With so many Beginner’s Searching…
For that “perfect opportunity” to make money online, it’s so easy to get sucked into buying a turnkey website business!
I was duped into purchasing my first turnkey website business back in 2008. Alas, what I thought was going to be my perfect make money opportunity didn’t turn out that way!
I did my homework and did searches on this product before I spent a non-refundable one time fee of $250.00. Out of desperation and dashed hopes I finely realized this turnkey system was not going to work after 1 year of trying so hard to make it work.
It was time to admit defeat!
Was I a victim? Yes!
Did I give up? Hell no!
I had to move on from this failure and after some time had passed I finally understood why!
Nobody likes the feeling of failure but on the flip side you learn from your mistakes. Correct?
My acquired knowledge lead me to accept the fact that turnkey websites are a challenge and not very successful for the inexperienced beginner! I was set up for failure and didn’t even know it.
Now, if you are new to the online world and contemplating a turnkey system, I would advise you to stay away from them. From my experience, I want to share with you why a turnkey website business doesn’t work for beginners!
How Do Turnkey Systems Lure You In?
I was intrigued with the idea of having a make money online business by using a system that has everything “done for you”, in otherwords, completely turnkey! Little did I know at that time, that these systems are primarily targeted towards beginners who have no experience.
The inventors behind these systems are very smart and sneaky. They know that newbies are so overwhelmed with how much knowledge they need in order to be a successful internet marketer.
They also promise a “plug and play” system with all the work done for you and they skip over the whole learning curve.
Immediately upon purchase you can start making money the same day. You could even earn $30,000.00 in your first month. WOW!!! What a great opportunity.
So I thought this would be an excellent choice for me! The turnkey system was so perfectly marketed to play on one’s emotions that I just had to buy it.
I felt so positive, full of confidence and super excited to finally start my own turnkey business venture!
After I opened the progam, I found unexpected things to do that I never heard of before. Oh Oh did I make a mistake?
No I didn’t make a mistake. This was done on purpose because this was how the seller snagged all of his mislead customers:
“Tell the customer what they want to hear not what they need to hear!”
Honestly, I was only interested in what they were telling me – I can make lots of money without doing any work. I had no clue there was more to it and because of that I failed and had no success with my online turnkey website.
My Four Reasons For Failure!
# 1: A Replicated Website – I wasn’t aware I had purchased a replicated website. I did notice that my site had my name but everything else was exactly the same as the main site I purchased from. I thought my site was okay.
It wasn’t until a bit further along in the training that I hit my first major problem. The training was very basic and gave no explanations as to why and I became very confused and frustrated.
A quick phone call to the support team and my problem was solved. Or was it?
I found out replicated websites have difficulity in regards to SEO (search engine optimization). Meaning my website and hundreds of others are exactly the same. From color, images and content, you name it, they are all replicated.
Search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo, will ban my website. Why? Because Google does not like duplicated websites.
So, my site would be banned and with no potential customers finding my turnkey business, how is one supposed to make money and be successful?
# 2: Domain Name and Keywords – Holy cow! I never heard and didn’t know what these words meant! Because of the poorly laid out training, I had no idea what I was to do and why.
Another phone call for help and was told I needed to change the original domain name to my own domain name. Plus I needed to add my own keywords to the site.
Easier said than done! Again there was no explanations as to why. I just had a “gut feeling” that by implementing these changes, then my website would not be a replicated site anymore.
I purchased a domain name from GoDaddy, and I had my web address. Next I purchased web hosting because they provide servers for storing web pages, data bases and content.
Getting my site set up was a lot harder than I anticipated. I still was confused on how all of this fits into running a website.
Next I had to tackle keywords, aahhgg my worst nightmare! Keywords were needed in the new name for the business. Plus I had to take out and enter my own keyword variations in order to make the site mine and not duplicated.
Of course there is no training on this so I did my best and used the old Google keyword tool. It took me 2 months and a lot of swear words to sort of figure it out.
I had no idea if what I choose for keywords was even remotely correct. But I went with what I found. At least my site won’t be banned, or will it?
#3: Duplicated Content – I understood the concept of duplication and I maybe added 10 keywords on the sales page only. I was very afraid to do something wrong and kill my own website.
However the proper use of content went much deeper and I only found out about the true meaning after I became a Wealthy Affilite member.
I was supposed to change the content on all of the pages, but the owners kept that part a secret. I could not access them. How could I make the content my own?
I guessed the search engines would list my first page in their index and any other pages would be ignored because it is replicated. It was better than nothing so I kept on going!
#4: Marketing: Oh no time to learn and implement something new! I was still struggling on how all this would work together. After 6 months I was still no wiser just more confused. I had to keep trying because I wanted to be a successful business owner.
Marketing was all about getting visitors to your site and hoping they would buy. I had the options of buying traffic, placing ads on free ad sites, submitting articles to ezine directories or purchasing and running campaign ads though Google adwords ( or pay per click marketing).
I decided on the free marketing options because I had no money to pay for traffic or runnimg an adwords campaign. The training modules showed these 2 to be the hardest, especially PPC.
Using USfree ads and Adland Pro for 3 months was discouraging. Not one customer response. I also placed 10 articles on ezines to no avail.
After 10 months I wanted to call it quits. I had one option left. With my 100$ credit from Google Adwords I set up 4 ad campaigns.
Honestly, I had no idea what I was doing. All I did was switch out an ad if there was no traffic. Was the ad any good? I didn’t know I kept going until my credit was gone.
By some miracle on the last day of my campaigns I had a paying customer! Unfortunately, that was the only one.
After one year of pure confusion and not understanding how this whole process worked, I quite.
In Closing
The moral of this true experience lies in the fact that I was a beginner and I would have traded having experience over inexperience any day. All four of the reasons listed was my own fault and failure because I had no previous knowledge.
Would I attempt another turnkey website business? No, because I learnt the hard way that they don’t work.
Instead of investing in another turnkey system I joined the Wealthy Affiliate community instead. Here I have learnt so much about building my own website business. The training is exceptional and I now understand domain names, keywords, content creation and marketing to name a few.
One has to be learn about the online process first before seeing results. Learn more about Wealthy Affiliate here and see for yourself.
I am happy to share my story about my first online business failure. I hope you have enjoyed reading the story and if you are a beginner you will have something to think about before you decide if a turnkey website is the right fit for you.
I welcome any questions and would love to hear from you. Please leave comments in the box below.
Take Care,
~Barb~