Update as of 9/15/10: GoDaddy, since finishing their grid beta, is a terrible place to host your site. If you want to sell garbage to strangers, you might consider this program, but I can’t in good conscience continue testing the reseller program.
Okay, so you may have followed my trial of GoDaddy’s reseller product, as I was updating periodically on how the attempt was going. It was an expensive trial, and one that I completely flubbed. Below you will find what I did, what I didn’t do, and how I may try to tackle it again with a new marketing plan.
After spending $199 for an annual reseller account, I did absolutely nothing with it. Well, that isn’t quite true. I tried to pick a name that people would search for occasionally. I ran some ads on Live, Google and Facebook; but as it turns out, that is very close to doing absolutely nothing. What I can say about the GoDaddy reseller plan with absolute confidence is that if all you are going to do is run a few sidebar ads here or there and come up with a searchable name, then you aren’t going to get anywhere. You’ll make no money at all.
That’s what I did, and I got less than 50 visits to the site in an entire year, and no one bought anything. Don’t do that. You are wasting your money.
Since canceling out the account, I’ve actually put a little more thought into it, though, and there may be ways we can get this to work (I say “we” because I am assuming you are interested in possibly opening an account and making some money). We’ll divide my thoughts into a couple of different topics.
Site Name: Don’t do what I did. I selected ushosts.us. I selected this because after checking Google’s keyword search tool I found that people were apparently looking for U.S. based hosting companies by using the keywords “us hosts.” In retrospect, people using that search phrase may have been looking for women who work the world’s oldest profession (oops), but it didn’t really matter because Google never let me come up anyway. After a full year, you could type in my site name exactly and never see my site. Why? Likely for a few very good reasons, which we’ll get into next.
Search Engine Marketing: Running ads on search engines didn’t work for me. Why? Partly because I was so cheap. I wasn’t willing to pay $7 per hit to get my ad up front for good searches, so I never got any business. Why wasn’t I willing to do that? Well, perhaps my math was wrong, but if only a small percentage of people who clicked on those ads bought, but I paid $7 every time the ads were clicked on, I would have gone broke pretty quickly. The break even on such a thing would have been years given the relatively low prices I was offering.
So, if search engine ads don’t work for me (because I’m either too cheap or too confused), what is left? Well, that would be may favorite sort of marketing, the free kind. This is where you get yourself to show up in search engines without spending any money on it. But after a year I still wasn’t showing up in search engines? How could that be? It’s pretty simple, really.
See, everyone in the world who has a GoDaddy reseller account has the same, more or less, site up. That means when Google goes to index your site, all it sees is a site that looks exactly like a thousand other sites it already knows about. You see, with the GoDaddy design interface, you can’t really change your site enough to make it distinguished from other GoDaddy reseller sites. This is a real problem if you are trying to get free search engine hits. So what is the solution?
The Solution: So far as I can tell, the best way to work this would be to purchase two identical domain names, one with a .com and one with a .net suffix. Use the .net as your GoDaddy site, where all the GoDaddy software is put, etc. and then create your own site with the .com address that has your own website that you can design and manage any way you like. This .com address is the site you are now able to market and try to get onto search engines, using all the usual tricks to get decent traffic (see my series on generating web traffic).
Will this work? Well, I said that this site wouldn’t be afraid to put up its money to attempt to avoid you having to waste yours, so I’m going to give it a shot.
I’ll be much more responsive this time and give you the blow-by-blow details as they occur. This trial will start either in late August or early September.
Meanwhile, if you are feeling particularly inspired and want to try it yourself, please follow the link below. By purchasing from links on this site, you help to pay for all these web hosting trials, and you can’t get a better price anywhere else anyway.
