from only one network, no matter how profitable they may seem. Spread out your traffic around several different offers in the niche on different networks. That way, if there is any problem with one of them, you will still be getting paid by the others.

Some people may be asking themselves if internet marketing is a good choice of career. Sure, the money that can be made online may seem attractive to many, but earning cash on the internet by promoting affiliate products or having your own products is not for everyone. Here are some thing to consider if you want to go into online marketing as a full time activity:

• Remember, you are building a business

Being an internet marketer is not a job. You will actually be working for yourself and thus have all the responsibilities that come with that. So you need to be a person that will always be motivated to do work without having someone giving them orders and telling them what to do or what not to do. The success of your business will depend on your ability to make the right decisions and you cannot blame someone else if things go wrong.

• You will need to learn things by yourself

When you decide to build an online business, there is a lot of information that you would need to look up, read and understand. There are very few actual college courses that deal with online business, and those that do typically just explain you what internet marketing is, but do not go into any real amount of detail on how you can build a successful business on the internet. So, if your idea of learning is sitting in a classroom and hearing some guy in a suit rephrase what is already in a textbook, then the online world is not for you. You must have the ability to learn everything you need by yourself, either by looking up information, or through experience.

• There is no fixed salary

Remember again, you are working for yourself and not for someone else. Therefore, you are the one that will determine how much or who little you get paid. In certain jobs, you might be able to get paid just for showing up and loafing around for a few hours. This is not the case here. How hard you work and how creative you are will have a definite impact on how much you get paid.

• You need to be able to embrace change

The online world is constantly changing, with new earning opportunities always emerging. In order to maximize your profits, you will need to take advantage of these opportunities as soon as they appear. Just remember, about 6 years ago, social media marketing was a relatively new concept that barely anyone took seriously. Now, many businesses use social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to stay in touch with clients and to acquire new ones.

What will be the next wave of change in online marketing? Some say it could be sites geared towards mobile devices, others think that the integration of various devices, such as internet enabled televisions could change the landscape significantly. No matter what happens, you need to be on top of your game and be among the first to spot golden opportunities.

When searching for web hosting, you may have seen companies that offer you really inexpensive hosting, such as $2 a month for an unlimited plan without any commitment. Obviously, these prices are attractive, but there must be some catch, right? Well in many cases, these hosting companies are places that you should stay away from if you are serious about your online business. Here are some reasons as to why:

• They are usually not real “web hosting companies”

What is meant by that is that they don’t have their own offices, staff, servers and connections. In most cases, these cheap hosting providers actually rent a server from another web host and then resell the space to their customers in an effort to make money. But what could be worse is simply one person buying a server and then plugging it into their internet connection at home. Obviously, don’t expect much in terms of reliability with that kind of arrangement.

• They don’t provide good support

It would be very rare for such a company to give you 24/7 customer service and technical support. In most cases, the only way you have of getting in touch with them is by email or by opening up a support ticket on their website. It can take several hours, or even days for them to get back to you. Don’t assume that if they have a toll free number and claim that they offer “24/7 support” that they are actually a real hosting company with staff standing by to take your call. Any kid can get a toll free number and then just forward it to his cell phone. Many times, you will find that when you try calling them, no one is available and you are told to leave a message.

• They haven’t built a reputation in the web hosting industry

These inexpensive hosts are usually “no name” companies that have not built a reputation and have not been reviewed by many customers. As such, you will have trouble actually trying to find out whether they offer good service or not. Buying hosting from a reputable company is the key when you want stable and secure hosting. Consider this: which one would be a better MP3 player? A real iPod, or some Chinese imitation that sells for $10? The same principle applies to web hosting as well. You are much better off sticking with the known companies and brands if you want decent service.

• Security and reliability could be a further problem

Professional web hosting companies know how to keep their servers running in optimal condition and how to secure them from attacks by hackers, viruses and malware. A no-name hosting company might not. In fact, they may cut down costs by not even making any backups, so if data is lost due to a server malfunction or hacking, it could be gone forever unless you have made your own backup copy first.

When looking for hosting on the website of a major web host, you may have seen a “reseller” option and wondered what this was for. You may have even seen something like “You can make a ton of money by having your own webhosting company”. But is all of this really true? Can you really make money as a hosting reseller? If you were dreaming of having your own webhosting company, is this the answer?

Well, it is possible to make some money as a reseller. But there are some drawbacks to that too. Let’s take a look at some of the advantages and some of the drawbacks.

Advantages of becoming a reseller:

• You will get server space, management tools and billing tools provided by the web host

This will allow you to effectively start your own web hosting business, without all the overhead that is normally involved, such as renting out space, buying servers, paying for the internet connection, etc. Since the web host provides you with all the tools to manage your operations, managing your customers accounts will also be easy.

• Many webhosting providers that offer reseller accounts also provide you with marketing tools

To make things easier for you, many webhosts will give you website templates that allow you to build a great looking site for your new hosting company. Some of them also give you templates for marketing materials, such as banners, articles, etc. This can be very helpful when you are seeking to attract new customers to your business.

Some drawbacks:

• You will be responsible for providing support

As the hosting reseller, customers will be asking you questions and reporting any issues that they have with their hosting. It will then be your responsibility to resolve these issues or forward them to the webhosts’s technical support department. While this may not be an issue if you have only a few customers, it can take up a lot of your time if you have hundreds of them.

• You will face a lot of competition

If you have taken a look at the world of webhosting, you will see that it is an industry that is extremely competitive. Of course, there are around two dozen of the “big players” out there, the major webhosting companies like GoDaddy and HostGator. But there are thousands of other, smaller webhosting businesses, many of which are resellers. This means that you will have a hard time competing with all of them and will need to be very creative in order to attract enough customers to make being a reseller profitable.

An alternative to becoming a reseller

If you want to make money from the hosting business, there is another option open for you. You can become an affiliate of a known webhosting company and get paid commission for every new subscriber that you send to them. This is much easier than becoming a hosting reseller and can be just as profitable, if not more.