Buying established websites vs building your own: Let’s take a look at the comparison between these paths, as this is often the first thing that jumps out to most people.
So, you’ve decided to invest in a website. And you feel a bit overwhelmed right away.
Buy or build.
It’s like having two inner voices telling you to turn to one side or the other – buy an established website or build your own.
There are some compelling arguments on both sides.
When choosing between these two options, one has to consider several factors.
Let’s look at what’s involved in both scenarios and underlying risks.
Building Your Own Online Business
1. Too much time planning
It takes as much energy to plan the design, build, and growth of your business as it does to execute it.
To set up a good site, one that is supposed to bring you an income, you need to think about a lot of things:
- Domain
- Branding
- Layout
- Copy
- Niche to tap into…
All this can take months, if not up to a year to nail down a solid plan. If you’re someone with no time and a need to move quickly, this doesn’t help.
2. Spend a lot of time creating
Filling the site with valuable data-driven content requires research, content writing, setting up affiliate accounts, testing display ads, etc.
Here are 4 reasons why it takes so long to create a website from scratch:
- You need compelling content
- You need great design
- SEO is a long game
- You need to deliver a great mobile experience
If you choose to go down the path of building a site, be sure to pick a niche you’re familiar with and interested in.
Don’t venture too far outside your wheelhouse.
If you choose to go your own way but need to fast-track content creation, check out the content writing services over at Alpha Investors for articles that get noticed.
3. Be prepared to wait a long time for traffic
Even with SEO and marketing efforts, and depending on how competitive your niche is, how patient are you really? Usually, it can take from 6 months to several years to start making any respectable profits.
In some cases, there might not be enough demand for your niche, and if that is the case, you’ll have to invest a lot of money and resources to generate that demand.
You won’t get far without these:
- Persistence
- Patience
- Continuing nature
- Openness to risk-taking and failure.
Again, if you’re someone with no time and a need to move quickly, the answer to buy or build is pretty clear.
4. There is still the risk of no traffic
In some cases, you’ve researched the niche and put all of the building blocks in place. But you’re not getting the traction you initially anticipated.
If the case highlighted above is true, chances are that there is no demand or the barrier to entry is far too high for you to enter due to fierce competition.
You’ll have to invest a lot of money and resources to generate that demand.
Let’s face it, that’s unrealistic.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that without traffic, comes no earnings. Plain and simple.
With that in mind, you can expect to fall within the 90% bracket of new businesses failing.
5. Knowledge required to build
Knowing how to build, grow, monetize and manage a site requires a set of skills – without these, you will struggle, a lot.
Building a website from scratch is an inevitable learning curve with a lot of hits and misses that you have to be ready for if experience in similar ventures is not in your skillset.
If you don’t have the skills to deliver a great user experience with great content, design and so forth, then it’s going to be a tough long journey.
A lack of skills, not funding, was the reason why many small, medium-sized and micro enterprises failed.
engineeringnews.co.za
You can spend months doing keyword research and market analysis, developing content and doing SEO, working on the tech — and you can still get little to no traffic or revenue.
Now when you begin to compare all of the above to buying a website, things begin to make more financial sense.
Buying an Online Business
1. Pre-built for you
The time to plan and create is instantly eliminated because you’re acquiring all of the assets that come with it. These include:
- Domain (and its entire history)
- Content
- Social accounts (including their followers)
- Branding
- Backlinks
- Email list
Acquiring all of these can save you a lot of time because they’ve already been built up over time.
You’re getting all of that from day one.
2. History of traffic = demand
Someone else more skilled has already grown the site for you.
They did their job well because a site that is already getting organic traffic indicates there is a demand for the niche it’s targeting.
Here is the traffic overview of a listing on our marketplace.
Now imagine acquiring the above website. If it’s trending upwards, what does that tell you about the risks of failure?
Pretty low if you ask me.
No need to generate that demand from scratch or lose precious time exploring endless possibilities of niches and themes to cover on your site.
The foundation is already in place for you to build further upon.
3. Guaranteed earnings
You’re no longer waiting months to generate earnings. You’re profitable from the first day you acquire the site.
Skip all those months of waiting and worrying about spending your time in vain.
Here is an example of a site that shows it’s revenue growth.
Looking at how the earnings of the site illustrated above are trending, what does that tell you about its trajectory after you acquire it?
The moment you migrate your affiliate URLs, display ad placements to your advertising network accounts, etc, you’ll begin earning straight away.
Enough said.
4. Proven business
When the answer to buy or build is buy, you can skip the part where you’re not sure if your effort will result in a proven business.
You’ve acquired an asset that has already found its market-fit, and the results that go with it.
You’re essentially fast-tracking your success with less hustle and more triumphs.
The business model works, and now it works for you.
5. Modify to your liking
This can be things like diversifying into more revenue streams or giving the site a new design to improve the overall user experience.
When buying an established website, you can also buy a great foundation to build upon.
Speaking for myself, I love taking something that’s already working well and tweaking it to make it even better and more successful.
To wrap it up
After going through all the points above, it’s pretty clear the answer to the buy or build question comes down to 2 different entrepreneurial philosophies.
If you’re someone with lots of time on your hands and not much capital, to begin with, then building a custom affiliate website will probably make more sense.
If you’re someone with no time, but investable liquidity, then buying is a no-brainer.
Which path did you choose? Buy or build? Did this article help you with your decision? Leave us your thoughts in the comments below.
Marketing Manager
Klara is part of the Marketing team at Investors Club. She has been working in various marketing roles for the past 5 years. When she’s not knee-deep in researching, creating, and analyzing, you can find her whipping up some sweets in her kitchen or running around the neighborhood.
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