Yes, BUT… you must come prepared with tons of capital.

According to ICANN, the governing body for all domains, here are some financial considerations before you jump into this business:

Before you undertake the registrar accreditation process, please read and consider the following costs to you. This is not an exhaustive list of all costs involved in becoming an accredited registrar, but is meant only as a helpful listing of some costs registrar applicants should be prepared to pay in connection with becoming an ICANN accredited registrar.

To ICANN:

• US$2,500 non-refundable application fee, to be submitted with application.
• US$4,000 yearly accreditation fee due upon approval and each year thereafter.
• Variable fee (quarterly) billed once you begin registering domain names or the first full quarter following your accreditation approval, whichever occurs first. This fee represents a portion of ICANN’s operating costs and, because it is divided among all registrars, the amount varies from quarter to quarter. Recently this fee has ranged from US$1,200 to S$2,000 per quarter.
• Transaction-based gTLD fee (quarterly). This fee is a flat fee (currently $0.20) charged for each new registration, renewal or transfer. This fee can be billed by the registrar separately on its invoice to the registrant, but is paid by the registrar to ICANN.
• Please refer to http://www.icann.org/general/financial.html for the most recent ICANN Budget to find additional details about invoicing, including options for relief.

You must have:

• US$70,000 in working capital requirement. THIS DOES NOT NEED TO BE PAID TO ICANN; ICANN requires only that you demonstrate (by submitting an independently verified financial statement) that you have at least this much liquid capital (cash or credit) before your ICANN accreditation becomes effective.
• Commercial General Liability Insurance coverage of at least $500,000. This coverage must be maintained in force throughout the term of your accreditation.

To Registry Operators:

Please refer to http://www.icann.org/financials/payments.htm for instructions on how to submit payments to ICANN.

As you can see, becoming a domain name registrar is not a business for everyone to get into – ICANN have set the bar pretty high.

HOWEVER, all is not lost.  Just because you can not become a domain name registrar does not mean that you can not sell domain names.

If you are in web design, hosting business, or any type of business that helps people establish web presence, then chances are good that at some point in your business transaction you will suggest your customer to get a domain name.

In fact, people love the idea of owning their own .com’s, especially their own [first & last name].com – and this is where becoming a domain name reseller could come in handy, and could earn you a handsome recurring income.

One of the most popular domain registrar is no doubt Godaddy.com and they have a domain name reseller program that costs just $90/year (or $180/year if you want lower buy-rates).

Some of the key features that we like about Godaddy’s reseller programs are:

• You set the price, you earn the margin
• Customizable website template
• Earn commission on other services such as hosting

Why do we become a Godaddy reseller?  Simple

• Residual income from domain and hosting renewals
• Low buy-rate for our own domain portoflio

No related posts.

Either it be a blog so the owner or company can make announcements to its customers, a static website that inform the rest of the world what the company is about, products/services it provides, and how to contact us, or a social networking site for badminton players – the goal is to ultimately make money with the website.

Having the website built brings you one step closer to making you more money – the website only provides a vehicle, you will still need to learn how to drive it to gets you to places you want to go.

So how do you make money with your website?  Well, simply put, you will need traffic and monetization.

Traffic
If you build it, they are not going to come.  Unlike running a brick-and-mortar business where you can set up shop at a busy street corner and get tons of customers the first day you open, a website is a virtual shop and no one is going to know about this brand new website without some marketing or advertising.

There are several ways you can drive traffic to your website.

1.  Buy Advertising
Before you go out and buy advertising, you have to know or understand where your customers will most likely come from.  For example, if your target audience is college students, then it may be worthwhile for you to look into advertising on Facebook, rather than buying keywords on search engines.

You can “leech” off other existing websites with traffic by buying advertisements on those websites.  One way to do this would be go to Google search engine and search for websites that are closely related to your business (most likely your competitor is not going to want to place an ad for you to your website), contact them and work out a deal.

Other places you may consider are classified/auction ads sites such as Craigslist and eBay.

2.  Word-of-Mouth Advertising
For this type of advertising to work out well you will need to make it “worthwhile” for people to spread the word for you – think about running a promotion, a giveaway, a grand-opening special offer.

For example, you can construct an enticing contest and get it listed on a highly trafficked online contest directory site (tip:  to find popular online contest directory site just Google “online contest” – why?  Because people would search for “online contest” if they were to look for one!).

Alternatively, if you already a member of social networking sites (such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter) and have a friend-base, then you can make an announcement there as well (tip:  remember to make it worth their while to spread the word for you).

Monetization
Now that you have people going to your website, you just need to tweak your sales message for these people to give them their money in exchange for products or services that you are providing.

If you are not selling any product or service from your website or if your website is more information-based (ie. you are running a review site, a social networking site, your personal blog), then the only other thing you can sell is advertising space.

If you want to get started with selling advertising space right away, then I suggest you look into ad networks such as Google Adwords, AdBrite, text-link-ads, CPA networks (take a look at this report to learn more about CPA networks and how you can make money even without a website).  The role of these network is to bring publishers (that is you) and advertisers together.

Without joining ad networks you will need to “sell” your ad space to advertisers or wait for them to come to you to make an offer to buy your ad space.

—

Hopefully this article has provided an overview on how to make money with your website.

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Now, let’s about the basics.

See, there are several things to take care of before you can set up your website:

Domain
This is your web address for your site.  The .COM is the world’s most recognized TLD extention (TLD = Top Level Domain).  Good names are being snatched up everyday so you may wish to register your desired domain name soon.

Go to http://www.wholesalerdomains.com and start searching for your desired domain name:

Web Hosting
Ever wonder why a website shows up when you type in a domain name in your browser?  That’s because every domain “points” to a web host (basically just a server that is connected to the internet whose sole job is to delivery web pages upon request).  Therefore, a web host holds the pages for your website.  Without a web host, your domain will just be a domain.

Here are a few web hosting companies that I recommend and have personally used for years:

Hostgator ($3.96/month)

WholesalerDomains ($3.99/month)

Site5 ($4.95/month)

Web Site
The terms website and webpage are often interchanged in conversations, but we’d like to think that a website comprises of webpages.  There are many different types of websites that you can build, some examples are:

• A CMS (Content Management System) website that allows you to publish local news and articles.
• A personal or business blog website where it provides you the ability to publish posts/pages, moderate comments, change the settings, etc.
• An e-Commerce website that has an online catalog, a shopping cart application, and inventory control, etc.
• A forum website that provides a platform for your visitors to post messages and for you to administer/moderate posts, etc.
• A help desk website where you provide online trouble ticket system for your customers.
• An image gallery website that allows you (or even visitors to your site) to host photos and share photos.
• A project management website for your business to manage employee or outsourcing activities such as software collaboration.

The possibility and application of a website is only bounded by your imagination.

Now, you may think that there is no way in hell you are able to learn enough HTML (in fact, HTML is not what you need to learn) to be able to set up a website like the ones aforementioned.  Well, the good news, you really don’t!

The internet has evolved in such rapid pace that web design isn’t what it used to be 10 years ago where you must know HTML or server scripting to set up your own website.

When you purchase web hosting, you should be provided with an online control panel to your account where you are able to set up your own emails@yourdomain.com, check traffic statistics, and one-click install websites with a very nifty tool called Fantastico… Yes, one-click install!  Okay, maybe 2 clicks for some websites.

Many different types of websites (including ones that we have listed earlier) are included in the Fantastico tool that makes setting up a website a snap.  You can literally buy a domain name (available for usage immediately), get web hosting (set up is instant upon purchase as well), and launch your own blog, a newsletter site, or a full-blow e-Commerce website in matter of minutes.

Let’s walk you through the steps you need to take to set up a, say, an e-Commerce website using the OS Commerce script (an open source online catalog/shopping cart script) on our test domain iWindowShop.com

First, login to your control panel (in this demostration we have a cPanel control panel interface – a very popular web hosting control panel).  Once logged in as admin, scroll all the way down or find the Fantastico icon (the blue smiley face):

Click on the Fantastico icon and you should see a list of scripts that are categorized for different applications.  Scroll down just a bit until you see E-Commerce:

There are 3 popular open-source (meaning free) scripts that you will see for your e-Commerce website.  For this demonstration let’s use OS Commerce.  Clicking on that link will take us to the 1st of the 3 steps installation process:

Here it will ask that you fill in some essential information for your online store.  Once completed, just click on “Install OS Commerce” – simple, isn’t it?

On to step 2 of the installation which is basically a confirmation before it really gets installed.  Click on “Finish Installation” button will complete the installation process and your website will be up immediately!

To see the default install of the e-Commerce site just go visit http://iwindowshop.com/oscommerce_demo

As you can see, it didn’t take very long to set up your own fully functional e-Commerce website because the solution is all there for you!  Welcome to the new era of web development!

However, you may be disappointed that it doesn’t look the way you wanted it to be – fortunately for you there are many ready-made templates for OS Commerce script (in fact there will be many ready-made templates for almost all the popular open-source scripts in Fantastico).

Here are some very affordable OS Commerce templates by:

• Template Monster
• Template World

Generally speaking, there are 2 main component to any website – the presentation (aka template, theme, or layout), and the logic (aka the infrastructure, the back-end code, or the script that provides different functionality for the website).

Although open source movement has taken great strides, website owners will need to set themselves apart by customizing the presentation or even the functionality of the website.  And this is where your website gets expensive – anytime custom design or scripting is needed.  If you just use turnkey solutions or ready-made templates, well, guess what?  Your website will be just like everybody else’s and you lose the competitive edge!

Hopefully this article will convince you to get off the fence (for those of you still on the fence thinking how much this is all going to cost) to set up your own website – to at least try out some open-source scripts to see if it fits your particular application.

For business-minded dummies or lazy-ass dummies you are of course welcome to consult with us for free and get a quotation for custom web developement work.

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