Why You Should Buy an Authority Site Rather Than Build One

In this article, I want to tell you why you should buy an authority website rather than actually building one from scratch. Don't get me wrong - I love both building sites and buying sites. I just wanted to make this experience where I take one side vs the other, and tell you why it can be a better choice.

Let's first define what I mean by a site or an authority site. This can be a site which is just recommending products, which is the case for many Amazon affiliate sites for example. It can also be a site selling digital products, which is the case for most of the sites that are in my portfolio. It can even be an eCommerce site or a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application. So it can really be actually any type of online assets that you could either build or buy.

So let me tell you a bit first about what my own experience with building sites. Some of the site I built are pure Amazon affiliate sites, and some of them are recommending products but also selling my own digital products in the form of video courses. One of those sites is now having more than 100,000 views per month just from organic search, and is still generating today most of my income.

On the other hand I bought two sites, one in 2016 and one in 2017, both from the Empire Flippers marketplace. By the way, I really recommend checking them out if you want to buy a site, because they do a great job into actually vetting all the metrics from the sites they sell. For those two sites, one is about snorkeling, and the other one is about hairstyling. So two niches that I'm not an expert in, however that's not an issue as you just need to find a good writer to generate new content for the sites you buy. Those sites are still quite small site compared to what you can actually buy on a platform like Empire Flippers (one was for $20,000, and the other one for $40,000), however I'm still really happy with those investments.

The main argument for buying a site rather than building one from scratch is that it will save you time. Building a site actually takes a lot of time, especially if it's the first site ever that you are building. It will take a lot of time to actually get everything right. For example, I built some sites that never made any money, despite me spending a lot of time on them. So this is definitely a major argument for buying a site compared to building one. So when you buy a site you just take the money that you have and instantly create some passive income that is generated by the site.

Also it's a great way to actually invest in a site which is in a niche outside of your usual interests (like me with my snorkeling site). I would probably never have started a website about snorkeling because I don't have a special interest for that. However once you actually buy the site, it is already generating money so you can really like make an abstraction on the topic of the site, and really focus on the business side of it. That's also great because you don't have to invent everything, you don't have to make guesses, it already an existing business that you can then really focus on and improve over time. How can I actually grow it? How can I hire writers and a team to grow the site? What optimisations can I do?

Also by buying a site you skip actually a lot of the risk which comes with building a site. You don't have to make any guesses about the niche, as everything is already built for you, and the business is already working. You already have an asset that is profitable from day one.

Buying a website will also make sure you don't have to get all the technical knowledge that is required to actually start a website from scratch. Again it's already built for you, for example if it's an eCommerce site the person or the team that built the site already figured out the technical side like the platform, the checkout page, the cart, and all the technology that is required to actually build the site. So you don't have to also figure out all the technical part yourself.

Finally, buying a site also allows you to be quite creative in terms of financing. I know for example that in the US you have some companies now doing financing specially for this type of online assets (like Kabbage). Basically, you just tell them about your purchase and send them the proof of how much it is making per month, and they will actually give you financing to buy the site. Of course, you can try also to do a loan at your bank, mostly a local bank that is more into taking risk than some bigger bank that will only give you money if that's something they know. You can really try to be creative here and get financing and actually buy a website with a loan, because you basically have a huge yield on your investment (around 50% annual yield).

So those are all the advantages that I see of buying a site compared to just building one from scratch. To sum up, you basically skip all the time spent into building a site, and you immediately get an asset that will generate money from day one. You also skip all the risk that comes with building a site and not really knowing if it will make money or not. Finally, you also have the option to get financing and build a very nice portfolio just by taking a good loan and putting that into a website.

Of course, if you have any questions about the content of this article or anything related to websites & investing in profitable websites, just leave a comment here or send me a message directly!