Buying websites is a great way to own your very own successful web business, it is also a very fast way of doing it… however, there is one factor that a lot of people forget, and if you are not careful, it could happen to you to.
Websites are businesses, and therefore require time, effort and resources to maintain.
This sounds obvious, but many people purchase websites with the dream of sitting on a beach whilst their website keeps pumping out money.
Yes, there are a few types of websites that can be automated, but they are few and far between, and even automated sites still require some effort to improve them.
For the other 99.99% of the sites on the Internet, you will need to put aside time each day to run the site. This could be anything from answering emails, being available during server or technical issues, adding new content, creating ad deals etc…
What’s more, unless you are experienced in all of these areas, it may require a LOT of time to complete these tasks.
Of course, you could outsource and hire employees etc… but even employees need managing, and don’t forget that they can eat into your profits.
Our advice when buying a website is to ask the owner for a list of tasks that are required on a monthly basis, and a rough estimate of the time taken for each one… once you have this list, add up all the time and then double it, for a more realistic estimation. If the result is more time than you can spare, then avoid purchasing it.
Remember, what may take 5 minutes for the current owner, may take 50 minutes for you.
An area where I often see this is with blog sales. Often the owners say things like “just 5 minutes per day is required for a new post”.
The reality of course is much higher.
A blog post of any sort of quality is going to take at least 20 minutes, and then you have the process of coming up with the idea for the blog post, which for some people can be a very lengthy process.
So be warned, running websites is a time-vampire, and if you don’t treat it like a real business, it will likely fail.
Midascode