The simplest marketing plan is target your goals, which is in this case get your first 100 clients. And patience is what you need to grow your company, remember that it takes time, hard work, and more commitment building company.

Although having lots of clients also meaning got more income, but try to limit the customers, first year is time to evaluate your company and giving your existing clients satisfaction.

Now, lets back to our discussion, getting first 100 clients, how we’re going to start it? Lets track down where the money came from. Most of people get money from their work, and hard work. The same thing we should do to get our first 100 clients.

It might took about 1 year to get 100 clients, might less, the key are hard work and times. The harder you work, eventually you’ll get better results. With time you could made your dream, just be patience and don’t give up so soon.

We all know that out there large web hosting company competing each other, but how about small company? Don’t worry there are plenty clients out there, with patience you could get them.

Benefit of being small is you’ll be able to know your clients and maintain relationship with them. Big web hosting company only in touch with their clients whenever their clients having trouble either in installation, billing, or others. Because of the number of clients they have, its impossible for them reaching each of their clients need. There goes your benefit.

The next thing to attract and convince your customer is your website look. A good looking web design on your site does attract clients to know about it more, but its not warranty they will decide using your web hosting.

What I meant, the most important thing is reaching the goals and deliver your information to your future clients, although you might have simple website, but if you done that, I believe they will come.
There goes simple marketing plan to get your first 100 clients, good luck with it.

When you are selling web hosting, selling both domain names and SSL certificates at the same time is highly recommended. This way your clients will not have to buy SSL certificates from other places, they can buy everything they need directly from you.

I won’t confuse you with many options when it comes to selling SSL certificates to your clients, just use Enom. Why? Enom offers a wide range of SSL certificates which you can sell to your own clients depending on their needs. They have SSL certificates for small websites for as low as $9.95/year (your cost) to premium high end SSL certificates at $499/year (your cost) which will turn browser’s address bar to green allowing website visitors to notice the security of the website they are visiting.
For your smaller clients, you can charge them at $29.95/year and you already make a profit of $20/year when utilizing Enom’s $9.95/year SSL certificates. Note that clients who need SSL certificates are most likely clients who run a money making website, so don’t be afraid to gain a larger profit margin when selling SSL certificates.

To obtain Enom’s reseller account, as I have also informed you in the previous section, simply do a search on Google for “enom reseller account”.

Also don’t forget to always use SSL when processing orders for your clients. People will go away if they see your website is not using https or SSL when they are ordering your service. This is NOT OPTIONAL when it comes to your own web hosting company website.

It is always better to have flexibility. Having a merchant account of your own will provide you with the flexibility which you will not have through a third party payment gateway. When your business has grown and you have processed a good amount of sale for at least two years, you can consider applying for a merchant account.

There are many merchant account providers which will provide merchant account for businesses in the United States. The key is you must have a US business presence in order to apply for a merchant account. Additionally you must have a US person which will act as a guarantor for the business.

To setup a US business presence you can use an incorporation firm, one which I recommend is VALIS International, which will be able to provide international persons and businesses to have a US business entity complete with US Employer Identification Number (EIN).

Once you have your US business entity established, you can then proceed by opening a US bank account using your new company name. To do this, there is no other way than physically walking into a bank in the US. They will need you to provide them with your passport and incorporation documents and they will be able to open your US business checking account.

The best way to obtain a US person as a guarantor when applying for a merchant account is to find a good old friend of yours who are now residing in the United States. Ask them to become a partner. This is how I gain my US merchant account, which eventually opens door for me to get my own US business visa by employing myself under my own company.

If you are already residing in a country where you can get a merchant account easily, such as Europe, Canada, or United States, you won’t have to go through all that.
Some of the merchant account providers I would recommend is:
1. PayPal through their PayPal Pro services
2. E-Onlinedata.com
3. Charge.com

There are two types of payment gateways:
1. A merchant account – where you can process your client’s payments under your own company name.
2. A third party payment account – where another company processes your client payments and then sends you the funds periodically or provide you with an option to withdraw your funds at any time.

For US persons, as long as you have good credit, you should be able to obtain a merchant account with no problem. If you’re just starting out and your credit is not good enough, most merchant provider can still provide you with a merchant account if you can provide them with a guarantor which has a good enough credit.

If you’re residing in a country where obtaining a merchant account is considerably difficult, I would suggest starting out with a third party payment gateway provider. You won’t need a merchant account to get started since there are many third party payment gateway providers.

The most popular and trusted third party payment gateway provider is PayPal. Almost anyone can sign up with a free PayPal account to start accepting payments. I highly recommend you to save your time looking for other payment gateway provider and just go with PayPal.

Another reason to go with PayPal is most billing system can automatically integrate with PayPal, so you don’t have to worry about billing your clients manually.

You would need to confirm your bank account with PayPal to be able to withdraw your clients’ payments. The process is simple. PayPal would need you to enter your bank account details and will deposit a small amount of funds into your bank account. You just need to confirm the amount deposited by PayPal to your bank account to verify that you actually are the account holder of that bank account.

Once that process is completed you can receive payments from your clients and should be able to withdraw the funds into your bank account at any time. Some other option is 2CheckOut and WorldPay both offers solutions for people outside the United States.

The details about client management system could be found below.
You might have question on your mind about what really is a client management and billing system? The answer is an application which will do the following:
1. Process orders and sign ups
2. Automatically bill and charge your clients
3. Automatically register/transfer/renew domain names for your clients
4. Automatically creates/suspends/unsuspends/terminates web hosting accounts on your servers/reseller accounts
5. Manages your client support/help desk system
6. Manages automated billings and invoicing for your business
7. Manages other tasks such as providing affiliate system, knowledge base system, and other tasks depending on which application/software you choose.

There are several client management and automation system available for the web hosting business today. I specifically am using WHM Complete Solution (WHMCS) and am extremely satisfied with their system. However, if you wish to compare WHMCS with other providers, here are a few that are quite popular:
1. WHM Auto Pilot
2. AWBS
3. Modern Bill
4. And of course WHMCS (recommended)

I highly recommend WHMCS because they have a very stable platform with a strong developer’s community which will be able to help you with any integration issues you might have. On this book, I will particularly guide you through the entire setup of WHMCS including tips and tricks on running your web hosting business using WHMCS.