1. Reseller Account Set-up
Q: How much do I pay to become a reseller?
Q: When will my account become active?
Q: Is your free reseller program intended for people with special skills?
Q: What do I need to do to become a reseller?
Q: What is required from me to become a successful free reseller?
Q: I cannot sign up because I receive a 'Reseller exists' error message. What should I do?
2. Reseller Control Panel
Q: Is the Reseller Control Panel easy to work with?
Q: What is the mechanism of reselling your services in a nutshell?
3. Hosting Store Set-up
Q: How long does it take for my reseller store to be set up?
Q: How do I set up my reseller store?
Q: How do I set up my web hosting offering?
Q: Do you offer advanced reseller store set-up options?
Q: How many reseller stores can I have?
Q: Can I create my own web hosting packages?
Q: Can I break the pre-defined packages that you offer into pieces and resell them to my customers?
Q: Can I disable certain services for my customers?
4. Reseller Commissions
Q: Could you give me an example of how the reseller commissions are formed?
Q: How do I receive my reseller commissions?
Q: Which payment method can I receive my commissions through?
Q: Is there a bottom release level for my commissions?
Q: What currency can I receive my commissions in?
Q: Do I receive only one commission per single client?
Q: How long will I receive commissions?
5. Domain Names
Q: Do I need to have a domain name for my website?
Q: Can I use a domain name instead of the web address you have given me?
Q: I have a domain name of my own. How can I use it with my reseller website?
Q: Will my domain name become active immediately after I add it to my reseller account?
Q: Do I have to pay for hosting my domain with the reseller account or for using the e-mail address?
Q: I do not have a domain name. How can I get one and how much will it cost me?
Q: Why can't I purchase one of the domain names that you offer for $6.00? Why should I pay $9.00 for a domain name?
6. Sales&Marketing
Q: How many clients can I sign up under a single reseller account?
Q: How do I understand that a sale has been made through my store?
Q: Where will my customers’ accounts be hosted?
Q: Can I purchase a web hosting account at a wholesale price for my own purposes?
Q: How can I popularise my reseller store?
Q: How much do I pay to become a reseller?
A: Becoming a reseller is absolutely FREE. You sign up for FREE, get a FREE account and set it up for FREE. You will have to pay only in case you want to register a domain name for your reseller website.
Q: When will my account become active?
A: Your account will become active as soon as you submit the signup form. You will receive all the necessary account set-up instructions in your e-mail address.
Q: Is your free reseller program intended for people with special skills?
A: Not at all! Our free reseller hosting program is designed for all of you who wish to win some extra money while dealing with your normal daily activities i.e. going to work, staying at home in front of the TV, hanging out with friends, studying, sleeping, etc. No matter whether you are a busy student or a work-engulfed businessman, you can freely take advantage of our free reseller program and bring a steady stream of residual income to your wallet.
Q: What do I need to do to become a reseller?
A: All you need to do is just fill out the signup form and you’ll become a member of our growing reseller hosting community absolutely free of charge. As soon as you submit your signup form you will gain access to a secured Reseller Hosting Control Panel of your own, offering centralized management of your private brand reseller hosting business through a variety of easy-to-use options.
Q: What is required from me to become a successful free reseller?
A: The most important thing is your enthusiasm and some marketing efforts to popularize your web hosting offering. Don’t worry if you do not possess any marketing skills or experience. As a valued reseller of ours you’ll be given some important tips for making a successful breakthrough on the global web hosting market and for attracting a reliable clientele.
Q: I cannot sign up because I receive a 'Reseller exists' error message. What should I do?
A: The reseller username you have entered has already been taken. Please try again with another username (using lower case letters only) and if the problem persists, contact the support team and send them your signup information, so that they could clarify the problem and sign you up.
Q: Is the Reseller Control Panel easy to work with?
A: Yes. Over the years we have tried our best to make the Reseller Control Panel as easy to use as possible by following the recommendations of our reseller community. It is fully automated and makes every single change to your store settings effective within seconds. After having defined your overall offering set-up you will be able to apply real-time changes to every single setting if you find it inappropriate for some reason. For your extreme convenience, we have implemented a Quick Controls wizard, which will enable you to set up the basics of your reseller presence in a few quick clicks.
Q: What is the mechanism of reselling your services in a nutshell?
A: It is simple indeed. Choose the design of your store and the hosting plans you will be offering (pre-defined or defined by you). You define the retail pricing of the separate services on the basis of our wholesale pricing. As soon as your customers begin to order through your store, you will start collecting your reseller profit, which will be sent to you in the form of monthly commissions.
Q: How long does it take for my reseller store to be set up?
A: Practically, you can set up your account and reseller store in maximum 2 minutes.
Q: How do I set up my reseller store?
A: Basically, you need to pass through a few quick store set-up steps, which will help you to easily build your unique reseller presence. First off, you should choose the name of your store and a brand name your customers will recognize you by amidst the variety of hosting resellers online. Then you should define your reseller storefront by choosing from a variety of FREE turnkey templates that we offer and by customizing their default layout parameters. Most of our advanced templates support various colour schemes, page section arrangements, options for promoting certain services, etc. You can also upload your own content (image, flash, html) in the header and footer sections of your template and supply details of your company.
Q: How do I set up my web hosting offering?
A: It’s a question of a few quick clicks. In your Reseller Control Panel you will find a section dedicated to the hosting and domain name services we empower you to offer to your customers. Simply select the exact services that you wish to offer on your store (web hosting plans, domain name TLDs, upgrades) and set their monthly/annual pricing. You can offer highly competitive pre-defined plans and create your own ones tailored to your customers’ exact needs.
Q: Do you offer advanced reseller store set-up options?
A: Yes, we offer you great flexibility as far as the set-up of your reseller store is concerned. Apart from our ready-made reseller templates, you will have the option to combine your uniquely designed store with our billing and domain search systems through the Remote Forms (Order form and Domain Search forms). Through the Reseller API – a more advanced store set-up control option - you can go even further. By using its rich set of management functions, you will be able to set up a highly effective communication environment between your custom store and our system. The result will be a fully customized reseller store with a custom order form of your own, which can use a billing system of both your and our own, whereas the offering can be controlled from your Reseller Control Panel.
Q: How many reseller stores can I have?
A: You can have a total of 4 reseller stores that are totally independent from each other in terms of sales/marketing settings within one reseller account. Each store can have its own unique design, a separate selection of web hosting plans and domain name TLDs, its own currency, etc. Having more than one reseller store will allow you to reach the bottom commission payment level much faster than if you are running only one store, thanks to the centralized management of your reseller commissions.
Q: Can I create my own web hosting packages?
A: Sure, you can. We have developed a web hosting plan builder, named Liquid Plan Builder, through which you can set up packages tailored to the requirements and demands of your target clientele in seconds. Offering your clients what they exactly need will make you very competitive on the web hosting market.
Q: Can I break the pre-defined packages that you offer into pieces and resell them to my customers?
A: No, the pre-defined packages that we entitle you to resell to your clients are offered on an AS-IS basis, i.e. the various plan types (Business, Corporate, Enterprise) are offered as separate products and when purchasing any of the plans your clients receive all the features specified in the particular plan configuration.
Q: Can I disable certain services for my customers?
A: Yes, we give you the possibility to define the level of access your customers will have to most of the upgrade/renew services in their existing accounts. You will be able to disable the whole Upgrades section in their Control Panel or just particular upgrade services such as Change Plan, Renew Plan, etc. Moreover, it is possible that you apply these changes only to a particular plan type if necessary.
Q: Could you give me an example of how the reseller commissions are formed?
A: The reseller commission is formed by extracting the difference between the retail price (yours) and the wholesale price (ours) of all the services you have sold to your clients within the period of one month. For example, if you sell the Business plan (wholesale $40.00) for $100.00/year, you will make $60.00 each time a customer buys the Business plan from your reseller store. Every single Business plan purchase will add $60.00 to your commission balance and the total of all “such differences” between the retail and wholesale price of the sold services will form your monthly commission.
Q: How do I receive my reseller commissions?
A: We send you your reseller commission via a payment method of your choice at the beginning of each month. As soon as the commission release procedure starts, we publish an official notification on our website, specifying when exactly you could expect to receive your profit.
Q: Which payment method can I receive my commissions through?
A: We give you the possibility to choose between three standard payment methods – payment check, PayPal and bank wire, and one specific method – your reseller wallet. If you choose to receive your profit through your wallet, you will be able to use the funds for purchasing services from your reseller account without having to pass through the regular payment procedure. The payment method can be changed if necessary.
Q: Is there a bottom release level for my commissions?
A: Yes, there is a bottom release level, whose value depends on the commission payment method you have selected. The minimum amount for payments through paper check, PayPal and wallet is $50.00 USD, while through a bank wire it is $500.00 USD.
Q: What currency can I receive my commissions in?
A: You can choose to receive your commissions in any of the following currencies – USD, CAD, AUD, GBP, EUR. The currency of your commission can be changed and can be different from the currency of your store if necessary.
Q: Do I receive only one commission per single client?
A: You will receive a commission each time a client of yours makes a payment, regardless of whether it is a hosting account renewal payment or an account upgrade order.
Q: How long will I receive commissions?
A: As long as your clients use our services - you will receive commissions from us based on the payments they make through your store.
Q: Do I need to have a domain name for my website?
A: No, it is not obligatory. With the set-up of each reseller store you are provided with a web address (store URL), which you can access by visiting the ‘List All Stores’ section of the Reseller Control Panel (section Store).
Q: Can I use a domain name instead of the web address you have given me?
A: Yes, you can use a domain name that you already own or purchase a new one using the "Domain Manager" menu. We offer a wide variety of domain name extensions (TLDs) that you can choose from.
Q: I have a domain name of my own. How can I use it with my reseller website?
A: Sure, you can. If you have an existing domain name registered somewhere else and wish to use it for your store you have two basic options – to transfer the domain over to our registrar so that you could manage its registration settings from your Reseller Control Panel, or only to host it with us for free, by changing its name servers (DNS).
Q: Will my domain name become active immediately after I add it to my reseller account?
A: No, it will become active as soon as the name servers (DNS) get updated. This update usually takes up to 24 hours after the DNS change request has been received.
Q: Do I have to pay for hosting my domain with the reseller account or for using the e-mail address?
A: No. You can use these services for FREE.
Q: I do not have a domain name. How can I get one and how much will it cost me?
A: You can purchase a domain name from the Domain Manager section. The yearly price of a domain name is dependent on the domain TLD you select to register/transfer. All prices are discounted and are valid as such for our resellers only.
Q: Why can't I purchase one of the domain names that you offer for $6.00? Why should I pay $9.00 for a domain name?
A: The $6.00 price is valid only if the domain name is ordered together with a web hosting plan. That is why the price is so low. You can register domain names for your own needs at a yearly price of $9.00 only.
Q: How many clients can I sign up under a single reseller account?
A: You can sign up an unlimited number of clients under a single reseller account.
Q: How do I understand that a sale has been made through my store?
A: We send you two instant e-mail notifications as soon as a customer of yours purchases a new or renews an existing service. These notifications actually represent a copy of the invoice that your customer receives and a reseller invoice containing the wholesale price of the services. Copies of these invoices can also be found in the Invoice Manager of your Reseller Control Panel.
Q: Where will my customers’ accounts be hosted?
A: We are working with two major data centers, located in two opposite parts of the world: Peer 1 - in Fremont, California, USA; and Bluesquare - in Maidenhead, Berkshire, UK. Your customers can choose where to host their websites and you can specify the data center that will be selected by default on your store’s order form.
Q: Can I purchase a web hosting account at a wholesale price for my own purposes?
A: Yes, you can purchase as many web hosting accounts as you wish at a great discount from your Reseller Control Panel. You can use them to create your uniquely designed stores or simply ‘hand’ them to customers whom you prefer to charge manually.
Q: How can I popularise my reseller store?
A: There is a multitude of website promotion techniques that you can use to better market your reseller store offerings and increase your brand awareness among potential and existing customers. You may decide to adopt any of these promotion strategies alone, but for maximum results we highly recommend that you make use of all of them. Some can work better than others, but if developed correctly, all of them will produce results that will be worth your efforts!
Submit your website to many and popular Internet directories
Web directories are extensive portal websites that list submitted website URLs by theme/topic. The links submitted to a web directory are gathered, reviewed and arranged in a particular order by people. Dmoz ODP (Open Directory Project) and Yahoo are considered as the best and most popular human-edited directories on the World Wide Web, and therefore they rank as the first most widely trusted and relied on traffic sources. Since these directories receive thousands of submissions every day, it's very often quite difficult to get into their listings. It may take around 4 - 6 months until your URL gets reviewed and listed.
Alternatively you can choose to use the paid listing support Yahoo offers for faster results. All other link submissions are absolutely free of charge.
The general practice shows that it's much better if you post your website's link into as many free directories as possible, without omitting the two most popular Internet directories mentioned above. They can generate for you significant amounts of traffic and positively affect your ranking in all search engines. Submitting your website's URL to Internet directories is very easy, doesn't require much effort at all, so do not hesitate to kick this marketing strategy now and list widely your website link as soon as possible!
Use appropriate keywords in your meta tags
People explore the Internet primarily searching for things or information. To start their search they usually input words that explain best their query. Your task here is to implement exactly these keywords in your meta tags and content (if you have custom design store), so that your website gets good position (high ranking) in the search results. You can use the Google keyword tool for discovering the best keywords for your web store. The better ranking you get in the search engines, the higher chances you have of people clicking on your website URL and visiting your web store. To add custom keywords to your template based reseller store, please visit the Metatags section of your Reseller Control Panel.
Make link exchange deals with similar websites
Reciprocal links are one of the most common and effective forms of website promotion. In addition to sending you visitors, reciprocal links also increase your link popularity and help your site rank better in the search engines. Before making a link exchange deal, you should first find a good partnering website. A good partner has website content that attracts the same type of visitors as your website. To make a successful link exchange deal, the exchanging websites need to be similar enough, yet different, so that they don't compete ineffectively with each other. In your case, you will get best results if you create reciprocal linking with a website offering web hosting services with different plan configurations than your web store's, or even better - with a web design store.
After you've found a suitable link exchange partner, you need to contact the webmasters of the website, informing them that you run a site with similar topics, and that you are interested in making a link exchanging deal between the two websites. You should first post the link of the partner's website onto your web store, then inform the other website of the posting and send them the URL to review their promotion. Finally - simply ask them to return the favour by linking back to your website. If you never get a reply of this particular website, or your proposal gets a refusal, do not give up this promotion method, but invest more search efforts to find the right partner.
Now, after you've made your deal, make sure that both sides keep their promise - neither of the websites is allowed to remove the partner link from without contacting first the webmaster, so better check every now and then the website of your partner to make sure they're keeping their part of the deal. If you notice some incorrect actions, better contact them immediately and kindly ask for explanation. In the case their explanation isn't satisfactory enough for you, you are allowed on your side to also remove their linking and simply look for other partner.
All our turn-key website templates feature a 'Menu Links' section, where you can specify up to 3 outgoing links for your link exchange campaigns.
Post in Blogs/Forums
Find popular blogs or forums closely related to the web hosting business area and post relevant comments on as many of them as you can. Remember that quality blogs/forums do not tolerate spamming activities, so make sure to substantiate your postings with adequate comments, cleverly including a link to your web store in appropriate place of the comments or in the signature.
Submit/comment on articles
Search for highly ranked article submission websites and post informative reviews about your web hosting company. Try to find also some good ranked articles and see if they will allow you to share your views on the topics discussed and send comments on the article. If you are able to, you will get free back links from them, since most will ask for your website's URL when you are submitting the contents of your posting. Once your comments appear on the articles website, your URL will automatically be posted and start to lead readers to your web store.
Write newsletter articles
Writing newsletter articles often has amazing results and can send you large amounts of targeted traffic in a short period of time, moreover - for free! All that is required is a little bit of creative thinking, decent writing skills, couple hours of time and a website that would be interested in publishing your work. This promotion technique is especially suited for small business owners with tight marketing budget.
In exchange for allowing your article to be published for free, you will be allowed to place one small ad in the newsletter without any charge. These advertisements are usually located right below the article and are called "resource boxes" or "bylines". A typical resource box contains a piece of information about the author and a link to his/her website.
After you decide to start writing articles, the first step would be to choose a topic you would be interested to write about and find newsletters that are dedicated to the theme of your topic. Try to find between 10 and 20 medium/large newsletters, arrange them into a list based on how many subscribers they have, and then send your article to the first newsletter on the list. You should better wait for a response at least couple of days before sending your article to the next one. Mind that if you send your article to a few newsletters at the same time and this results in simultaneous publishing of your material in two or more large ezines, this will surely discredit you as an author and discard any further submissions of your articles to those sites.
Start using E-mail signatures.
They might not immediately bring thousands of visitors, but are an irreplaceable way to promote widely your website without having to actually do or pay anything.
Now just think about it. How does it sound if people used to handing out their business cards to nearly everyone they meet, sign their E-mail messages with merely their name. Now that's a waste of valuable resources, isn't it? Instead of just signing with your name, why not include a full-scale E-mail signature at the bottom of your messages? Since you're going to send out those E-mails anyway, why not turn them into a traffic generator by using a good signature. How can I do that, you are asking ...
Before you design your signature, think about what kind of people you usually exchange E-mails with. If they are too diverse, consider first your main targeted group of recipients. Then try to figure out what these people are fond of or would expect from your company. Would it be better to use powerful keywords in your signature, such as FREE or NOW related to your web hosting offerings, or stick to a strictly formal version that contains only the name of your website and its Internet address? It's only up to you to decide. If you feel unsure with what's your optimal marketing strategy, you might be better off with a more formal style instead of a marketing type. Since a signature is something that will clearly represent your company in the eyes of all e-mail recipients, you should be more than careful not to damage your high reputation with a signature that the recipients may find to be unprofessional or tasteless.
Banner Advertising
It works, but only when well figured out! Banner ads are usually annoying to the visitors of any website. A well placed banner ad, however, on a website which has content relevant with your web hosting business area, is much more likely to attract visitors to your website than a banner ad placed at random.
The main purpose of your banner is to get people to click on it. So the better it looks like, the higher are the chances that it would catch the eyes of potential visitors interested in your website. Do not strive however to achieve the most sophisticated design for your banner, just make it user-friendly and appealing to the customers! That's all you need to do to get a good click-through ratio, which is actually what you are aiming at.
Your message should be very brief and right to the point. You will have no more than a sentence to persuade the viewer to visit your website. Make sure to use immediately engaging phrases to intrigue the viewer to quickly visit your website. Use a noticeable font size to attract their attention and clarify a valuable reason why the viewer should click on your banner. Use for example eye-catchers, such as 'FREE domain name', FREE scripts installer', or 'FREE website builder' to make the viewer immediately click on the banner and visit your store to find out how to get these hot freebies.
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We wish you good luck now! If you notice that there are some things you have already done, feel free to simply skip over them. Promoting your site may take a considerable period of time until you achieve satisfactory results, however do your best, and if you need further consultation, do not hesitate to contact our knowledgeable ResellersPanel team.
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