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posted on 02-06-2007 by bwb
Anyone who has worked for a living knows how hard it is to be passionate about a job every day. In the hosting industry this is even more brutal as you are usually dealing with demanding individuals called "customers". The Create Passionate Users Blog posted a great article today called Don't ask employees to be passionate about the company! It is a great read and I agree with a lot of his points.
It is so hard to be passionate about a company and to ask an employee to do that is not fair. The articles makes the point that you should be asking them to be passionate about the industry or the people they deal with. So in hosting tech support people need to love helping people solve problems, or at least enjoy it enough to ignore the screamers. Or they need to be passionate about making web sites and powering them. Great article on an important subject espicially with the rate of turn over you see in the hosting industry. Keeping employees happy is hard!
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posted on 02-04-2007 by bwb
Finding a good support service to help expand your business can be very hard. I've worked for hosting companies that have outsourced and finding competent people is hard. This thread on WHT deals with just that and I thought I would mention it as a lot of people are talking about Touch Support and how good they are. I've worked for Touch Support during college providing support to several hosts and they are very good. They are considered pricey but that is only because you are comparing an all US based firm to ones that outsource to India and so on. So if you are thinking of outsourcing they are worth the money. The only other firm I've been impressed with is one in Canada, I will try to find the URL for that one too.
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posted on 02-02-2007 by bwb
The guys over at HosTest put up a great survey they did in November. They emailed 50 of the major web hosting companies three emails and graded them on the response and how quickly the emails were responded too. The three emails were sent at different times, one on the weekend, one in off hours, and one during business hours. Pretty interesting test and take a look at the results. What is sad is that a huge chunk of the hosts didn't respond to at least 1 of the emails and that the worst didn't respond to a single email. Shows how important customer service is, if you do all this work to get people to your site yet the people who express an interest only get a response 2/3rds of the time your business will fail.
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posted on 02-01-2007 by bwb
The guys over at Marketing Pilgrim wrote a great article on taking advantage of your "thank you" page. Too many people don't use this page when it so important and when it can help boost your sales. With web hosting this page can be used to offer them web design services, a template store, SEO or marketing services, information to help them get a start on building their site, and many other things.
Here are a couple more ideas:
1. Offer a free trial for a month of an add-on service you offer. Maybe you offer a spam prevention service on top of your regular hosting at a small fee per email account. You could give on the thank you page a coupon to give a 30 day trial. Great way to get people to try it!
2. Offer a customized coupon that they can email to a friend right then to give that friend a free month or some form of discount to try your hosting. Great way to get more signups using word of mouth marketing.
3. Offer them a free quote on your design services, marketing services, or SEO services. Great way for designers to get more work out of each client.
4. If they bought a reseller hosting package point them to resources that can help them get setup. You could point them to your help files, this site to help them learn what to do, and Monster Templates if they need a hosting company template.
For more info be check out the related links. The marketing sites have a lot of good ideas that you just need to apply to the hosting industry.
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posted on 01-26-2007 by bwb
Once again we see some info on why affiliate marketing is such a great deal for hosting companies. MidPhase announced today that their growth in 2006 has hit record numbers jumping from 1,000 new clients month to 4,000. What do they attribute to this success?
According to the Web hosting provider, the company surpassed all previous revenue records and its affiliate program was responsible for approximately 75 percent of new business.
And
"2006 was a phenomenal year for us," says Ushman. "We grew by leaps and bounds, shattering every record we ever set for the company's growth. And most of it was due to our affiliate program. Our market share has literally exploded since we began really promoting the affiliate program in early 2006."
I am a big supporter of affiliate marketing with web hosting. Why? Because there is no direct source of clients you can tap into easily in this industry. You have to go into every niche on the web to find clients and no company has a marketing department that can handle this. By using affiliate marketing you can let other people do that work and you can concentrate on improving customer service/support. Plus you are only paying people when you get new business so there is no betting that an expensive ad campaign is going to work.
Plus affiliates might just be someone who has a popular site and throws up a button that doesn't do much business but if 1000 people do that it can generate a decent amount of signups, not to mention the obvious branding you are doing and name recognition.
If you are curious at what MidPhase is paying affiliates per month. 75% of 4,000 clients a month is 3,000 clients from affiliates. Their site says they pay $85 per client minimum, that means at the very least they are paying out $255,000 per month to affiliates. That means this next year at the very least they will be paying 3 million dollars in payments ($3,060,000)!
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posted on 01-24-2007 by bwb
I just posted the interview I did with Ross of ResellersPanel. The interview covers their client base, their thoughts on marketing and seo, and their custom API setup they offer resellers. Its refreshing to see something new in the hosting industry and they seem to be doing pretty good with their system. Here is a summary of how it works:
With this API system a Reseller can focus on building their site with 100% automation and on marketing while ResellersPanel handles the end user support and underlying architecture of the system. You can even choose between building your own site and integrating their system or from one of their already created sites.
Their top resellers are making $6,000 a month with this system and they have paid out over $1,000,000 dollars in payments. Read the interview with ResellersPanel here and if you haven't read the other interviews we have done be sure to check them out.
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posted on 01-23-2007 by bwb
I should have an interview up soon with ResellersPanel. Waiting for a few answers to some remaining questions and then I can post it. They have a very cool setup for resellers with an API system that lets you resell their hosting and they provide all their support. Their top reseller who is doing this API system is making $6,000 a month. It is a nice setup if you want to focus just on marketing and leave support and everything else to them.
Forum Roundup:
- Thread on how to price a hosting business if you are thinking of buying one..
- Thread on outsourcing support companies, esp BobCares.
- Typical business card thread but still useful.
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posted on 01-15-2007 by bwb
I found this great article a while back but forgot to post it. It is entitled "Little Known Ways to Brand on the Cheap: 99 Tips for Poor Web Startups" and it has some great info to get you started branding your company. Branding refers to the act of building a name for yourself in the community and it is not as focussed as PPC and other forms of advertising.
I'm back from break btw and will be posting a lot more :)
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posted on 01-06-2007 by bwb
Coupons are a great way to increase signups and to get people to try your services who would others wise be wary. A 30 day money back guarantee just doesn't give people the same feeling as getting the first month free so that if they do cancel they don't have to go through the trouble of getting a refund. Also it is a good idea to avoid fraud signups by still requiring credit card info that you can use for verification. Read the WHT thread on using promo codes to promote your hosting here. Great discussion going!
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posted on 01-04-2007 by bwb
2007 is going to be a very busy year for this site! I am going to change the news towards a blog format, make it slightly more personal, and start some weekly features such as marketing tips for hosts, customer service tips, and other weekly focuses that will help everyone! We are also going to test the waters with some case studies that will hopefully help hosting companies get a better idea of what works when designing a landing page or using video/voice on landing pages. The backend code will get a nice revision to add some new features and make a few things easier.
We have a lot of ideas on adding a few things like a section for reviews of hosting companies offer dedicated servers / reseller plans but we haven't decided anything final yet. Or something like a hiring / help wanted section. I think for a message board we will just stick to WHT as they have a great community.
If you have any suggestions please email me and add in resellerguide to the subject line :)! I'll be back writing full time Jan 14th after a much needed vacation. When I get back I'll try to get up the free hosting template section as we have about 10 hosting company templates for people to use.
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