Twenty years ago, I was fresh out of high school, living in my first apartment, and almost broke. That’s when I spent my last $300 on acquiring a small website. I had hopes and dreams of making $1,000 per month, but it was not going well at the start. I knew some HTML, but was immediately in trouble because the website was written in PHP — and I didn’t even know what that was. (My due diligence skills were not as honed as they are today). So, faced with potential failure, I did what anyone else would do. I taught myself PHP and revitalized the website.

In my first year, I earned double what I had set as my goal. I fell into the usual trap of purchasing stupid shit I didn’t need (that most people go through when they start making decent money). But after that, I began to acquire more web properties. My strategy was to focus on websites that were under-earning because they needed attention and renovation.

While it had been a website that I had built from scratch that provided my seed money for the first website I bought, it was the acquired websites (and the work of the previous owners) that attributed most to my long-term success. In the years that followed, I would code and build JuicyAds from scratch to service the advertising needs of those websites, using the same programming skills that I had acquired out of desperation.

So, which is better? Buying a website or building it from scratch? Well, that depends on who you are and what resources you have. [Continue Reading in XBIZ Magazine]