A few weeks ago, Jeremy wrote an excellent article concerning Black Friday and why it’s important to consider all the cloud has to offer for managing such a busy holiday. Remember that? If not, you can (and should!) give yourself a little refresher course, here. Now, to establish the obvious, Black Friday is a high-traffic “holiday”. The same thing goes for Cyber Monday. However, these days, this might be little more than the result of heavy marketing campaigns and layers upon layers of hype that have accumulated around it over the years. We recently stumbled over some intriguing statistics that The Wall Street Journal dug up. For those of you hardcore deal-seekers who may be tuning in–you should probably consider sitting down for this.

Did you know that Black Friday may not always be your best bet for finding the absolute lowest price or steepest discount? It was hard for us to believe, too! There’s always such a craze leading up to and—of course—on Black Friday; from the lines wrapping around entire city blocks, to the blinking, coffee-slugging early-birds maniacally refreshing retail sites. However, according to the aforementioned study conducted by The Wall Street Journal and Decide, Inc., all of this effort (and, well, misery) might not be monetarily worth it in the end.

Interestingly, it seems that major retailers are pumping up marketing campaigns surrounding their more extreme deals, while inflating the price of other items to avoid a diminution of profits. Therefore, let’s say you want a specific TV, and see that it’s absurdly marked down at a specific store. Go for it! You wait in those lines, hurdle those human beings, and get that TV by any means necessary! However, if you’re shopping in general or looking for something that has a significantly reduced demand post-holidays, you might want to just hang out for a week or so. Or, you know what? Be a go-getter! Create your own shopping holiday and have a “Super Saturday” a few weeks early, or something.

Before you give yourself a head-slap for time spent in the calamity of Black Fridays past, rest assured that Black Friday does offer some outrageous deals and you absolutely will and have saved yourself a good chunk of cash. Our point is, a lot of expert deal-hunters might be looking for bargains on days that aren’t Black Friday, and you’ll see high traffic spikes then, too. So, although you definitely need to consider Jeremy’s advice for Black Friday because of the less-informed masses who will virtually stampede through your virtual doors, you might ALSO want to do some research and apply it here and there at other times throughout the year. That way, you won’t be unprepared for the hordes of shoppers who have really done their homework.

Take a look at this graphic we pulled from Decide, Inc., and mull it over. Happy Autumn (and happy shopping!) from TurnKey Internet.

Howdy-do, TurnKey Lovers?

A couple of weeks ago, my co-worker, Joe Schoonbeck, came up with a brilliant idea for a post. He suggested we write up a quick “How-To” on some of the essentials you need to begin a hosting business. What a simple, yet profound idea. If I had a dime every time we received questions about how to set up hosting, I would be able to buy a triple with cheese and a large fry from Wendy’s. Enough of this talk about food; let’s get down to business.

Now, this list of ideas is by no means set in stone. These are just a few steps that I believe will give you a good foundation to build your business upon.

 
Step 1 – Decide and Buy

This may seem like a no-brainer, but it is important to determine which type of reseller account suits your needs. Unlike spandex, one size does not fit all. You see, at TurnKey Internet, we sell different types of reseller accounts: alpha, master, and WHM (web host manager).

Each reseller account has its pros and cons, but we’ll leave that for another article. For this entry into the TurnKey diary, let’s just keep it very high-level. Alpha accounts can resell Master accounts and WHM accounts, while Master accounts can only resell WHM accounts. Then, the poor, old WHM accounts can only resell cPanel accounts. This allows you to resell multiple accounts on your website.

Once you decide which account is best for you, purchase it.

Step 2 – Create

I had an intense, internal debate about step 2. Initially, I was thinking about skipping right to Step 3 (configuring your DNS), but it didn’t make sense to me to get into that if you have no site to share with the world.

You can take multiple steps in setting up your website, so I will be brief. You can use TurnKey’s website builder that is included in our reseller packages. Or, maybe you have a developer who creates fantastic websites in his/her sleep. The choices are limitless on this step.

Step 3 – Setup (Part I: Your DNS)

For the sake of this article, I’m going to assume you do not know what DNS is. I’m going to instead share how I teach what DNS (domain name system) is to our newbie engineers. You see, I compare DNS to a post office system. You have your streets and your addresses, which allow people to find your place of residence. That’s what DNS is, in a nut shell.

You have your website, and in order for others to see your masterpiece, you must first tell them where it is. You do this with your DNS. You have your DNS record, which contains your website’s IP address and your nameservers. Your IP address is essentially like the number on your mailbox. Your nameserver(s) would be the street(s) on which your house resides. You have to setup your DNS in order for others to visit your site.

Step 4 – Configure

Now that you have your site online and users purchasing hosting from you, they will inevitably need support. This could be with anything, from support for setting up your clients’ websites, to adding space to their account.

You will need some point of communication that you can use to speak with your clients. Our TurnKey reseller accounts each come with free helpdesk software included, which you can white label in your company’s name. This allows you to have a way for your customers to easily and efficiently submit tickets.

Step 5 – Setup (Part II: Extras)

When I say “setup extras”, these are items that can add increased functionality to your hosting company. While this step can be rather large, we will just stick to a few of the basics.

If you’re selling anything on your site, you will need to install an SSL certificate. This basically encrypts your users’ connections when they submit orders to your company. I would say this is just as important as your website. If you don’t happen to have an SSL certificate lying around, you can request a FREE SSL with your TurnKey reseller account. If you’re going to be accepting orders, you may need a billing system that can help keep those orders in line. Enter—one of our most popular free extras—a free WHMCS license.

 
Now, there are no exact steps, but these can give you a good foundation for beginning your hosting account career.

Until next time, Turnkey Lovers!

Howdy-do, Turnkey Lovers?

You know, I haven’t spoken with you guys and ladies in quite some time. It’s been too long, and I just wanted to write a post for you. Today, one of my favorite musicians’ latest album came out, and it got me thinking — thinking about what some people consider to be the American Dream.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the story; some lady or gent claws their way from the bottom to the top. It could be figuratively or literally. It could be coming to this country and opening up a chain of gas stations, or coming to this country and opening a chain of hosting companies. While all of that is fine and dandy, I wanted to share with you, Turnkey Internet lovers, my hosting dream.

Now, this dream is mine and mine alone, but I’ve also gathered a bit of information just from dealing with multiple clients on a daily basis. You see, I believe the hosting dream is very similar to the American Dream. I say this, as I work with hundreds of clients who have this idea that they can start a hosting company.

They purchase a Turnkey reseller account, and set up their site to begin. They may then have a developer, or use one of our website development tools, to build and design their site. Dedicated IPs are purchased, and assigned to domain names that have been recently bought through Turnkey’s domain registration. The customer then sets up the reverse DNS (dynamic naming service) to only be in their domain, after which WHMCS or a similar billing product is purchased or provisioned so that orders can be processed.

Next comes the fun part — marketing this new online business. Maybe you create a hosting account on a credible hosting forum to begin making a name for yourself. You may even create social media accounts on sites such as Twitter or Facebook to develop a following. Sure enough, the day comes that you receive that first customer. The beginning of a long journey has arrived.

Support issues will be raised, and need to be addressed quickly and completely to the customers’ satisfaction. Repeat. Repeat, repeat. You repeat until your customer base grows. Your name is mentioned in forums and in social — and possibly your local (newspaper, television, etc.) — media.

You see, that’s my hosting dream. That anyone can deliver a satisfying product to their customers with the correct tools, ambition, proper networking, support, etc. That anyone can provide top-notch support and superior customer service. That, with all of this, you and your budding hosting company can flourish.

That’s my dream and desire for every customer that approaches Turnkey Internet. My hosting dream is for our company to help your company succeed and thrive.

I just thought I should share that with you, as everyone has to have a dream, right? How could we achieve anything in this life if we never have a dream?

From my hosting dream, to your own.

Until next time, Turnkey lovers!

Today we released the fancy new version of our web conferencing platform, Voxwire Gold, to resellers. This means our customers can now sell Voxwire Gold under their own brand with up to a 50% mark-up in price (read: 50% profit). Voxwire Gold is ENTIRELY brandable, from the platform itself to the instruction manual, training videos and a pre-made website offer page. This is a complete business-in-a-box for the reseller who wants a ready-made SaaS solution to start making profits immediately.

What is So Great about Voxwire Gold?

Voxwire Gold is an impressive piece of work–from it’s flash-based architecture (cross-browser, no downloads) to it’s high-definition video, file sharing, remote desktop control, recording, and seamless integration of documents, presentations and video. Show attendees a streaming video while providing your own simultaneous voice-over. Hold a training webinar to train new employees without having to travel. Teach a class, provide technical support, hold a board meeting, and do it all remotely. Brick-and-mortar establishments charge thousands of dollars for the use of their conference rooms and meeting facilities. Offer that to your customers for $49/month. The value of Voxwire Gold is undeniable for an easy sell, every time.

Web conferencing is a 1.3 billion dollar industry for a reason: it increases efficiency while saving businesses money. This makes it an easy sell for resellers with a huge potential for profit.

A word from our President and CEO Adam Wills:

“We are excited to be able to offer our reseller clients a product in such high demand that can be branded and packaged so easily. We’ve put together a complete package with all the tools a reseller will need to bring this innovative, green-friendly communication platform to market. This is a true ‘turnkey’ product that allows our resellers to start making sales from day one.”

Adam’s right–this product epitomizes our mission here at TurnKey Internet. The entire sales arc can be accomplished in minutes. You can be signed up with your own product and your own branded website immediately. You can make your first sale right away. And there is absolutely no start-up cost, which means there is no risk. Voxwire Gold Reseller Edition comes with a WHMCS billing system plugin, so you can start keeping immaculate customer transaction records automatically. It also comes with a private label control panel for managing clients’ accounts.

The Benefits of Private Branding

This is your business with your name. Just as many large companies resell web hosting under their own company name, you can resell web conferencing under yours. Set up a viable, profitable business with no overhead and creatively brand it with your own company name, logo and brand identity. The company is completely in your hands. You decide who you want to sell to. You decide on your own target demographic. Sell Voxwire Gold to colleagues, friends on a forum you frequent, or to businesses right in your own community. Wherever you see a need for web conferencing, YOU supply the product and YOU make the profit.

Offer a Free Trial

We have lowered the profit barrier even further by providing our resellers with the opportunity to offer their clients 7-day free trials of Voxwire Gold. The service starts at just $20/month for resellers. With a suggested retail value of $49/month, you can more than double your money with each sale. You have complete freedom to raise or lower your prices as you see fit.

Learn more or SIGN UP TODAY!

This month I’ve written a lot about how web conferencing can help you market your company, save money and streamline your business operations. The truth is, web conferencing is an extremely versatile tool for many different aspects of online business, and, if used creatively, it can vastly improve your bottom line. This isn’t just true for marketing and employee meetings, it’s also true for business training, and providing tech support, two significant expenses that are often overlooked when businesses are looking to save money.

Employee Training
Training employees to prepare them for working in your industry can take a lot of time and money, especially if your business is technical or heavily regulated. Many businesses send employees off for weeks of training before they step in the front door. Those businesses are paying travel expenses, they are paying instructors to teach, and they are paying those employees to learn. What if you could pay once, for a series of presentations, and be done with it? With web conferencing, you can.

Hire your experts to create a series of training webinars that cover all of the aspects of your business operations. Record those webinars and link to the recordings from your website. Send new employees the URL and ask them to watch the webinars. When they are finished, host a live meeting with a seasoned employee to answer any questions and go over anything they don’t understand. This will streamline your training process, while providing company information in one place for easy reference. If your business handles sensitive or proprietary information that you can’t post publicly, you can still save money on travel expenses by hosting your training via the conferencing platform rather than in person. By having new employees connect with live video, you can teach them face-to-face, maintaining the in-class atmosphere that promotes attentiveness and focus.

Technical Support
If you have a business that provides technical support, you never have to make another house call with Voxwire Gold. With Voxwire, you can connect to your customer’s computer remotely and take control of their OS, while they watch. This means, you can go in and make changes, demonstrate a software product and show them exactly what you’re doing while you explain it, in real time. You will never again have to verbally walk someone through dialog boxes and login screens while they click on the wrong thing. Taking control means getting things done quickly, efficiently and to your customer’s satisfaction. It will lower your operation costs while making your customers happier. Happy customers bring more customers and help you build your business. Everybody wins.

Search engine optimization is all the rage everywhere you look, and for good reason when traffic equals sales. But optimizing a site for search engines is harder than it sounds, especially if you’re not ready to spend hours and hours learning about how to do it right. Over the past several months, we’ve been asked by clients over and over again how they should configure their hosting to make the most of the search engines. Then, suddenly, it occurred to us: why not set up a hosting plan that is already optimized? So we did.

Today, I am happy to announce SEO Hosting from TurnKey Internet!
Now our clients don’t have to wade through the mountains of conflicting information to get an indexed website with decent traffic. You don’t need to know anything at all about SEO to make the most of these hosting plans. Everything is automated and ready to go from the second you gain access to your account. In addition to a boatload of features which I will get into below, your sites will be hosted on our lightning fast Dell Poweredge R410 servers with 8+ cpu’s and raid 10 disk protection, hosted from our tier-1 New York datacenter. If you don’t know what any of that means, don’t worry: it’s good!

Those days of slaving over tutorials are in the past!
We’ve configured our SEO servers to allow clients to take complete control over their portfolio of websites, while easily managing everything from one location. You will access your account via cPanel, and will have full WHM (web host manager) access. This means you can create an unlimited number of accounts, domain names and web sites each with their own dedicated IP address. This is the key to great SEO!

Dedicated IP Addresses
Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, index sites on dedicated IP addresses as unique properties. This is very important for SEO. It is easy and cheap to set up hundreds of websites on the same IP, and to link them all to each other to try and build up some SEO juice. The search engine hive minds know all about this strategy and, if they weighted those sites that “live” in the same neighborhood (same IP’s) the same as sites on unique IP’s, they’d be sending traffic straight to the people trying to game the system. By privileging unique IP’s, search engines are trying to ensure that sites are naturally indexed, and that that indexing is a result of unique sites hosted by unique people.

For businesses, this is not good news. Building links is one of the most popular and effective methods for driving traffic and, until now, it has been necessary to buy several different expensive hosting accounts with different IP’s to get the proper indexing. Now, that is a thing of the past with TurnKey Internet’s SEO hosting package! We provide unique IP’s all under the same hosting account, so you can set up many different sites that all get indexed as unique properties. This will save you immense amounts of time, effort and money, while ensuring that your sites get privileged by the engines. And, as I mentioned above, you can manage all of these properties from one easy location.

Many Class-C IP Ranges
Not only do you get many different IP addresses with TurnKey SEO Hosting, those addresses are spread over many different class-c blocks. This means that, even if the search engines were to start recognizing IP’s on the same block as “living” in the same neighborhood, your sites would still keep their unique status because they are on different blocks. In the SEO game, so much rests on the whim of the search engines. They can change the rules as they go, and we all have to race to keep up. Keeping your IP’s on separate class-c blocks pre-empts the possibility that the search engines will recognize this sort of SEO hosting and penalize it, protecting you and your properties from the whim of Matt Cutts and his cohorts.

Additional Advanced Web Hosting Features
First and foremost, TurnKey Internet is a web hosting company. We take pride in what we do and in the features and services we offer. Our SEO hosting packages are no different from our other hosting packages in this regard. With each account we offer Fantastico, Softaculous, WHMXtra, RVSiteBuilder Pro, and R1Soft’s continuous data protection backups. These are all built right into your cPanel controls, so you can implement any and all of them as you see fit. We see this SEO hosting package as everything we already have and more.

To learn more about our SEO Hosting packages, visit: http://turnkeyinternet.net/seo-hosting

This year, e-commerce sales are predicted to jump 15% from last year. This is big news! Not only does this make 2010 the biggest e-commerce year ever, it’s happening in the midst of a major long-term recession. If you are one of the many companies that sells products or services online, this holiday season could be huge for your company, and it couldn’t be coming at a better time. So, what can you do to maximize sales and make sure you’re getting the most out of your site traffic? Hold on to your hats, folks, and pay attention…

Clean House and Take Names
We’re getting close to the wire with Christmas only a few weeks away, and online sales (as opposed to in-store retail) is predicted to ramp up and up as the big day approaches. If you haven’t done it already, visit your own site with a critical holiday shopping eye. Don’t just visit the front page—pretend you’re a customer and make a purchase. Do your best to catch any typos, bugs, or strange formatting. Make the process as pretty and seamless as possible to maximize sales.

Holiday Themes
Tis the season to decorate your site with holiday images, from front to back. Make your site feel as festive as possible and visitors will respond. Studies show, the more festive the atmosphere, the more sales retailers make. This is just as true for online stores as it is for brick-and-mortar. Just do a google search for some festive images and be sure to make them non-denominational. The last thing you want to do is offend your shoppers.

Put Your Best Promo Forward
Lead the pack with an unprecedented sale or special to entice new customers. While you might balk at the idea, sales are more valuable than the amount of money they bring in. A first-time shopper is much more likely to become a repeat customer if you make them remember you with a huge discount. Also, word-of-mouth spreads fast at the holidays, with coupon sites running up-to-the minute promotional specials from all over the Internet. Take a few moments and submit your coupons everywhere you can, and talk them up on forums. One satisfied customer can quickly become many as the sale catches fire.

Boost Your Bandwidth
Get ready for the influx by beefing up your hosting for the holidays. Many retailers forget this vital step and it results in lost profits, sometimes in the thousands. If your customers can’t access your site, they can’t make a purchase. It seems obvious, but many people don’t think about it until they’ve already lost money. Contact your hosting provider now and upgrade your plan. You can downgrade again after the holidays. The money you spend now will come back to you many-fold, and you’ll save yourself the embarrassment of a down website at the busiest time of the year.

Market Market Market
Use your company newsletter to announce your last minute holiday sales to your customers. Provide a special newsletter-subscriber-only link for a VIP discount to make your readers feel appreciated and valued. Highlight a few big sellers—products or services that have been selling well so far. Provide added discounts for these products and be sure to emphasize that they’re only available for a limited time. Use social media to spread the word too.

Fraud Protection
Fraud is rampant this time of year. Make sure you have a powerful e-commerce platform or third-party security solution to protect yourself and your customers from holiday fraud. Taking this added precaution now will protect your business’ reputation, and it will protect you from the infamous charge backs that darken the new year for many online merchants.

And… Remember to Check Out TurnKeyCommerce!

Happy Selling!

If you own a hosting company, chances are good you have a large number of customers paying a very low price for shared hosting services. But, for all you know, those customers are doing good business—despite the low price tag on their hosting. So, how can you make the most of this potential source of income without investing a ton of money in infrastructure and software development? By reselling online business solutions from TurnKey Internet, of course!

What Services?
Every business needs an ecommerce solution, right? Every business needs robust office email with collaboration tools. Every business needs web conferencing, monitoring and secure backup services. If you don’t provide these things to your clients, they will get them elsewhere. If they’re getting their other services elsewhere, it may not be long before they switch their hosting over too, consolidating their business with one company that has it all. You need to make your company the company that has it all. The more services you have to offer, the more clients you will keep, and the more money you will make.

What they Don’t Know they Need
As advanced as business has become, still many small business owners are behind the times. Part of the reason for this is simple fear of the technology—but another reason for this is ignorance of the simple solutions that could be increasing their sales ten-fold (and yours too, as a reseller of the services they need). The first step in making a successful resell, is education. Let your clients know about the tools you have to offer, and then sell them those tools. It may just be as easy as it sounds.

Your Monthly Percentage
The beauty of reselling is the consistent income that perpetuates itself with no additional work from you. You don’t have to worry about tech support or phone troubleshooting. Once you’ve made the sale you don’t have to raise a finger while you watch your profits go up and up.

TurnKey has it All!
As we move into the fall months, we will be releasing our full suite of online/cloud business solutions. We have already released TurnKeyMail, TurnKey NAS Vault and TurnKey Newsletter. These are three robust, action-packed SaaS solutions that you can start reselling to your clients today. Follow the links to learn how you can increase your monthly income with the clients you already have. You have nothing to lose!