Okay I'm giving myself a 5,000$ budget to get a new site going. The question is should I just purchase an established site for like 4k and put 1k into advertising, links and so on. Or should I build a new site and invest 5k into the new site? What would you guys do?
Personally I would prefer to build it myself and pour the money into marketing/advertising it. But what are your programming skills like and do you have any good ideas for a site?
You want only one site for the $5000 or might you diversify? Also what are you going after as in adsense, affiliate sales, product sales, etc? I could go two completely different ways with it depending on what you are trying to do.
i think i would buy an established site, and invest the other $1000 in marketing/promotion. *** however, i would be VERY picky about what (and more importantly from WHO) i was buying. in theory, a $4000 site would have a small/regular income stream, so you start recovering your investment right away. i would TAKE MY TIME, and with the first sign of "trouble," back off. GOOD LUCK!
If you have an option of purchasing established site and that site is having the worth of 4k then I will say without wasting time go and buy a established site .The reason behind it is 1) It is tested and bug free 2) It is having loyal visitor base. 3) If you are purchasing a site for 4k or 5k it means there are strong chances of good PR and Search engine traffic. 4) Acquisition always works for proper management. Regards.
I would buy an established site that I like and then start from there. Starting a new site could be very annoying sometimes, especially if you're lacking good ideas or great skills.
ok, well nice little blip of spam there from plendroom, but I would build the site if I knew how, but if not then I would definitely purchase one because of what WM7 said about it being established and already getting visitors. This will reduce what you have to spend on advertising because $1000 is not much for advertising and promotion!
Well, how quick do you want a return on the investment? If you'd rather earn more quickly, buying an existing site with verifiable income might be your best option. If you don't need to earn back the investment quickly, I'd probably come up with something unique on your own and invest the money in a decent design, content, and marketing.
In any business, Acquisition has it’s own Importance. See whether you are a programmer or not its nothing to do with it, what my point of view is, how profitable a venture will be in period of time. Why google overtakes Youtube ,Feedburner etc.. , Google is having finest designer and developers working with them and most important they are having largest advertising network, still they overtake major sites. It’s just because every site takes time to get a loyal visitor base, you can’t setup Second digitalpoint in 2-6 month though you have million dollars in your pocket. I hope you got my point.
I'd buy an existing site/sites for $4000 and spend the last $1000 on promotion. With $4000 you can buy a quality site that is already making $400+ per month. I'd do that before ever starting a site with $5000.
$5000.00 in my opinion is a budget for developing your own website. It will not buy you way into any particular successful niche. Be very very careful about buying a site that has track records of profits. Many people bulk advertise for months prior to a sale to get the numbers looking good. I'd start from scratch using the following steps: (a) Buy a good & aged domain in your niche. ($250.00 - $1000.00) (b) Look around forums for an experienced artist (plan on outsourcing this aspect) even if your a great programmer. (c) If your building an e-commerce site stick to the big names for backend (Zen, CRE Loaded, etc.) (d) You may need to spend a bit on upgrading the out of the box cart to support a simple checkout process or larger photos. This can be fairly affordable using "lance" type websites. (e) Setup a google PPC (Pay Per Click) account (adwords). (f) Become a master at advertising. There are many blogs, forums on the subject. you should be very familiar with how to "test" your ad's prior to spending your first dollar on advertising. Test = A/B graphics on your site, testing ad copy in PPC campaigns, testing landing pages, etc. FYI - this list goes on and on! Thats my 2 cents. If your interested in building a site that is more viral than product oriented PM me. I've been looking for a partner that can take on the timely task of building out a winner in this niche.
I suggest you develop a product, then buy this script: http://www.launchformulamarketing.com Then use the rest of the money for advertising and site design.
It also depends on the time you can invest in it before you actually see results. If you want a site which starts giving back to you something right away, then it will be a good idea to buy an already established site. If you can wait, hire people to do the work for you (research, development, design, content writing etc.) then you should get it done, then wait to get it indexed on the search engines, go through the process of getting links for it, directory submissions etc and then waiting for Google to update its PR... and so on. It can be a very time consuming and lengthy task. If you have the budget right now, I'd suggest you simply buy a site and start working on it. Maybe 2 or 3 related sites in the same (or different) niches.
$5000 is a fairly big budget. You can get a site with pretty good inclome with that. If you build it from scratch, it will obvious ly take time to get the enough visitors for income to start rolling in.
Okay to clear some things up I can code websites, I usually code all my site from scratch. The only problem with that is it takes a while to code a site, plus I'm not sure what kind of site I'm even going to make. Buying an established site will solve both of those problems. More then likely I willl just build the site myself though. How would you spend the money to market the site though?
That all depends on the demographic you are targetting, are you selling products? making money off ads?...etc.