I'm wondering which one is the most effective way; build your website or buy existing website. I'm interested to buy some sites but really the price can go from $10 to more then thousand bucks. What is the criteria needed before buying one? How to spot a really good deal? and how to avoid being dupe?

Hi

There are pros and cons to each side.

If you purchase an existing site, you get the advantage of whatever aging has occurred since that site was created. The longer a site has been around, the better the search engines like it. Also, you get the advantage of someone else's sweat equity in the site.

However, if the site was not created well or properly, none of this may matter.

I would look at what keywords were used to build the site and the profitability of those keywords. This means how competitive are they and how monetizable are they. I would also check the rankings of those pages on different search engines. I would look at how the pages were constructed and how much correction would need to be done to properly optimize them. If there was no rhyme or reason to the construction of the pages, that is not a good thing.

The other thing I would look at is income. I once heard that you can put an estimate of a site's worth on its Adsense income. You would take the monthly Adsense and multiply it by 18 months. That is a rule of thumb of market value.

Now if you're thinking about someone else building a site for you, I personally wouldn't do that. There is so much to learn that can actually help you make money, it really behooves you to learn on your own. I used Site Build It! (SBI for short - it's an online e business building course), to learn how to create my own sites and now that I know how, I can build more and more, creating endless revenue streams for myself. I can be self-reliant and have as many businesses as I want right at my kitchen table. I can also now determine if other sites are properly constructed so if I did want to buy other websites, I could make educated decisions. :-)

At any rate, buy an existing site if it's working well or you know how to get it working - otherwise, learn to build your own. It's a great skill to have.

Hope this helps somewhat.

Thanks BizzyB for your valuable post. I'll appreciate that.

And as Jessica34, we're not talking about SEO here. Tq.

I agree, generally try to make your own site. If you use a Mac, try Rapidweaver. There is probably some really good software for Windows that will achieve the same thing.

Self-reliance is a big thing.

If you are starting out I don't know if I would jump right into buying a website right out of the gate...but you can find good deals. I would really do your research on who is selling the site, how much traffic it is getting, the revenue it is bringing in, etc.

If you go down the path of creating a site...I recommend you getting yourself a copy of dreamweaver to create a website of what you want and then take it from there.

To Your Success,

Dave

Learn The Biggest Mistakes Most Network Marketers Make And How You Can Generate Free Leads Effortlessly,Recruit On Demand,And Put Your Business On Total Autopilot Starting Now...

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You don't need to build sites. A really smart strategy I learned from Google Sniper, (George Brown's Google Sniper - Autopilot Affiliate Marketing Guide) is to purchase domain names and get free templates from Wordpress.

WordPress got tons of beautifully designed sites for free, some for personal use and others for commercial use. It's definitely a faster way than learn how to build sites from scratch using Photoshop or Dreamweaver. Trust me your learning curve will be a lot faster.

since last post, I already purchased 1 website in Flippa. I'm happy with that.

My advice, hands down, is to build your site with your own brand.

If you're thinking about purchasing a website, I'm going to assume you have some capital to invest. And if that's the case, just outsource the whole damn thing to the Philippines. :-)