buy_an_affiliate_siteIf you want to buy an affiliate marketing website there are a number of factors you need to consider.

Advantages of Buying an Affiliate Website

Buying a site can have advantages over building it yourself, the biggest of which is that buying a site will often give you the opportunity to generate immediate cash flow, without needing to go through a long development process.

Buying an affiliate site is also a great option if you want to expand into a niche that you don’t know a lot about.

In this case, buying relieves you of the burden of learning the nitty gritty details of what users are looking for and how to describe a product. Especially if it’s a technical site (medicine, legal, or software, for example) this can be a huge benefit.

What To Look For

When you’re considering a site purchase, it’s important to perform extensive due diligence on the site before you make an offer.

Rather than just looking at the owner’s screenshots (which are easily faked), you want to verify historic traffic and earnings numbers, with an eye on how the site has grown over time. You can request information from the bank, or have the owner add you as a view-only user for their analytics account.

Ideally, you want to look for sites where you see opportunity for growth that the current owner isn’t taking advantage of. Sometimes, it’s simply that the owner built the site 3 years ago and is getting residual traffic without updating anything, in which case simply adding new content could spark major growth.

Other times, the owner has overlooked a key target user base that can be easily accommodated. Either way, you’re looking for potential.

Where To Buy

While there are plenty of website marketplaces out there, like Flippa, my favorite technique is to find niche sites I’m interested in through Google.

Looking for the sites myself takes longer, but usually it provides me with better results. That’s because I almost always know what type of site I want to buy, which means that browsing listings on a marketplace isn’t likely to help.

Many small website owners are happy to have a conversation about selling their site, even if it’s not something they were actively trying to sell. Just reach out and ask them. You might be surprised by what they say.

Other Points To Consider

Finally, it’s important to keep in mind a few other aspects of buying a site.

Namely: what happens once you’ve bought it?

You will need to transfer the domain and hosting to your account, and you will also need to make sure you change all affiliate links to have your unique affiliate id included, which may mean you’ll have to open new accounts if they’re promoting products you’ve not worked with before.

Finally, it’s important that you have a plan for growth in place before you make the final offer. This requires that you know what you’re doing when it comes to internet marketing, and is one of the main reasons that I don’t recommend beginners should buy an existing website.

If you’re a beginner, you’re better off taking the time to learn affiliate marketing and build your own profitable site first, and then you can move into the world of buying and expanding other sites.

Read more about why beginners shouldn’t buy affiliate sites.