A Guide to Buying Premade Affiliate Websites
Buying premade affiliate websites comes with a fair share of benefits and drawbacks and we’ll discuss all of them in today’s article.
We’ll also look at where you can get the best ready-made websites for sale, how you can determine the value of an affiliate site, and several different factors that might not have even crossed your mind.
Where to buy pre-made affiliate websites
Flippa
If you’ve ever considered purchasing a site before, this site might have come up in a conversation before. Flippa is one of the most commonly used places for buying and selling websites and they have a variety of affiliate ones, too.
There are a lot of options, so you will have to do your best at telling which of the sites is actually worth the price and which one you should steer clear of. Some sites can cost as little as $500 while others can sell for more than $10,000 — it all depends on your budget and obviously, the value of the ready-made affiliate website.
Empire Flippers
Like Flippa, Empire Flippers has been around for some time during which the company has acquired a pretty good reputation. There are a myriad of affiliate marketing websites for sale here, so you will be able to find something that can fit your budget and expectations in terms of value and earnings.
Additionally, Empire Flippers always shows you the data from the site for the past 12 months, which means that you can at least get an idea of how much it can make you in the future.
While one of the most significant benefits to using Empire Flippers is that they handle the entirety of the purchasing process for you, including site transfers and anything else, their services do tend to cost a pretty penny (about a third more than what you can expect from Flippa, for instance).
FE International
This company mostly focuses on very large sites, so you aren’t going to find any small done for you affiliate websites here. While we do recommend FE International, you should be aware that you cannot browse through the sites that are available for sale without first creating an account.
You can also request more information on any site listed on FE International so that you know where you put your money.
HumanProofDesigns
This is a pretty neat place to go to if you want to make sure that your investment is truly worth it. The affiliate marketplace you can find on HumanProofDesigns is quite generous and also lets you tap into niches you might not have even heard of before.
The good thing about the platform is that it’s extremely user-friendly. Also, their staff will guide you through the process of buying a website and if you really can’t seem to find anything that seems up your alley, they will get one for you.
Another aspect we’d like to note about this marketplace is that even after you have purchased the website, you can expect customer support to assist you with anything you might need.
BuySellEmpire
This one is another great option if you are looking to buy affiliate websites and handle as little hassle as possible. While their services are based on a brokerage strategy, they do their research very well, so they’ll give you a number of sites to pick from.
We’d say that this platform is at least worth looking into before you decide to spend your money on a specific digital asset.
Does getting a premade affiliate website make sense?
This is the question that’s on everyone’s mind and the truth is that it all comes down to what you can invest and your expectations. Naturally, the biggest advantage of all (and we’ll go into more detail in a section below) is the fact that along with the site, you’ll also buy ready-made content, backlinks, and everything else.
In other words, you will not have to wait for at least several months for a new site to rank for certain keywords, and instead, you can also make money right away.
But the reality of it all is that good Amazon affiliate websites for sale (or any other, for that matter) do not come cheap. You will have to fork out at least $5,000 for a decent affiliate site and even for that amount of money, you should have minimal expectations in terms of your earnings.
Think of it this way – the person selling that site has spent time and money on the domain, hosting, web design, content, on-page optimization, and off-page optimization, too — so more often than not, when you purchase an affiliate website, you’re also paying for the amount of work that the seller has put into that site.
And even if they are re-selling it, perhaps they’ve performed significant improvements on it over the course of a period so that the website ends up being more valuable — in other words, they’ve also put in some amount of work, too.
Pros of buying an affiliate website
We’ve already mentioned how you don’t have to wait for anything and how you can start making money off the bat, but there are other advantages that need to be mulled over, too.
For example, the more you invest in your affiliate website, the more valuable it will get, so if at one point you decide to sell it to somebody else, you will be able to do so for a larger amount of money. Otherwise said, affiliate websites are an excellent investment and that’s why so many entrepreneurs have built their businesses around flipping sites.
Cons of buying an affiliate website
If you’re just starting out and you have no budget to speak of, this might not be the right option for you. In fact, it might make more sense for you to build a website, write the content, optimize it as best as possible and do your best at purchasing backlinks from good websites for a fair price.
Another aspect we have to note here is that getting a ready-made affiliate website is not a great choice for a complete beginner. If you do have the money, but you know absolutely nothing about plugins, themes, working with content writers, or backlink building, you first have to do a bit of research and come back to it later on.
Also, you might want to consider hiring a VA or a content writer or manager to handle all the work regarding the website as best as possible.
Furthermore, you should be aware of at least some minimal requirements safety-wise so that you don’t accidentally leave the previous owner with access to the site so that they might start selling links or changing the affiliate codes or whatever they might bring them a bit of money, too.
How much can you expect to pay for a premade affiliate website?
It goes without saying that the value of websites tends to vary from one to the next, but it also depends on the niche and how competitive it is, the domain rating and history of that site, as well as the amount of money it makes on a monthly basis.
Most affiliate sites tend to sell for an average about 30 times their monthly profit. This means that if a site makes just $100 per month, you can expect to pay about $3,000 for it.
However, depending on that site’s health, type of content, and other such factors, you might have to pay at least $4,500 to $5,000 for it.
Telling how valuable an affiliate website is
The earnings are, without a doubt, quite important, but there are other aspects that you should consider before deciding to spend your hard-earned cash on an affiliate site.
The first question to ask is this: where is that site’s traffic coming from? Do keep in mind that the traffic can sometimes be ‘cheated’ in that the one coming from paid ads or social media might not be as valuable as the one coming from actual organic searches (since they’re automatically linked to good SEO).
These days, everyone wants their content writers to have authority over the topics they tackle, so if for example you were to buy a pet website where the main editor would be a veterinarian, you’d automatically buy that ‘persona’, too.
And if it so happens that the person is the website owner, you’re out of luck as somehow you have to continue that person’s work without pretending you’re them — and do keep in mind that some of the website visitors might return specifically to check on that vet’s advice.
The amount of competition within the niche you are buying into also needs to be carefully considered. If there’s a lot of competition like you can expect for a search term such as ‘best running shoes’, you might want to steer clear of that site altogether. Smaller niche sites actually tend to do better these days specifically because there aren’t so many other sites tackling the same topics and focusing on the same keywords.
Finally, the age of that domain is another factor that you have to look at. If it’s been running for several years, it’s way more valuable compared to a site that’s been up for several months, if not for the simple reason that during that time, it might have acquired way more backlinks from other websites.
But how can you make sure that you’re spending the right amount of money for an affiliate website? Well, you can never be too sure. However, what we would like to ask is that you do your own valuation alongside the one offered by the website selling platform so that you can tell whether the investment actually makes sense.
If you want to save some money and you’re not willing to pay for commissions on sites like Flippa, you might want to consider directly reaching out to the website owner. And there are ways you can tell if they’re the owner or not, such as asking them to share earnings data in a live conversation on Zoom, for example, alongside some technical information or their Google Analytics data.
Some things to watch out for would be whether or not the traffic is evenly spread across several different posts (if most of the traffic goes to one article in particular, that’s a red flag) and the countries the traffic is coming from.
The reason for this is that if, for example, you want an affiliate site that ‘sells’ to people in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, you want as little traffic from the likes of India and Bangladesh, for example, since they’re completely irrelevant and those people are not going to make a purchase, either. 
What happens after you’ve bought the site?
Once everything is done, the site has been transferred, you’ve paid the seller, and you now own everything, the first thing to do would have to be to change the affiliate links. Whether this is an Amazon Associates-based site or not, you still have to change the affiliate links so that you can start earning instead of the previous owner.
In some cases, this could be a real hassle. There are plugins that can replace most of the links, but you’ll still have to do some grunt work and go through all of the posts and perform a manual check, too.
Once that’s done, you have to set up a strategy of what you will do in the future. Do you want to further build the website so that you can sell it for more? Or would you rather invest more in it but just in order to increase your earnings?
In any case, you’ll have to invest in content and backlinks because the search engines need to see that your website is still getting updated. If you leave it there to die, at one point you are not going to make any more money.
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Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.
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