By Software is big business, but that doesn’t mean you have to be a software developer to make money in this industry. Reselling software enables you to provide real value to your clients, generate recurring revenue for your business, and scale, all while dramatically reducing overhead costs. But how to make money as a reseller?
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In this article, we’ll cover exactly how to make money as a reseller, different SaaS products you can resell, and some insight into how you can get started.
Why become a software reseller?
In order to sell original software to your clients, you have to either have the skill, time, and resources to develop it yourself or the capital to have someone else build it for you.
This is a massive upfront investment without a guaranteed return: you have to compete against established software companies, and then you still only have a single product to offer your clients.
Learning how to make money as a reseller gives you access to as many different SaaS products as is appropriate for your business to sell. It also eliminates the problem of up-front costs.
In short, it’s a risk-free way to build your business.
You can choose the reseller programs that you want to offer your clients and prospects, determine your pricing, and jump right into selling without the need to develop an original product.
Additionally, becoming a software reseller means you can become a more valuable resource to your clients. The greater the variety of services you can offer them, the stickier their relationship to you will be.
How do resellers make money?
SaaS resellers take the well-established principles of purchasing wholesale products and reselling them at retail prices from the physical world to the digital realm.
Just as a reseller of any physical product might purchase it in bulk at a discounted price, add a retail markup, and take the difference as profits, SaaS resellers join reseller partner programs that give them favorable pricing. In turn, they offer these SaaS products to their clients.
Resellers don’t actually have to purchase software in bulk: instead, they only pay for a software license when their clients make a purchase. This means there are no upfront costs apart from the costs associated with selling. SaaS resellers don’t have to put themselves in the red in order to reap monetary benefits down the line. They can jump ahead and see profits as soon as they start.
By learning how to make money as a reseller and repeating this formula for many clients and potentially many different software products, businesses can significantly boost their recurring revenue without much of a negative impact on their costs. They don’t have to invest in in-house staff or development costs to offer their clients more value.
The result? A serious improvement to the bottom line.
How to make money as a hosting reseller
Every business needs a website. The days of websites being optional nice-to-haves are long gone. Everyone from startups to freelancers to well-established enterprises all have a digital home on the web. In fact, it’s increasingly common for individual professionals to have websites where they can showcase their work and make themselves more appealing to prospective employers.
All those websites have something in common: They need to be hosted somewhere. As a managed WordPress hosting reseller, you can offer world-class, secure hosting services to your clients, coupled with the service they already know and trust from you and your team.
You might wonder how to make money as a reseller of managed hosting when it isn’t necessarily the most expensive service a business uses. You can round it out with additional services such as website design and website building. However, it’s also worth considering that by becoming a hosting reseller, you can more closely integrate yourself as an essential partner for your clients. If they purchase hosting from you, there are many other additional services you can offer to increase the value of each client. It also makes it more difficult for them to leave your agency because you offer a core offering.
How to make money as a reseller: Reselling PPC
Together with SEO, PPC is one of the essential pillars of digital marketing. Businesses generally need to invest in both to be successful in the digital age.
There are two main ways you can make money as a PPC reseller once you’ve found a PPC reseller program you like.
The more hands-on approach involves finding a program that has the features you’re looking for, selling it to your clients, then managing PPC campaigns in house. The work will be far less than if you were to create and manage campaigns from scratch: You’ll have access to tools that simplify the process, such as being able to access all your clients’ campaigns from a single dashboard. However, you or your team will still need to dedicate some time to campaign management.
The second, more hands-off approach enables you to scale your services to far more clients. As a white-label software reseller, a team of experts works under your brand name to deliver PPC results.
The best option for you will depend on how much time your staff can dedicate and how much you want to scale your PPC services.
How to make money as an SEO reseller
SEO offers great digital products to resell because it requires ongoing management. Even if your client is having great SEO results today, they should continue to invest in SEO management to maintain and continually improve those results.
Part of how to make money as a reseller of SEO services is effectively communicating to your clients that SEO is a long-term process, not something that can be accomplished overnight.
Once you choose an SEO reseller program, you can choose if you want to manage the services yourself or have a white-label team handle the job.
How to make money as a reseller of other SaaS products
One of the best parts of being a SaaS reseller is the flexibility to offer a variety of digital products, depending on what your clients are asking for and what niche you operate in. Here are some more categories worth considering:
- Reputation Management – Help your clients stay on top of reviews and never let a comment go unanswered with reputation management software.
- Website Builder – Resell websites that are beautiful and responsive with a website builder.
- Productivity – Become a Google Workspace reseller, or sell other tools from top companies.
- Local SEO– Ensure your clients are on top of their local SEO game by becoming a local SEO reseller.
- Scheduling – Modernize the daily operations of your clients that require scheduling software, such as hair salons and professional service providers.
Is reselling profitable?
Reselling is profitable because it gives you full visibility of your costs while giving you control of the prices you set. While it’s true that your prices will generally have to be in line with what competitors are offering for similar SaaS products and platforms, there is room to charge a premium price if you add value with additional support and services.
However, how to make money as a reseller ultimately comes down to the fact that the reseller business model is highly scalable. Without having to increase your costs, you can sell more, and add more recurring revenue with each client that you sign.
How much does a reseller make?
There’s no fixed price that a reseller can make because there is so much variety in the types of businesses that choose to incorporate SaaS reselling into their business model. Whether you’re an established agency, an MSP looking to expand your services, a media company ready to dive into digital waters, or a startup wanting to build a business from scratch, you can put together a portfolio of SaaS reseller programs that will help you meet your financial goals.
Getting started as a software reseller
If you’ve never resold SaaS products before, here’s how to get started.
- Find a reseller software marketplace. Why? Because this is the most effective way to access a wide variety of reseller partner programs in a single place.
- Choose the reseller products you want to resell. You don’t have to add everything at once: consider the products that make the most sense for your client base and industry.
- Start advertising your services to your clients. If you don’t have a client dashboard they can access, consider setting one up. This way, they can see new products right in the dashboard, among many other features.
- Collect testimonials as you go. Once you have your first few buyers for your new reseller offerings, gathering testimonials can help build trust so you can expand your business further.
