Digital Marketing

Buying a website on eBay – Without being scammed

First of all, we would like to say thank you for viewing our article. We hope you find it useful whether you are buying a turnkey website from eBay or from another online auction. Good luck!!!

We wrote this article to give you enough information to make “something” of an informed guess.

We say “some” because not all aspects of buying from an eBay website can be covered in this article. It would take a whole book!

Why are we qualified to write this article? We are a real web development company that has been hosting, developing and optimizing websites for over nine years. We have developed everything from local sites to complete eCommerce sites for global campaigns.

We are located in Michigan (state with the most business lost). As with most small businesses in Michigan, we have had to turn to more creative ways to build market share. Here we are on eBay.

Purchasing a “pre-built turnkey website” on eBay can be a very quick and easy way to access the internet affordably. If you design, develop and optimize your own site, it can take weeks or even months to get up and running. This way , you can jump right in and start promoting and marketing your new site.

. . . . . With all that said, let’s go! . . . . . .

It’s really all in the domain name!

A true turnkey website should include a domain name or give you the option to choose a domain name for the site.

A proper domain name should be keyword rich! By keyword rich I mean that it should have at least one site theme keyword in the name. For example: if your site is about dog breeding, then the domain name must have at least the word dog. MyDogDomain.com OR MyDogBreedingDomainName.com

Having a keyword-rich domain name will also help with search engine placement.

What about the website itself?

The Turnkey Website must have these qualities: . . . . .

  • An attractive and professional design
  • All content is relevant and flowing – matches the theme of the site
  • Minimal Graphics – Large graphics take a while to load
  • Accessible via the web: accessible to a wide range of viewers
  • at least two sources of income

A little more about Web Accessibility – Accessible Web design is the art of creating Web Pages that are accessible to everyone, using any device. It is especially important so that people with disabilities -whether due to accident, illness or old age- can access the information on the Web pages and be able to navigate the website. Wikipedia has a great article about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_accessibility

Is the site easy to maintain?

After all, as a website owner, you have to spend your time promoting and marketing your website without doing any maintenance. Although, some maintenance will be required for any website, no matter how big or small, but overall, your website should work for you.

Whichever turnkey site you choose, it should contain some type of automatically updating content, news, items for sale, links, videos, etc. This dramatically helps with search engine placement. Search engines love fresh and up-to-date content.

Ask your eBay seller if their sites include content that updates automatically. If not, you might want to ask if they have affordable site upgrades that can make your site more automatic.

What about web hosting?

There are a couple of things to worry about when it comes to turnkey website hosting.

1.) You should never pay more than $5.95/month for web hosting. $5.95 / Month is a fair price for both the seller and the buyer. It costs money to run a web hosting server: support, backups and daily maintenance have to be done.

two.) Is the hosting expandable as your website grows and how much will it cost to expand? Once your site gets off the ground, you want to have peace of mind knowing that your hosting provider will be there for you. You may also want to ask if you can change hosting if it’s not working.

Ask questions before buying a turnkey website – this will give you a chance to see how good the vendors support really is.

What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

SEO is a buzzword that has been around for a while, it basically means search engine optimization. Carry out certain procedures so that your site appears in the main search engines. Most of the good traffic you will receive will come from search engines.

Any site you buy or create, should have these facts at a minimum:

  • Relevant keyword title, description, and meta tags
  • An .xml sitemap and an .html sitemap
  • Specific keywords and key phrases integrated into the theme of the site
  • Automatically updated content
  • Hand-coded with appropriate content-specific named files and pages
  • robots.txt file

How do I make money with my turnkey website?

Every website needs a way to generate income from its visitors. Income generation can take many forms.

  • Income through affiliate marketing: eBay, ClickBank, Amazon, Google Adsense
  • A physical product that you store or manufacture
  • A service-based website to sell your services
  • Sale of digital products
  • Monetized site promoting Google Adsense

We try to build at least four streams of income into our turnkey websites more than that and it can be quite problematic as it’s hard to keep track of everything. We limited ourselves to the top four internet revenue producers.

  • Google advertising
  • click bank
  • Amazon
  • ebay

These four are some of the largest and most successful sites on the Internet today. We have found that partnering with them brings us and our clients the greatest success.

How to avoid being scammed!

Buy Beware! — If it sounds too good, it probably is.

Use good common sense judgment before purchasing a turnkey website!

If the seller claims he’s making $10,000 a month and you can buy it for $399.00, that just doesn’t make sense!

Why would you sell a website for $399.00 if it makes 10K a month? I wouldn’t and no one else would!

If you insist on buying one anyway, ask a ton of questions, ask to see proofs of all sorts, ask to see the traffic reports, to earn that kind of money you would need a ton of traffic to your website every day.

Established website OR preset website?

There are many eBay website sellers who claim to be selling an “established website” when in fact they should be advertising them as “pre-established websites”.

For a website to “establish itself”, it will receive traffic on a regular basis, which can take anywhere from 6-12 months.

A preset website is one that is established in the fact that most of the design and development is done, as well as basic SEO has been done.

You can get a really great website from eBay, just use a little common sense and ask a lot of questions before you buy.

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