Turnkey affiliate sites are they any good?

[fizzy]

Has anyone found turnkey affiliate sites to be beneficial? I just started a few dating sites on world dating partners, one cellphone site, and I also started an online casino. Although they are saturated markets I want to capitalize off my somewhat generic domain names in my portfolio instead of parking them. Is this a waste of time...should I just try to develop them and put affiliate banners/links instead or leave them parked?

It appears to be alot easier than making a site yourself. But there has to be some kind of catch to this...

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi fizzy

Yep there are some gotchas. Turnkey sites tend to be cookie cutter or mirror sites that multiple affiliates, even hundreds could all be using. Search engines don't like it and you can get hit with duplicate content penalties.

The other thing is even if you find one that's not very saturated, many times you are limited to how much you can customize so can't do the things you need in order to optimize for search engines, for instance changing the title tags.

If you don't need search traffic because you have plenty of other traffic, then it may be better than parking. For instance if you already had a high traffic tech blog and wanted to throw up a quick and easy cell site to send your existing blog visitors to, not a terrible strategy.

However, the biggest issue of all is that those are all highly competitive markets. Why in the world would someone go to your cookie cutter site when there are tons of authority sites, corporate sites and sites built by rabid aggressive marketers that have been playing the game for years? Chances are your turnkey site is going to land on page 90 or page 600 in the search engines so no one will ever find it.

Now there are exceptions to every rule and you may have found some good ones, but in general, even though I may sound a little negative, I think any of the pros on this board would agree with me.

It's a great question and many newbies end up going down that path,
so don't feel like the lone ranger.

 

[kpfingaz]

You'll still have to learn how to market the sites.

Once you learn how to market those you'll realize that its better off having your own site where you can collect opt ins or like Linda says, have a site that allows you to optimize it for search engines so you can get natural traffic and also get good PPC results as well.

Jay

 

[fizzy]

Hi fizzy

Yep there are some gotchas. Turnkey sites tend to be cookie cutter or mirror sites that multiple affiliates, even hundreds could all be using. Search engines don't like it and you can get hit with duplicate content penalties.

The other thing is even if you find one that's not very saturated, many times you are limited to how much you can customize so can't do the things you need in order to optimize for search engines, for instance changing the title tags.

If you don't need search traffic because you have plenty of other traffic, then it may be better than parking. For instance if you already had a high traffic tech blog and wanted to throw up a quick and easy cell site to send your existing blog visitors to, not a terrible strategy.

However, the biggest issue of all is that those are all highly competitive markets. Why in the world would someone go to your cookie cutter site when there are tons of authority sites, corporate sites and sites built by rabid aggressive marketers that have been playing the game for years? Chances are your turnkey site is going to land on page 90 or page 600 in the search engines so no one will ever find it.

Now there are exceptions to every rule and you may have found some good ones, but in general, even though I may sound a little negative, I think any of the pros on this board would agree with me.

It's a great question and many newbies end up going down that path,
so don't feel like the lone ranger.

Thanks so much!! You definately saved me lotsa time, I'll keep them parked for now until I can figure out whats best.

I didn't realize that I'd be penalized for mirror sites. I am though noticing on the ones I already have started using is they somewhat customizable: edit meta tags on each page, add original content, news..and the casino one I host on my own, you can play with their files and ftp back up..

I guess my follow up question is with all these new attempts by the turnkey affiliates, will this at all fool the search engines? Or can they recognize its all still being managed by the same source?

The more I read the more I am thinking if these sites are going through all this trouble-you end up customizing and doing the site yourself in the end. I might as well make my own website and be able to pick and choose my affiliates...lol duh ok thinking outloud.

 

[YourMlmTools.biz]

I bought a couple clickbank stores. One time offers were pretty decent but I don't really rely on them. I do create some niches using redirects in case there's something I don't have on my huge site lol, but I always place them on the bottom of my subindexes

Rick

 

[fizzy]

Oh neat, I will definately look into Clickbank didn't know you could buy a store from them.Thats an interesting idea to create niches using redirects..I'm thinking that might work for a few of my electronics names in the same niche-hi def tvs, multi touch screens etc..

 

[YourMlmTools.biz]

Not from clickbank itself. I'm a pro member of two of them sold by two individuals. They sell the storefronts

Rick

 

[marketingmama]

You definitely want to have your own unique website. Just go to traffic swarm and check out all of the turn key programs that you just see over and over again.

If your website looks like 10,000 other sites, there is no way you're going to get anyone to hang around.

I'm telling you this from experience.

So, I went out and taught myself what to do and bought a webdesign course and now you could never tell that it was once just like a bunch of other sites.

I'm not going to mention names here, but at least I was lucky enough to have one of the ones that you have creative control over. It's hosted and you have access to your host account. I was lucky because I didn't know any better at the time.

A lot of times, you have no say really in what is on there.

My suggestion, pick a topic that you know something about. Create a nice little site with NVU to get started, and go from there when monetizing your site.

Seriously, this will save you a lot of time because you'll end up doing that anyway.

Sheree