I think when you're assessing whether turnkey niche websites make money or not, it's more a case of ‘can' than ‘do'.
Sure, with a lot of these websites there is tons of potential to make money, but I'd say the majority of people fail to do so, and I'll go into the reasons for that shortly.
Learn all about making money online here.
First up, what exactly are turnkey niche websites?
It's basically a website that somebody has made, is ready to make money, and just needs a new owner to come in and ‘turn the key' or switch it on.
It's not usually that simple, which is why a lot of them fail and the term ‘turnkey' has a lot of negative connotations. Why? Because you can't just assemble a site and money will come to it. Even if you pay for traffic, there's no guarantee that you'll have buyers.
So that's one of the reasons why a lot of these sites fail. The purchasers expect to be able to just plug them in and sit back and relax. I always wonder, if this was the case, why is the seller not doing the same?
If you could create sites quickly that were guaranteed to make money on autopilot, would you sell them on for a hundred bucks?
I didn't think so.
Another reason, and perhaps the most important, is that people don't understand what they are buying, how it works, how they use it, not a single stage of the journey.
If they had some training to follow, it might be a different story. At least there would be a much higher success rate.
A lot of turnkey sellers just produce junk and claim it will work on autopilot, so the person wouldn't need training. Their lies waste your money. If they said the truth “You can make something of this site if you follow my recommended steps, and work at it” then it would be better.
Then again, a lot of people don't want to hear that. They'd rather close their eyes and choose to believe.
Ok, the final reason a lot of these sites fail is because they have duplicate content. They are cloned sites made over and over again. Google won't ever index sites that don't have unique content, so that rules out search engine traffic. That leaves you with social media (feel like spamming?) or paid traffic (want to spend money to see if your site is any good?).
Naturally, it's easy to see why many people just give up when they realize they've bought junk.
So wait, didn't I say turnkey sites can make you money? Why am I slamming them so much?
I'm slamming the reasons why many of them fail, and I'm slamming the junk sites that people put up for sale on sites like Flippa.
What I'm NOT slamming is the concept of buying a ready-made site.
There are some major advantages to buying a ready made site, let's take a look:
- You don't need to struggle to make a site
- You don't need to select a topic or research the first few topics
- You can just take it over, and continue the process of turning it into a successful site.
What about training?
I can't speak for all sources of ready made sites, but here at HumanProofDesigns we put as much effort into producing the training as we do the sites themselves.
We actually created a custom plugin that let's us put our training right into the back end of the sites.
What does that mean? It means that when you log into your site, you have a nice ‘training' button to click on. That training is covers EVERYTHING about setting up a site, getting it moving, and get it earning money.
You can see a quick snapshot below of what I'm talking about.
You can learn more about our sites right here.
The conclusion is that turnkey sites definitely have the potential to make money, but often they don't. That's not always down to the web developers themselves being scammers, sometimes people buy a site then give up!
But more often than not, it's because you are buying junk.
At least with us you know you are egret ting quality, because we hate junk too.