Are turnkey websites good investments?

A turnkey website is a completely functioning website with everything needed to run a website already completely functional. This includes important items such as domain names, website hosting, scripts, and shopping cart systems. These websites are ready to do business, but they don’t have any history of earning. For instance – dropshipping turnkey websites, have got live products with live prices. All you need to do is update your payment gateway and that’s it or if there is an affiliate turnkey website, just update your pretty link.

These kinds of websites are good for entrepreneurs who want to start their business out of the box and not go through the development cycle. The primary advantage of such turnkey websites is that you can start your business as soon as you purchase them.

Types of Turnkey websites

When you are buying a turnkey website, you are buying assets as slump sale i.e. the website transferred lump sum consideration without values being assigned to the individual value (domain, backlinks, etc). This means that when the website is transferred – there is no transfer anything else like human resources, office space, etc.

The business is the website. Which broadly translates to the following common type of websites:

• Content-based (Affiliate) Websites
• Lead Generation Website
• eCommerce (Dropship, FBA)
• Services (SEO, WordPress, etc)
• Web Hosting
• Online travel portal
• SaaS (Software-as-a-Service)

In short, any website or web application that can be transferred as an individual business can be sold as turnkey websites.

Success Story

A turnkey website bought for 400$ in Jun 2018, after that there were further investments into the website for marketing. Total Sales: $12,170.13 vs Total investment was $2,750. If done properly only a small investment can lead to huge profits. Furthermore, the clients recently concluded the deal to sell off the website at 33750$. When we look into the whole transactions the website in investment vs returns over a period of 18 months was 43,170$. An initial investment of 2,750$ gave a return of 43K USD!! No other asset class will give you such returns.

Key aspects of running the business:

• Hosting: Hosted with TD Web Services – Business Hosting costing them 7.50$ per month. Recently they upgraded to Managed WordPress Hosting
• WordPress Designing & Maintenance: new pages, new concepts were added over time. Money was not spent upfront. The average cost per month is not more than 100$
• SEO: The SEO effort was on the lower end as the domain that was bought already had quite a few backlinks. Which could be harvested via 301 redirects. Average SEO spend per month is 275$
• Social Media: VA is employed to do social media marketing and managing all social media accounts. The monthly cost of 75$
• Content Writers: Need to keep the blogs updated and fresh. Monthly cost 100$ (1 article per week)
• Products: Data feeds were provided by Power Day Sale, they have less than 40% of dresses that are available on AliExpress, giving this store an ability not to compete on the prices – rather focus on quality.

Why buy a turnkey website?

Cost

The cost of development has reduced which has brought down the cost of turnkey websites. It is costing you nearly the same as getting a whole website developed from the start.

Time

Generally, the development of the website will takes time from 10 days to over 30 days. With a turnkey website, they ready for business and saves your time.

The work you do at the beginning of setting up the domain/hosting, creating the email, registering the social media, etc. are really not that important when you look at all the other stuff you need to do in the business.

This matters a lot when it comes to eCommerce business. Signing up with vendors, getting their products listed, etc. just takes a lot of time.

Access to Vendors

One of the reasons why some people who want to start their eCommerce business and not be part of the AliExpress eco-system, use such a website to get access to product portfolio and vendors. This way it helps them to expand their business faster.

Further investment & expenses after buying such a website?

Like any business when you buy, there will be investments in marketing and integration. Just by buying a website, it will not start to make money. Most of the investment & expenses will go to kick-starting your business. Some of the common expenses that you need to do before your first dollar walks in:

• Business Integration: For instance, when you buy an affiliate website, there are URL(s) that will need to updated or incase of dropshipping payment method. Basically minor updates to your site.
• Customization: This is not always required, but there might be a need to customize a few things within the website, like the installation of a few plugins that you might require or as simple as updating your contact detail.
• Search Engine Optimization: Almost all turnkey websites don’t have any Off-Page SEO done. There are absolutely no backlinks or ranking.
• Social Media: Very few websites will come with a complete social media profile. Once the profiles are set up, is to start getting your social media marketing started.
• Ads: This is a new website which means that there is absolutely zero traffic. One of the fastest ways of getting traffic is via Ads.

Conclusion

Well, after buying a turnkey website, do not fall into an assumption that it will start generating money immediately for you. You will need to take it forward as a serious business. You will need to invest time and money both in order to make your business successful. As any business requires a sort of marketing and advertising for it to grow.

Not all the people who buy a turnkey website will have a large budget for advertising and promotion of the same. However, there are some inexpensive methods available that make a great impact and helps you to start generating a good amount of income in less time if done properly.