My favorite reason for buying an established website is that by purchasing a website that is already online, you have the unique opportunity to build off the work of the previous owner. They’ve already spent the time testing what works and what does not, and they are always happy to give advice on what they would do differently if they started it all over again. This is invaluable information, and it saves a lot of the time you would normally spend testing different revenue models. From day one you can focus on the money because there is already money there!
Here Are Some Other Ways You Can Benefit From Buying an Established or Existing Website...
1. Allows You To Hit The Ground Running
Whenever you consider buying websites, it’s important to consider what you are actually getting for your investment. If you’ve ever started a website from scratch, then you know how challenging the process can be. From picking the domain to selecting a host to writing the content to getting traffic and optimizing for conversions, the checklist for developing a new site can be daunting.
When you have the opportunity to buy a web business that has already worked through many of these beginner challenges, you are left with a business where you can focus more of your time on doing the things that matter: increasing traffic, increasing sales, and focusing on actually making money.
2. The Site is Already Making Money
I wish I could find a concrete statistic on this, but since we all know that 95% of small business fail within 5 years (sba.gov), I would venture a guess that 99% of websites fail within the first 5 days (maybe not quite that fast, but you get the idea). Why? Because most people start websites without any concrete plans for monetization.
When you have the opportunity to purchase a website that has made it past the challenging stage of getting off the ground and it has revenue to boot, that is a business worth looking into.
3. Built In Traffic
Second to monetizing your website, getting traffic is a real challenge. Some might argue traffic is even more important than monetization. After all, how can you monetize a site with no visitors. Either way you look at it, traffic is important, and when you buy an existing website, the existing traffic source you buy can be worth its weight in gold.
Not only will you continue to have visitors to your new business, with free tools like Google Analytics you can quickly see what visitors are doing on your site, where they are going, who is buying your products, and what you need to do to improve.
It’s important to verify where the traffic is coming from. Is it primarily affiliate driven? Is it from SEO or PPC? It is cyclical, or is it focused on one or two pages only? These are all things you want to verify during the due diligence stage, but purchasing a website with built-in traffic sources is always a good thing!
4. Content Already in Place
Have you ever sat down to write a paper or better yet an article for your website? It’s hard. Writing is not always easy especially for those of us not gifted that way. Since content is the food for search engines, purchasing a website with content already in place can really help you leverage what you can do with the site under your ownership.
Perhaps the owner didn’t organize the site in the most optimal way from an SEO standpoint. Maybe they are passing page rank onto pages that they shouldn’t. There are any number of things you can do with the content of a website once you own it, but the benefit again is that it’s already there.
5. Initial Search Engine Rankings
Finally, there are the search engine rankings. It is no secret that age matters for domains (at least from Google’s perspective), and any time you can buy a site vs. starting one from scratch it may be a good idea for this reason alone. There are certain markets where it will be next to impossible to break the competitive barrier sites already ranking for those desired keywords possess.
If you have the opportunity to buy a website that is ranking well, or even remotely well for a set of keywords in which you are hoping to rank for then you should consider buying that site, buying websites for search engine rankings is something you can’t ignore. Often times it can take months for a new site to make any measurable progress for certain keywords and phrases.
I am not in favor of buying existing or established site because we can do everything through SEO in less cost rather than buying a costly existing site.
ReplyDeletePay Per Click Agency