“Turnkey” Websites: A Good Idea?
March 24th, 2009
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by Steve · Filed Under: Bacic Internet Marketing · Video and Audio Posts
I just had a guy send me a link to his “website”. He wanted to know how he could drive traffic to it. It turned out to be one of those “turnkey websites”.
I wish every beginner out there could hear me right now.
THOSE KINDS OF “SITES” DO NOT WORK!
The only people making money on those are the people selling them to unknowing beginners! I could make a fortune doing that; but how could I sleep?
Those sites are nothing but duplicated content…duplicated over and over and over again across the web. And we all know about duplicate content and how it ruins any chance of a page ranking well.
Again, this is just another shortcut which beginners think will give them a head start.
There are no shortcuts to all of this. Any website for sales which had great potential would cost many thousands of dollars…not $39.95 
13 Responses to ““Turnkey” Websites: A Good Idea?”
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Steve – I agree with the basic answer here. However, if someone buys one of these sites and then takes the time to rewrite the articles and add some of their own thoughts to each article, these sites can give them a good place to start.
If they buy them and make the changes to the config file and upload them; not going to work. It’s not that easy.
So I think there is potential there if the articles are good to begin with and someone is willing to spend some time making the sites unique. It can save time from building a site from scratch.
I agree when you find a site concept you like you do have to tweek the style a bit no pun intended. The main problem with newbies is that they think its just start up the engine and they are off. No matter what you have to do your homework on internet marketing their are no shortcuts to that. If someone can market a pet rock or chia pet then you can make a turnkey work with the right skills. I find the best turnkeys are the 1 page variety. The ones that are a cross between a squeeze page and a ecommerce site..the way the internet is set up your customer is gone in 10 seconds. So the 1 page type with affiliate links attached are effective.
-Dusty Crawford. online product reviewer
of
http://www.turnkeywebsitereviews.blogspot.com/
Yes, but of course the problem is always traffic. With most of those “turnkey” type sites, your only real hope of any targeted traffic would be mostly article writing and the social networds.
I’ve been a newbie for a while, and I’m now reading your Real Website Pro book, and I wish I wish I had this information when I started internet marketing a year ago. I agree with Steve that Turn Key Websites are not effective at all. Newbies are scared of having to create a website because they’ve never taken a computer science course, and they don’t know what to do. So when some turnkey product comes a long, they pounce on it, and end up wasting more time trying to figure out how to get traffic to this turnkey website than learning it right and optimizing their websites the first go around. You see people all the time on Yahoo Answers asking how to promote their website. They are just completely clueless to the whole process. It’s much better to start off on the right foot.
Thanks Gina for your comments. Like you say, there are no shortcuts. The quicker a beginner learns that and then focuses in the direction, the quicker success comes.
I’m helping a friend set up a website right now, and it is amazing to me how clueless (and scared!) she is about the Internet and computers in general. I’ve been working with websites for so long that many things come second nature to them. I’m having to hold her hand all the way, but it’s exciting to help someone be successful. She has an existing offline business, and she’s very knowledgeable in her field, so I think she’s going to be able to well. But her priorities! She wants to improve her design and market her website. But she has no content. Not even an about page!
My best advice for beginners, especially if you want to blog or have an article site is to get Wordpress for your website and use one of the great free templates out there, customizing it with your own pictures. Then write your own unique content about things you know about. With Wordpress, you don’t have to know anything about html. You set up your website, then your content is added in just like writing an e-mail. A simple system, and a great tool. It’s best if you have a product of your own. When you have a lot of content, and a very INTERESTING, personal-feeling website, THEN you should advertise and worry about marketing (if you haven’t already achieved your marketing goals, because with just good original content, regularly posted to your site, search engines will love you).
Good comment Leighann. I totally agree. If a beginner is simply not willing or able to build a “regular” site, by all means use WordPress along with SEO plugins to help with the optimizing. For small niche areas content really is king; a blog can easily get that job done for anyone.
Hi Steve,
I relally appreciate if you can give a look to my place: //www.remoexchangeofficeltd.com
I’m a foreign exchange dealer(in Real money) in a major downtown city,at street level, in Canada.
My site was made by myself using:worldinternetbuilder.com(Was not an easy job! but good support from this commpany)
I have to pay 50$ a month to keep the update(I never do!) plus 37$ to Submitnet.com for SEO submissions.
My place ranks 1st line & 1st page on Google ONLY if you search:”exchange office” and sure from the Yellw Pages and the Canpages(They cost a fortune!)
I’m wondering it’s worth to continue this way?
I liked your classes!
Thanx,Fausto P.
Honestly, that is WAY too much money to be paying. $50 hosting per month is more than outrageous. You could do so much more with a simple WordPress blog which you could easily control on your own host for $4 or $5 per month.
And about your “SEO submissions” you pay for. I am very interested in exactly what they do for $37. I suspect they are not doing much for your site as Google indicates your site has no PageRank.
Also, in my FireFox browser, your text is running off the edge of the center table. For that much money, that should not be a problem.
How much traffic does your site get now and from where does it come from?
Hi Steve,
Please go to: faustop@telus.net/ Passw.:nellino to get my Submitnet acct.You can see all the “SEO submissions” they offer.
Only Yahoo! Alexa & DMZO were to be resubmitted,but I don’t know how to modify and add keywards & metatags.
For”No Page Rank on Google” do you mean no submission at all or very far from the 1st Page?
My site did have 2,541 Visitors,me included(In a very long period)
“Test is running off the edge of the center table ” What does mean?
The problem is if I quit:”worldinternetbuilder.com”(C$47.87)my place will be running with no tools to update and will be worthless.
Easly I can quit Submitnet.com(C$30.28)
My business is mainly B/S foreign currency(Real Banknotes,about 50).I tried a website to advertise the services we offer as all my competitors did.
This business is often confused with:”Foreign Exchange Trading”(Now it’s booming!)that is a very risky business,like Stock.Unfortunally the 2 business do have the SAME terminology and jargon,so that it’s very difficult to distinguish because they use same Keywords!
Thank you for your patience!
Bye,Fausto P
PS:I’ve got some difficulty in writing this reply:If you click the button:”Submit comment” and you don’t fillup all data,all the text disappear and you have to rewrite
again!
Hi Fausto,
It is a waste of time and/or money to “submit sites to search engines”. It does not good to “resubmit” anything ever. Besides, “submitting to the search engines” is not the way to do all this anyway. I have not “submitted” a site to google or yahoo for years; there is no need to do that to get listed well.
Yes, you don’t have Google page rank on those other pages because you have not done intra or off page SEO.
I can’t get into all that here, but SEO 4X goes into great detail about all this.
I have to tell you that as long as you don’t know how to add content, make changes, host and control your site yourself, you are severely handicapped. You’ll have a hard time in this business until you learn those basic skills.
About your text: I meant that your text formatting on your site does not look good in my FireFox browser.
I hope that helps,
Steve
Hallo Leighamm Garber,
I read your post about newbies making websites on Nov 6,09
I relally appreciate if you can give a look to my place: //www.remoexchangeofficeltd.com
I’m a foreign exchange dealer(in Real money) in a major downtown city,at street level, in Canada.
My site was made by myself using:worldinternetbuilder.com(Was not an easy job! but good support from this commpany)
I have to pay about 50$ a month to keep the update(I never do!) plus 37$ to Submitnet.com for SEO submissions.
My place ranks 1st line & 1st page on Google ONLY if you search:”exchange office” and surely from the Yellw Pages and the Canpages(They cost a fortune!)
Steve told me my web is not working properly but if I don’t continue to pay the subscription to that company I will lose all the tools for the future updates.I Can copy & paste to another host.After that can I upgrade with Steve SEO-4?
What do you think about my Content?
I had a basic Blog on WordPress(and on Google too)I only wrote a couple of articles on them.
Actually I don’t have any access to them because M.Soft deleted my email and I made a new one
Any clue about that?
I visited your site:Wonderful!
Thanx,Fausto P.
You would be able to copy and paste the text parts of your site for future use on another site (with the same name and using the same file names to avoid duplicate content issues), but you could not move the web pages themselves to another host since they have control over them.
Your site is small and very simple. I would think that setting up a simple WordPress blog would be your best route. They are easy to setup and easy to administer and add content to yourself. I have a link for a video about setting up a WordPress blog here: http://www.steveweber.us/course/blogs.htm
Like I said, you could host this for $4.95 a month and have total control over the blog. Sure, you’ll have a bit of learning to do, but the rewards for being able to have a nice site with new content all the time at a low price will be worth it.