I started a webhosting business this weekend and this is how I did it.

Why Start A Webhosting Business?

You might manage websites for friends and local clients or sell websites.  When you own your own webhosting company you can have them login and manage their site by themselves and also get premade programs to collect money every month from them.

To make money.

Also, when Selling a website you can place the website on a new webhosting account at your webhost and have the buyer login and move the site or give them a free length of time to keep the site hosted there after the sale (bonus!).

There are many other reasons to start a webhost, however this post is for those that want a small time webhosting business where they don’t want to manage their own hardware,etc. but do want the front of a webhosting company for their clients.

What Will The WebHosting Company’s End Result Look Like?

The end goal is to have a site like yourhost.com where people will go to, they will sign up for a webhosting plan, the site will take their money, it will email them some nameservers like ns1.yoursite.com and then after they set their domains nameservers to yourhost.com then they will be hosted with you;)

How Do I Set Up My Own WebHosting Company?

Setting up your webhosting company is a 2 step process:

1.  You need someone to do the webhosting/serving of the files for you (a reseller)

2.  You need some software to take the money and setup the new accounts on your server

Let’s discuss:

Your Server Or WebHosting Of The Files

You need to purchase a reseller account somewhere that where the files will physically go.  I used Hostgator.  Their reseller account was only $25 per month when I joined and they had everything I needed plus pretty quick support ticket answering.

$25 sounds like a bunch for regular webhosting but this isn’t regular webhosting, it’s RESELLER webhosting that allows you to start your own host ;)

Besides, if you charge your clients $14.95 per month, you only need 2 clients and you are in Profit :)

Your Software To Set Things Up And Take Money

The software I used was WHMCS. Basically whmcs is the software that makes you look like your own webhosting company to the customer.

WHMCS will cost you money to use but fortunately it’s FREE if you sign up with Hostgator.

After you signup with Hostgator for your hosting go to this special link whmcs.com/hostgator on their site and you will get a free license.

All of the decent web hosting softwares cost a pretty penny so be sure to visit that link only after you sign up for hosting (they verify your domain is registered with Hostgator)

How To Setup Your Hostgator Info

Setting up your Hostgator to be the reseller or to webhost your web hosting company’s files is real simple.

After you join with them just go to yourdomain.com/chm and add a new package (like the number of domains allowed, number of subdomains allowed, etc), put your domain under this new package, and that’s it ;) For more help just write support there, they are real helpful.

NOTE: Even though Hostgator is doing the webhosting for you, the customer will never know, your frontend is handled by the whmcs software ;) Kinda like outsourcing.

How To Setup Your WHMCS Software

After you have your webhosting setup go to WHMCS.com and login and then go to the license tab and you will find your free license and also the download links.

Upload whmcs to your domain and follow the install instructions.

The “configuration” was the hardest part for me. Basically you need to go down every link under the “configuration” tab and pick your preferences. They are unique to each person’s webhosting company so i can’t help you much but here are a few notes that helped me.

Note 1: After installation you can find the customer area here: /whmcs/index.php

Note 2: You need to make you own homepage with your webhosting offers and then Integrate your pages with wchms. For instance you make a page that says “buy this package” and the link will go to a whmcs page on your site. These links can be found in the “Links Integration” part of whmcs.

Note 3: To automatically have your new hosting customers accounts magically and hiddenly setup on your Hostgator account you need to first create a product and then under the “modules” tab on the product page you choose “cpanel” and then enter the “package name” that you created from earlier. I looked for this step forever and then everything was peachy.

That’s It

After you signup with a Hostgator reseller account, then install and configure whmcs, you just need to put your own graphics and “look” together and you are on your way.

Instead of your friends and clients getting free webhosting from you can now put them on your “webhost” and have it do the billing for you.

The process is a bit technical but not impossible. I setup my host over this weekend. You pay for support so use it! Don’t hesitate to send support tickets before you get frustrated and good luck ;)

PPC is something I never could win at.  It’s incredibly easy to understand, you buy some traffic and hope it converts paying more than you paid for the traffic.

However, I would spend and spend and I always ended up earning less than I spent, I was always losing money.

I reckon eventually i would have found some profitable campaigns, however my budget and nerve couldn’t stand losing money to get there.

Finally something is working for me though, here is what it is:

Use natural search data to create your PPC campaigns.

and

Here’s How I Do It

1. Take your affiliate merchants that are converting for you or making you money (through free traffic).

2.  Get your past month’s earnings and how many clicks you sent them.

3.  Divide the earnings by the clicks to get your earnings per click.  Example: If you sent a merchant 4700 clicks last month and earned $460 then divide 460/4700 which equals = .098 or roughly .10 cents per click you earn for every visitor you send that merchant.

4.  Go into your stats program for that website, cpanel or google analytics or whatever, grab all the keywords for the past month. You will use these in your adwords campaign.

5.  Create a google adwords campaign, use your bid amount as Half of what you found in step three.  In step three we found .10 cents per click so our bids will be .05.

6.  Set your keywords to EXACT match and Content Network only.

Notes

1.  If you don’t have thousands of clicks sent to a merchant to get your original data a few hundred will work, but anything less and you should find more data elsewhere.

2.  Clicks may be difficult to come by using exact match plus you are bidding low however when they do come the should make you money ;)

3.  It won’t make you rich but it’s a start.  It  may or may not work for you.  However, even if you can only get a $1 spend per campaign daily and it makes $4 per day in earnings consistently then just keep doing that and not only will you have a handful of successful campaigns you will be making money ;)

It worked for me.  There are a million and one pieces of advice about doing PPC out there, just thought I would share mine to maybe spark some ideas on your end.

Update After an email discussion with Jay Geiger I thought I should add that I send the clicks directly to the merchants product page for they keywords I’m bidding on. If I bid on “purple socks” then I send the visitors to the merchants “purple socks” page.

The following is a suggested post about a free clickbank tool.  Want your tool or site featured?  Contact me and tell me why it’s great.
Christian writes about CB-Intelligence (free):

I've been developing a
FREE tool for all Clickbank members (CB-Intelligence),
that can save them a lot of time when checking out the
performance of their products or the performance of
their affiliates.

They can check sales, refunds, chargebacks, rebills for
each product, also the overall account status and can
even track the performance of a specific campaign
(performance of products within a time frame).

All this happens LIVE - in an instant. Users simply
need to upload their transactions' CSV file (which
can be downloaded from their Clickbank account).

Here are a couple screenshots from the video (which desperately needs some sound, any sound):

I didn’t get to test the tool, my low volume clickbank stats wouldn’t make it worth it, but I bookmarked for when things picked up.

And as usual for every free tool there is a paid tool but with a few more bells and whistles, for cb stats it’s Clickbank Accountant.

What Are Social Bookmarking Sites And Tools?

Social bookmark sites are where you can save and share your favorite websites/bookmarks on the web.

Social bookmarking tools help you post your favorite sites to multiple bookmarking sites at once.

Why Use Social Bookmarking Tools?

The most obvious reason to use bookmarking tools is so you don’t have to go to multiple sites to upload your favorite sites. By using the bookmarking tool you can avoid visiting multiple sites and just use one.

Other reasons to use bookmarking tools are when you want your links to be seen by as many people as possible, help with getting sites indexed, and more.

What Are The Best Social Bookmarking Tools?

One of the more popular bookmarking tools was onlywire, however they went to some lame pay/link to us scheme this weekend with no additional features added so forget about them, there are others that off the great service without the headache.

Here are three to try:

Bookmarking Demon - A paid software for social bookmarking. The benefit of a paid over free option is they try and automatically setup all the social site accounts for you saving you googles of time.

Social Poster: “you can easily submit the whole site to up to 160 social and bookmark sites at once!”

SocialMarker: “It can help you spread a link on 48 of the best social bookmarking sites in under 15 minutes!”

The following video is from one of the creators of the Msn Loophole which is currently the top digital product in a few clickbank categories.

In the video Chris Rempel takes you behind the scenes of his clickbank account and shows exactly how it’s a myth that big lists are better than small lists.

In summary: the affiliate who sends him a couple hundred visitors makes more sales than an affiliate that sends him quadruple the visitors.  Enjoy:

Read the comments on the video here.

Makes you wonder why people are pushing subscriber tactics that annoy visitors to get the subscriber count up without any mention of the intentions of having a higher number other than the sake of having a high subscriber count.

(ironically the salespage mentioned above does not use entry popups, are bloggers getting more annoying than some sales/pitch pages lol?)

How Do You Get A Responsive List With A Smaller List?

Intent when signing up is a big part of what a list will do later. I’m newer to email marketing but the lists I’ve built where people want information on buying things or they are already proven buyers work much better for me than just pumping up list numbers for no apparent reason.

For an example, instead of starting a generic newsletter on “scrapbooking”, try a scrapbooking newsletter for people who want the “best scrapbooking deals of the week”, or “weekly scrapbooking coupons” and see what list buys more ;)

Create a list of buyers and they will buy ;)