Help in choosing a domain name and web hosting are two natural upsells you could help your design clients with, and your bottom line at the same time.

Domain Name

If your client is just settisng up a business, he or she will probably have a business name in mind but might be open to changing it when you point out the necessity for the domain name to match the business name.

Your client may not understand the need for the business/domain name to include a reference to the company products or services. He or she will hopefully be open to persuasion in the interests of getting more organic hits in search results.

Its important to direct the client’s attention to whats really important in a domain name – including geo-location match, brand protection, connection to long-term marketing strategy, etc’.

There are certain phases that come with prerequesites. Not knowing what is your client’s site domain will hamper your clients’s creative efforts when working on designing a logo. You wouldn’t be doing your client any favours by skipping this advice before starting your design project.

Explain the advantages of always buying and registering domains from the same site, namely ease of access and discounts for buying domains at bulk in one go.

LCN.com is a UK based domain and web hosting service that offers bulk domain discounts

Customers are often confused by domain names and fail to realise that they are only ‘renting’ the addresses with annual payments each year. Your help will make the experience less traumatising for your design clients.

Web Hosting

The whole area of web hosting is a foggy minefield for non-experts. Any customer will appreciate your help and advice on hosting their new site. Even if they have hosting already, you might be able to suggest a better deal.

How do you monetise this? Two options exist; hosts’ affiliate payments and reseller hosting.

Hosts Affiliate Payments

This upsell involves less effort on your part, just researching the client’s needs and find a host that matches them.

Almost every web hosting company will pay you a healthy commission when someone takes out a contract after four affiliate link. These commissions are usually in the $50-100 range and will soon add up.

Don’t just jump on the bandwagon that the companies with the highest marketing budget have rolling around the Internet. Research will show you that those companies have large numbers of unhappy customers who leave at the first opportunity. Your reputation rests on any host you suggest, so you need to know your clients are going to be happy.

Sign up as an affiliate for any hosting company you plan to recommend. Approval sometimes takes a few days, so plan ahead.

WPBeginner’s hosting reviews.

Use a hosting review site’s listings to justify your recommended options. Always recommend two possibilities; otherwise the client may think you are just sending them to the one that pays you the most.

Set up a page on your own website with your hosting affiliate links. Remember to explain on that page that you earn a commission when clients buy hosting through those links. Hosting companies will refuse to pay commissions if they check and can’t find your affiliate disclosure statement.

You can then either send clients to your hosting recommendation page or send an email with your affiliate links.

Reseller Hosting

Reseller hosting could be opening up a can of snakes that will come back to bite you.

At first glance, the idea of selling your own hosting looks like money for old rope. It isn’t.

When you open a reseller account with any host, you take on all the support functions. Everything from receiving payments to solving website crashes comes down to you. You can contact the host’s support team for anything you can’t answer yourself, but your clients won’t be getting 24/7 support unless you hire a hosting expert of your own to sit at the end of a phone waiting for problems to arise.

To accept credit card payments, you will need to set up a payment gateway and a merchant account. The extra costs and hassles of providing support and taking payments soak up much of the perceived benefit of reseller hosting.

The Short Version

Upsells make sense. Your clients trust you with website or logo designs and font suggestions, so they will trust your advice regarding domain names and hosting.