Whats the best way to get your reselling business off the ground?

I've been running for over 4 months now, and I have 1 customer that pays me $1.50 (of which paypal get about 35C). The customer also hasn't paid me for last month yet...


Using search engines seems useless these days, and even if it was, it seems tricky to find any decent ones.


Anyone have any ideas?

I used addme.com
and
ineedhits.com

and I've had nothing since.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

To get our company up and running (and making a profit) we invested heavily in pay per click and magazine advertising. It was a big gamble, but paid off.

After a few months of making a heavy loss we are starting to reap the benefits.

http://www.comparewebresellers.com

Putting your site in Web Hostin Directories is more effective then just Search Engines.

Offer to host a high traffic site for free.. We have got over 500 customers from 1 heavy traffic site alone.. (Yes, just 1)

Hello
Here is how I did it.

$300 initial investment.
Bought a reseller plan
Sold annual plans to produce positive cash flow.
Invested that money ina dedicated server which reduced costs.
Sold annual plans to cover set up costs on dedicated server.
Started making reasonable profit.
Invested in PPC and other advertising.
Budgeted to spend a certain amount of money per month on advertising and keep it consistent.

The business has always been in profit and has no debt.
I would recommend not spending money you do not have.
Promotion is getting more and more expensive as the market becomes saturated with smaller players.

Gordon

Whats the link toy our site Turboz?

Im not sucking up here but the best form of advertising for my site seems to have been WHT, mainly from my signature i guess and posts i have made. I have finally got my site on the search engines which is always good!
Word of mouth is the best form of advertising but of course you need some customers first :)

if you're offerring site design as well as hosting, hire commissioned sales people.

I'm in the Philadelphia area so there are lots of businesses looking for sites and lots of independant sales people willing to sell them on commission.

If you act as the project manager, you can outsource the work to developers and designers.

This model would have to be adapted to selling Virtual Hosting accounts.

My advice would be to team up with a web site designer and start making phone calls out of your local phone book.

! JC

Originally posted by tazd9t9
Im not sucking up here but the best form of advertising for my site seems to have been WHT, mainly from my signature i guess and posts i have made. I have finally got my site on the search engines which is always good!
Word of mouth is the best form of advertising but of course you need some customers first :)

I agree. I 've designing sites for five years now, and got into reselling mostly as a service for my design clients (so they wouldn't have to go hunt down a host on their own). As a newbie I used hosting directories, which were not that helpful. At the time most of them were saying ***** was the second coming or something, which I knew from first hand experience to be total BS.
I find that lurking on message boards and news groups is really a better way to go.

Cheers!

You could start by placing you URL in your signature when you post on boards, free advertising!

Depends how many customers you need to recruit.
I have a wife, three kids and a leased line to support :)
So advertising is the only reliable way to keep all that going.

Gordon

Well I guess different people have different formulas.
One thing I know is you cant just buy a reseller account, design a site and just sit back.

I did not submit my site with webhosting directory nor is my site listed in any search engines.

I did it the offline way.
One good thing to do is to print out lots of namecards and start giving people those cards, it is good not to discriminate.
Give the butcher next door your namecard, who know when he wanna promote his porks and beef business online.

Another great tip is to partner up !!!
One of my greatest partner is a print company.
The owner is a good friend of mine. We just started talking about a parnership and agreement and BANG, he started marketing my business to his client base ranging from small shops to MNCs.
Well one tihng is I offered him a great commission scheme which make things more yummy for him too.

Well I can go on and on but maybe you can start on these 2 and I belief you should be doing well soon.
Hope the advise helps.

Hi again Gang!

Thanks for all your help and advice.

I was actually thinking of advertising the offline way because using search engines seems almost impossible these days.

I do agree with a lot of the comments that you've posted, and I am taking it all in.

If anyone has any more ideas, I'm open to hearing them.