Lately, I’ve seen a lot of people on various webmaster forums and blogs advising new internet marketers to stay away from hosting as a niche for promoting products. Now obviously, hosting is one of the essential pieces of any website building campaign, and there’s very decent money in the business too. Naturally, this leads a lot of bloggers and affiliates to target hosting leads and sales (I’m no exception here) and there has been room for new people to join the hunt because hosting is still a growth sector.
In fact, I don’t think we’re anywhere near the end of growth in website hosting demand. Do you think the world has enough websites? Some people probably think we have way too many (e-snobs), but the ease of new technology implementation and low cost simply means more people will be adopting the internet as a place to do business, network, debate, or even just rant. In most places of the world, internet access hasn’t even become saturated. For these countries, the growth in hosting could still be explosive.
Yet the fact remains, people around the net are advising new webmasters to find a source of revenue outside of the web host business.
Are they just trying to prevent potential competition? Yeah, in a large part that probably has a lot to do with the motivations behind such warnings.
But I’ve also seen myself now how tough the competition can be already. While there are plenty of potential customers, there are only so many places near the top spots of the search engines and there are only so many websites that bring in enough traffic to make sales a regular occurrence. Does that mean you should just give up with that and find another way to monetize your website? No! There’s fierce competition for any potential source of revenue – you’re just going to have to think up creative ways to get your sales pitch to the top (and then it better be a good one, too.) If your website is of use to webmasters, hosting is a good fit for monetization.
If you think you’re up to the challenge and you can compete despite having a natural disadvantage against those who started before you, well then that’s what the website building biz is all about. So you still want a piece of the hosting business you say? Check out the Dreamhost Reward program for an idea of the commissions and structure system from a company that actually pays its promoters and delivers a good product. You can make up to $97 with a sale, but you should probably need to offer the maximum $50 discount back to your buyers through a coupon because they can (and should) just go elsewhere to get the best coupons and discounts available.
So there you go: Your first advantage in the “saturated” business of website hosting (that I still see having huge growth potential). Use your ability to set prices to gain an edge on your competition.
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