In a reselling relationship, reseller is not an employee of service provider, but instead acts as an extension of larger company's marketing, sales and support operations. The reseller markets product independently, and signs up customers to original provider's service, often providing simple side of service, like offering basic tech support and administration of account.

On service provider's side of deal, a reselling program allows a business to expand its customer base without overextending its marketing and sales operations. From reseller's side, a reselling program allows a small, independent operator to profit from a small piece of Internet services market without requiring a lot of technical knowledge, or a big investment in infrastructure.

THE FIRST STEP

The first step in a successful reselling venture is defining what type of product/service you want to resell. A big mistake most new resellers make is cramming lots of different products and services into a website.

Start small, start with 2-3 related products that you can resell and support with ease, then expand into a broader range of products and services as your client base grows. If you have experience in a field, choose a product that flatters your knowledge, create a niche market, and then expand.

HOW TO SPOT A GOOD RESELLER PROGRAM

An excellent higher-tier Web host truly values its relationships with resellers. Through such relationships, a company enhances market reach of its product and services offerings through reseller's specific market segments.

A higher-tier company will thus offer a myriad of specifically tailored services to enhance reseller's service offering. By providing a wide range of options, a reseller's business can scale along with its customer base.

The options, or resale models most usually made available to resellers include "volume discount" reselling, discount per domain, affiliate and private label reselling.

VOLUME DISCOUNT MODEL

The volume discount approach provides increased revenue per domain as reseller increases number of accounts within their hosting portfolio. This model is extremely cost-effective for larger resellers, since cost per account declines as volume of accounts increases.

The major disadvantages of this model however are that resellers are usually directly identified as resellers, since infrastructure and brand identity throughout entire Web hosting service is usually identified with higher-tier hosting provider.

The model also is not very advantageous to newer and smaller reseller operations which have just started-up, since reselling under this model is much more expensive if reseller's customer base is small.

DISCOUNT PER DOMAIN MODEL

Lesson One: What is Web Hosting?

Web hosting is essentially placement of your website onto Internet through a server. Once your site is on a server, anyone with Internet access can look at your website - from anywhere in world, 24 hours a day. In order to have your site hosted on web, you need to have following three things:

A Website - a page or set of pages that is located under same domain name. brandblast.com is a website (but you knew that already!) A web page is a computer document written in a publishing language called HTML. When an Internet user types in your web address, your web server sends content of your web page to that user.

A Domain Name - a unique text-based address used to locate a specific set of web pages. A domain name is made up of words and/or numbers plus a TLD (top level domain). The TLD for most businesses is ".com", such as http://www.brandblast.com/; non-profit organizations use ".org"; universities and educational sites use ".edu"; and sites involved with U.S. government use ".gov". More TLDs are available, such as .biz, .pro, .name, .info, etc.

An Account With A Web Hosting Company, or a server of your own to host your website. A server is a computer that stores information that can be accessed through network. Servers can also be used to store website information that can be accessed by any computer with a connection to Internet - and a browser such as Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, two most popular web browsers.

Web hosting is, in many ways, similar to renting property. There are plenty of companies that will rent you space on their web servers. The wide range of services start from free hosting on up to buying a server for your own personal use. It's possible to spend thousands of dollars a year on web hosting alone, though average person or small business typically pays $10 - $50 a month, depending on how many features, web space, and data transfer they need.

Lesson Two: Do I Need a Web Host?

If you are planning to establish an internet presence, whether it be in form of a personal homepage or a full-service e-commerce catalogue, and do not own your own personal server, you will definitely need a web host.

Finding a good web host, however, can be a rather difficult endeavor. BrandBlast’s website hosting services are a great place to start your search, our hosting plans are designed to acccomodate any website requirement and can be upgraded at any time, our plans grow with you.

Choosing a host for your website should not be taken lightly. Once committed, it becomes a real headache to move elsewhere - not to mention damage that can be done to your business if you make wrong choice.

This makes it very important to "get it right first time." Find out as much as you can about your prospective host before making any decisions, and have a clear idea of scope of your site, and functions you wish to have prior to searching for your host.

Doing proper planning will help you a great deal in your selection of a host, and will save you headache of trying to change hosts later.

Lesson Three: What type of web hosting package is suitable for me - free or shared?

FREE - Free is for fun. If you want to experiment with a site or put up a small, personal site for fun of it.

If you fall into this category, you probably need just a small amount of web space and little bandwidth: 1 to 2 MB should be plenty for your needs; and a personal, unique domain name may not even be necessary. In fact, you can get web space FREE. A popular provider of free space is Geocities (http://www.geocities.com/). However, because it's free, you may find out later that there are many limitations - it all depends how far you want to go...