Partners Integration Best Practices - Cloudflare...Provide a set up tutorial or orientation guide...

Partners Integration Best Practices

Introduction

At CloudFlare, our Partners are crucial to our success which is why we do whatever we can to make your integration process as easy as possible. One of the most important steps on the Partner onboarding process is to communicate your CloudFlare offering clearly and loudly to your customers. This guide will help you with that goal by demonstrating some past successful integrations.

CloudFlare integration into your control panel

Typical control panel integration

An example of cPanel default integration with CloudFlare section. Note the different CloudFlare areas that a customer to enter into without drilling down.

1 888 99 FLARE | [email protected] | cloudflare.com/partners

The CloudFlare control panel sections are useful to your customers so they can change/update CloudFlare settings and controls directly within your interface.


Customized integration through Host API

SiteGround has chosen to use a customized theme for their control panel integration.


Another example of their custom control panel with CloudFlare integration can been seen in the specific CloudFlare “Settings” and “Statistics” tabs.


Landing page to describe the benefits of CloudFlare to your customers

Create a website landing page for your customer to learn more about, and activate, CloudFlare

Three points to remember when creating a landing page:

1. Be informative A landing page is meant to be a place to describe what CloudFlare is and what it can do for your customers. Highlight features of the service that will speak to your customer base. Do you have a lot of WordPress users? Mention how we keep their websites secure and mitigate DDoS attacks. Are your customers receiving global traffic? Use a map of the CloudFlare CDN network to highlight how extensive their websites will be cached worldwide.

2. Be eye-catching It’s easy to put a large amount of text on the page to describe a product or feature. What’s harder is to make a landing page which stops your customers from quickly passing over. Check out our examples below

3. Be engaging and call to action Don’t forget to give your customers the opportunity to sign on to CloudFlare right from the landing page! A linkout button to your billing area or control panel will keep the momentum from your customer’s interest and lead to more activations

Check out these great examples:

www.dreamhost.com/partners/cloudflare

DreamHost has done a fantastic job of highlighting CloudFlare’s feature set while not overburdening their customers with too much detail. They have also added links for both new and current customers to sign up through a new plan or through an existing plan’s control panel.


www.bluehost.com/cloudflare

BlueHost is another example of a landing page that is very informative and highlights features of CloudFlare that may be of interest to their customers. However, BlueHost has not been very good at keeping their page accurate which is a learning lesson in landing page design. If you are not able to consistently keep statistics updated. In this example it reads that CloudFlare has 23 data centers when we now have 36 (Q2 2015)! It would be a better idea to use generic terms and to link out to the www.cloudflare.com webpage.


http://www.cloudflare.com/

www.siteground.com/cloudflare-cdn-hosting.htm

Siteground.com does a fantastic job of organizing information on CloudFlare into distinct sections while keeping the information focused to a few key bullet points at the top of the page ‘above the fold’. In addition to great organization, Siteground give their customers ample opportunities to click directly to an order page or click out to the www.cloudflare.com site for more information.


http://www.cloudflare.com/

Customer education

Including CloudFlare into your own Knowledge Base or Customer Support Wiki

You want to own the relationship with your customers and we want to be as unobtrusive as possible. The CloudFlare Support team will always be available to help out with issues but sometimes the customer can discover - and solve - a problem with only a little outside help.

It’s a great idea to provide that help by adding a CloudFlare FAQ section to your wiki, a series of how-to articles to your knowledge base, or a best practices list for your new customers.

Here is another great example from SiteGround:

Provide a set up tutorial or orientation guide for new CloudFlare users

Sometimes going through the options and add-ons when setting up a hosted site can be daunting. To ease this challenge and keep the process as transparent as possible, offering a set up guide for your customers is a nice way to lower the barrier to sign on.

Check out this example of a CloudFlare set up tutorial:


Customer awareness

Promoting your integration with blog posts and emails about your CloudFlare Partnership

Your customers will never have the opportunity to experience faster, safer, and smarter web content if they never hear about CloudFlare! Which is why we encourage you to post blog entries and send announcement emails to your customers.

Here is a default blog post that has proven successful and engaging:

How CloudFlare increases speed and security of your site

This is a guest post written and contributed by CloudFlare. CloudFlare makes it easy for any site to be as fast and secure as the Internet giants.

CloudFlare, a web performance and security company, is excited to announce our partnership with [Your Company Name]! If you haven’t heard about CloudFlare before, our value proposition is simple: we’ll make any website twice as fast and protect it from a broad range of web threats.

Today, hundreds of thousands of websites—ranging from individual blogs to e-commerce sites to the websites of Fortune 500 companies to national governments—use CloudFlare to make their sites faster and more secure. We power more than 400 billion monthly page views - more than Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Zynga, AOL, Apple, Bing, eBay, PayPal and Instagram combined - and over 1.2 billion monthly users regularly pass through our network. We’re really glad [Your Company Name] has partnered with CloudFlare – said (name of the person and his/her job title) from CloudFlare.

Faster web performance CloudFlare is designed to take a great hosting platform like [Your Company Name] and make it even better. We run [XX] data centers [link to http://www.cloudflare.com/network-map] strategically located around the world. When you sign up for CloudFlare, we begin routing your traffic to the nearest data center.

As your traffic passes through the data centers, we intelligently determine what parts of your website are static versus dynamic. The static portions are cached on our servers for a short period of time, typically less than 2 hours before we check to see if they’ve been updated. By automatically moving the static parts of your site closer to your visitors, the overall performance of your site improves significantly.

CloudFlare’s intelligent caching system also means you save bandwidth, which means saving money, and decreases the load on your servers, which means your web application will run faster and more efficiently than ever. On average, CloudFlare customers see a 60% decrease in bandwidth usage, and a 65% in total requests to their servers. The overall effect is that CloudFlare will typically cut the load time for pages on your site by 50% which means higher engagement and happier visitors.

Broad web security Over the course of 2011, CloudFlare identified a 700% increase in the number of distributed denial of service attacks [link to http://blog.cloudflare.com/2011-the-year-of-the-ddos] (DDoS) we track on the Internet (see the chart below). As attacks like these increase, CloudFlare is stepping up to protect sites. CloudFlare’s security protections offer a broad range of protections [link to http://www.cloudflare.com/features-security] against attacks such as DDoS, hacking or spam submitted to a blog or comment form. What is powerful about our approach is that the system gets smarter the more sites that are part of the CloudFlare community. We analyze the traffic patterns of hundreds of millions of visitors in real time and adapt the security systems to ensure good traffic gets through and bad traffic is stopped.

In time, our goal is nothing short of making attacks against websites a relic of history. And, given our scale and the billions of different attacks we see and adapt to every year, we’re well on our way to achieving that for sites on the CloudFlare network.

Signing up Any website can deploy CloudFlare, regardless of your underlying platform. By integrating closely with [Your Company Name], we make the process of setting up CloudFlare "1 click easy" through your existing [Your Company Name] [control panel] dashboard. Just look for the CloudFlare icon, choose the domain you want to enable, and click the orange cloud. That's it! We’ve kept the price as low as possible and plans offered through [Your Company Name] are free. Moreover, we never charge you for bandwidth or storage, therefore saving you tons via reduced bandwidth costs.


http://www.cloudflare.com/network-map

http://blog.cloudflare.com/2011-the-year-of-the-ddos

http://www.cloudflare.com/features-security

For site owners who would like to take advantage of CloudFlare's advanced offerings, we also offer a 'Pro' tier of service for $20/month [link to http://www.cloudflare.com/plans]. The 'Pro' tier includes all of the 'Free' tier's offerings, as well as extra features like SSL, full web application firewall and faster analytics. We’re proud that every day more than a thousand new sites, including some of the largest on the web, join the CloudFlare community. If you’re looking for a faster, safer website, you’ve got a good start with [Your Company Name], but the next step is to join the CloudFlare community [link to https://www.cloudflare.com/sign-up].

This is an email communication that you can change to fit your company’s requirements:

[Your Company Name] is happy to announce a new partnership with CloudFlare, the web’s easiest performance and security solution. As a CloudFlare Certified Partner, we deliver their simple and free solution to help protect and accelerate your website. Once your website joins the CloudFlare community, it loads twice as fast and is protected from a range of online threats.

Getting started is super easy—you just need to log into your control panel and look for the CloudFlare icon. With two clicks, you can activate CloudFlare and your website will automatically be faster and safer around the world.

We are pleased to offer you the CloudFlare service for FREE. There is no commitment. Turning CloudFlare on and off takes two clicks of the mouse, so feel free to try it out. We think you’ll like it.

To learn more about CloudFlare, you can watch the introductory video here [link to http://vimeo.com/14700285] and take a look at their blog [link to http://blog.cloudflare.com]. We are delighted to offer this great service to you and help make your website faster and safer.

Use case examples as talking points

Here are a few use case topics that may be useful to help create customer communications, close sales, or further educate your customers


http://www.cloudflare.com/plans

https://www.cloudflare.com/sign-up

https://www.cloudflare.com/sign-up

http://vimeo.com/14700285

http://blog.cloudflare.com/

Partners Integration Best Practices - Cloudflare...Provide a set up tutorial or orientation guide...

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