Should newbies buy a Turnkey web site with prebuilt OTO?

Hi Ben,
So many Guru’s and marketeers these days are offering free turnkey websites with OTO’s etc etc. I’ve noticed that they all are identical and run usually by the same company, and have very poor support. Do you recommend Newbies to take up these offers, or are they a waste of time?

Cheers,
Ken Griffiths

Hi Ken,

Great question.

Yes you’re right. I’ve seen a lot of turn key sites offered. I’ve also seen a site that will sell you an OTO package and sales page already pre-written.

The quick answer is avoid the turnkey stuff and develop your own stuff. You can buy software to assist you in managing your site, managing your sales, managing your affiliates, etc. However the most effective method of marketing is NOT using a turnkey site.

Turnkey sites… LOL I just typo’d “turkey”… Maybe that’s the best description of them!

These types of sites are designed to sell to newbies.

If you are looking for a quick way to make a buck I wouldn’t even use them. Why? Because you could instead use that money to buy an original ebook. Hire someone on elance.com or hire a programmer on rentacoder.com to create an original product for you to sell.

There are way to many OTO (One time offer) pages out there right now. EVERYONE is using them. What’s worse is that MOST don’t add any real value. They just have crappy products. You know what happens? When you signup for one of those you get distracted downloading all your bonuses and either a. never look at them or b. you get distracted from the web site that you bought access to in the first place!

Some of my own visitors complained about Squidoo Secrets because they started working on Squidoo and then got sidetracked by the other stuff Bob was offering them so they never finished their Squidoo site.

A turnkey site is also just a duplicate of someone else’s site. If they sell 100 turnkey sites even if each of you have original graphics most of you are selling the same exact thing. If you’re selling to someone who has been around awhile they’ll realize that your site is a nothing new and won’t buy from you. The only people you’ll be able to sell to are newbies.

In addition turnkey sites also are not going to rank well in search engines. Search engines are smart and can tell when something is a duplicate site. So why use turnkey sites?

So there are a lot of reasons to NOT use turnkey web sites.

In my opinion the best thing to do is this:

1. Focus on a niche. DON’t do internet marketing. Do it based on something else that you enjoy. Are you a guy how about a site on HDTV? Do you like music? How about a site on your favorite band. Do you have a hobby? How about a site based on your hobby. Are you an expert in a particular industry? How about a site based on that?

2. If you aren’t comfortable writing the content yourself go to elance.com. Hire someone to write your content for you. It’s easy enough to have some write you a “special report” or an short ebook. Heck just have them write you the 5 most important things about your topic and break that up into a series of 5 emails for an autoresponder.

3. Now launch your product, build your mailing list. That’s the KEY. You can advertise other products and affiliate programs in your niche even if you give away your special report for free you’ll be able to use those names to build the popularity to your web site, your blog, your newsletter, and then sell them on the backend.

WOW.

Long answer