Category: Site Build It!

I just got a notice from SiteBuildIt (SBI) that they’re offering monthly payments. If you’re not familiar with SBI, you can take a look at by original SBI Review.

Now, I understand why they’re doing this. People have trouble committing $299 to hosting and tools to create a website, even when the tools are top-notch. That isn’t a problem with SBI, but with the general attitude of most Internet Marketers. The “gurus”, the ones who make their money off the rest of us, create an image of instant success, so most people aren’t willing to invest for the long-term.

So, a monthly payment for SBI seems like a good deal to those people. They can try out the tools and system month to month, and get out if they decide it won’t work.

The problem is that building an online site that will earn money regularly takes time. My neglected niche sites (ebook to come, promise!) typically take six months to start generating income. Sites that are actively developed take less time, but we’re still talking months.

In my opinion, anyone not willing to invest a year into an online project is dooming themselves to failure. Going month to month just means that the people looking for quick results will probably quit after a couple of months. But the person who paid for a year will keep going, and see that success happen.

So, if you’ve been wanting to try SBI but have been put off by the yearly fee, you can certainly try the monthly option. But if you’re going to make a success out of it, you’ll spend less by just going for the yearly fee to start.

It’s that time of the year again, when anyone who has been thinking about giving SBI a try has an extra special reason to take the plunge. For the first year, you get not one, but two complete SBI sites for the price of one.

They’ve recently started marketing SBI as a complete online business course. It’s about time, too, since their Action Guide really is a complete course. It’s a very specific course, designed to allow you to create content sites that compete on high profile keywords.

The secret of SBI is that anything that can be automated has been automated. You don’t worry about search engine optimization, you just pick keywords according to the guidelines in the action guide, and put them in the places you’re told to do so. Everything else just happens. There are tons of other features like that that make it worth the yearly fee.

Your only responsibility to your SBI site is to create content consistently. That might mean one page a day, it might mean one page a week, or one page a month. Just keep creating content at whatever rate you can, and your site will keep creeping up in the search engine results.

SBI is not for people who want to create a site and forget about it. My upcoming ebook is for that audience, but SBI sites require tender loving care on a regular basis. Think of them as high maintenance friends. Give the sites what they need, and they’ll start earning for you.

To take advantage of the 2-for-1 Christmas special, click on that link and click on the Order link at the bottom of the page.

Long-time readers will remember that I created a couple of niche sites from scratch. One used my neglected niche site strategy (basically, create a typical MFA site, submit it to some directories, and forget it). Another used SBI, which is a more managed approach, focused on creating a quality niche site.

Both sites were started in November of last year, but my natural procrastination kept either from being much to look at until March (when I had enough of the SBI site up to monetize it).

Traffic

The SBI site started receiving traffic almost immediately. Too soon, in fact, since I hadn’t had enough pages up to make it a site worth visiting when the first visitors started arriving. But that just gave me the motivation to get a minimum set of pages up quickly, instead of procrastinating. The SBI site currently gets about 70 unique visitors a day, on average. I’ve done no promotion with it beyond directory submissions.

The neglected niche site has had, on average 0 visitors a day until just recently. It takes sites like this a while to age before Google decides they’re okay to list. It’s now sitting on page 2 for its keyword in Google. Based on my experience with other sites like this, it’ll take another three or four months to get up to page 1 (and will drop off entirely several times in that period). The key here is to keep up with the directory submissions, so Google sees continued linking to the site. So going with just the recent activity, the site is getting about 5 visitors a day.

Adsense Income

The SBI site started getting Adsense hits as soon as I monetized it, since traffic was already coming to the site (another reason for late monetization is the instant gratification you get by getting at least one Adsense hit). It’s made a grand total of $30 since March. Not great by any measure…the particular niche I chose might tend to discourage Adsense clicks.

The neglected niche site has made about $1.50 in that same time period. Based on other sites like this I’ve done, I expect it to eventually make about $1 a day. It’s in the same niche as the SBI site, but provides less useful information so the click through rate on Adsense will be higher.

Which Is Better?

It all depends on how you work.

I think the SBI site has more potential for income, but the key with a site like that is that it must be updated frequently, and the information must be quality. You’ll make less in Adsense in the short-term, but you’ll build trust with your regular visitors. That trust will let you recommend affiliate products or sell your own products later.

But the neglected niche site strategy is a fire-and-forget strategy. It’s the “build 50 of these sites to earn $1,500 a month” strategy. That’s appealing to a lot of people, because it doesn’t require creating quality content, and doesn’t require much in the way of promotion. It does, however, require patience, since sites like this take forever (in Internet terms) to rank well.

I’d recommend you try both and see how they work out for you, personally.

Regular readers will remember that I’ve done a couple of neglected niche sites.

The basic idea is that you write a niche site and then forget about it for months at a time. You might submit it to some directories, but other than that you do absolutely nothing with it. Eventually it starts to get some traffic, and earn some money.

The first neglected niche site I did earns about $30 a month from Adsense, and about $50 a month from affiliate sales. For about 8 hours of work over the last six months, that’s not bad at all. I wanted to see how a quality niche site built with the SBI tools compared to a neglected niche site.

So I did the keyword research to pick a niche I could write quality content for, and put together a neglected niche site using the same formula I used for the first. I used WordPress to create the niche site, and wrote just enough content to justify placing affiliate links. Total time spent, about 4 hours.

Once that was done, I bought an SBI site and started working through the SBI Action Guide. Over about four months I created content, and last month put some Adsense ads on the most visited 10% of the pages. I actually targeted a more competitive keyword for this site than for the WordPress based one, to give the SBI tools a test.

Both sites have been live for about the same amount of time. What have the results been so far?

The neglected niche site is still waiting to get out of Google purgatory and get ranked for its keywords. Total number of visits to the site in the last four months is 15, mostly from Google. This actually matches pretty well with my first neglected niche site, which started ranking well only after three or four months.

The SBI site in that same time frame has had about 2,000 visitors, split among the Google, MSN, and Yahoo search engines. Traffic has been trending upward the entire time, so the future looks good for this site.

Income from the neglected niche site has been $0. I just put ads on the SBI site March 10th. The first month’s income there was $16. I don’t have affiliate links on the SBI site yet, but plan to add those soon.

The SBI site hasn’t caught up yet to the first neglected niche site I created, but I have no doubt that it will before long. The traffic on the first neglected site is no longer trending upward, but has plateaued. The SBI site is still stretching its legs, so I’m not sure how high the traffic there will go.

I’ll be back in a few months with an update, but at the moment I’m convinced that writing quality content and using advanced tools (such as the SBI tools) is a far better investment of time than churning out mass quantities of made-for-Adsense sites.

If you’ve been following along with my SBI! series, you’ll recall I was last on day 7. How’d I get to day 10 already?

Day 10 is monetization, and is triggered by you reaching 30 pages of content on your site. When that happens, the monetization module unlocks, and gives you access to some very cool analysis tools.

Keep in mind that you don’t automatically monetize at this point, but 30 pages of content is a good milestone. You also want to be getting some traffic, at least 20 to 30 unique visitors a day. If you aren’t getting the traffic, then the time you’ll spend monetizing could be far better spent creating more content.

The SBI! monetization tools pull data from Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing, along with data culled from your website’s referrer logs (those tell SBI! what keywords people are actually finding your site with). All that data is then run through some analysis and provided to you in three ways.

The Content Building module shows you the relative keyworth of all of your site’s keywords. Keyworth is a number that SBI! came up with that is a one-number summary of the keyword demand, supply, Adwords and Search Marketing prices, traffic, etc. Sort by the keyworth column, and you have the keywords you want to target at the top of the list.

The Content Building module helps you to focus your content creation on the pages that will give you the most monetization benefit. You’ll still create pages for all the keywords eventually, but you might as well do it for the most valuable keywords first.

The Ad Selling module shows you a list of all your pages, along with how many visitors you’ve gotten to each page, and the Adwords and Search Marketing estimates for how much the keywords for those pages are worth. Since this is a page oriented module, if you don’t have a page for a keyword it won’t show up here.

This module shows you what the most valuable pages are to place either Adwords or Search Marketing ads on. And it’ll tell you which is better for each page.

The PPC Buying module provides you with all sorts of statistics that are useful if you plan on driving traffic to individual pages on your site with PPC campaigns. You have to be able to effectively monetize before this makes sense, so I haven’t gotten into this module. But it looks to provide the same high quality analysis as the others.

Once again I’m extremely impressed with the quality of the tools that SBI! provides. The monetization analysis tools provide the data needed to make rational decisions about how and when to monetize to the greatest benefit. Most people creating niche sites do this haphazardly, but SBI! gives you what you need to do it systematically.

Click here for a quick tour of what SBI! provides.

I’m into day 7 of the Site Build It! action guide, which covers building traffic.

I’m actually still in day 6, building content, too. In the later stages of the action guide, the days overlap a fair amount. In fact, I skipped ahead to day 8 to get my “Contact Me” page built recently, and then came back to days 6 and 7.

But what I wanted to cover in this post is the Value Exchange tool in day 7.

One of the prime techniques in day 7 is building quality inbound links. If you know enough SEO to be dangerous, you know that a link building campaign is a great way to boost your positioning in search engine results. If you know a little more SEO than that, you also know that quality in-context links are worth their weight in gold, when compared to general directory links. Directory links help, but they don’t give you the boost that even one really good in-context link does.

The Value Exchange tool helps you to locate sites that’ll give you those in-context links. It’s primarily a link exchange program, which have gotten a bad reputation, for good reason. The way that link exchanges are typically done among blogs is that one person will offer to blogroll another person’s blog, in exchange for them doing the same in return. This sort of generic site-wide link offers little SEO benefit, and might actually cause a site to be penalized if you do too many of them.

What Value Exchange does is it offers the opportunity to exchange quality in-context links with another site in your same niche. This is the sort of thing that happens naturally. I find a site in my niche that covers a topic really well, so I link to them for more detail in a post about that same topic. They have a post about at topic that I cover really well, so they link to me. Search engines don’t penalize this behavior, because it’s expected.

Value Exchange simply makes it easier to find those other sites in your niche, so that you can negotiate an exchange of quality in-context links.

At least, that’s all it does if you don’t own an SBI! site. If you do own an SBI! site, then Value Exchange has another level to it. The software analyzes the web logs for your site daily, and pulls out any referring sites and puts them into a list of inbound links. You can easily check out the site that’s linking to you and see what if the link is quality or not.

If you’ve made a link exchange arrangement with a site, Value Exchange will check the status of that link daily, and let you know if they remove their link (an unethical technique that some webmasters will use).

Value Exchange also calculates the Internet-wide oomph of your link campaign, as a number between 0 and 100. 0 means that you have no inbound links that are attracting traffic, and 100 means that you could not possibly be doing any better. They’ve arbitrarily chosen CNN.com as their basis for comparison, so CNN.com is a 100. CNN.com gets a lot of incoming links!

Part of what goes into this number is not just the number of incoming links, but the quality. Are the links used in context and with suitable anchor text that will help your site rank higher in search engines? Then the link counts for more. General directory links count for less, niche directory links count for more than general directory links, but less than in-context article links. You get the idea.

While the scale goes to 100, the most that a small niche site can really hope to achieve is from 50 to 60. When you get to 50, you know that you’ve positioned your site as well as you reasonably can with respect to inbound links. It’s time then to focus on other aspects of your site.

My current SBI! niche site is at 12, which is in the range that means the link building is having an effect on search engine placement, but a lot more work is needed. Which is reasonable, since I’ve just started link building.

The deeper I get into the Site Build It! action guide, the more impressed I am with the tools. They’re truly useful, and tailored to be useful in just the way you need them to be.

You can participate in Value Exchange without owning an SBI! site, but you won’t get the link monitoring benefit. It’ll still be a great way to find other sites in your niche for the purpose of exchanging quality in-context links.

Click here for the Value Exchange page.

Regular readers of the blog know that I an a huge fan of SBI! for creating niche websites.

I’ve neglected, though, to talk about being an SBI! affiliate, which is also a great opportunity backed by SBI!’s professional support. So here are my top 10 reasons to be an SBI! affiliate, even if you don’t purchase an SBI! site.

#10: It’s Free

Okay, so any decent affiliate program should be free, but some aren’t. And it’s only reason #10.

#9: Track Clicks To Sales

The built in link tracker you can use as an SBI! affiliate tracks clicks to sales, so you’ll know exactly which promotion is converting visitors into sales, and which aren’t. This can be used to target specific landing pages to specific markets, once you figure out which ones work best.

#8: Two-Tiered Earnings

Recruit affiliates, and earn a bit of what they make, too. The amount isn’t much, but it’s something.

#7: Tons of Landing Pages

Most affiliate programs give you one landing page only. SBI! has landing pages tailored to different markets you may want to pursue.

Trying to sell SBI! to work-at-home-moms? Use the WAHM landing page, or the WAHM Master’s Course ebook. Or maybe you’re targeting webmasters, so you’d use the Webmaster Business Course page.

Want to market to college students? Try this landing page. Or this one, for marketing to retirees who want an online business.

And there are others for auction sellers, people who want to sell e-goods, people who want to sell hard goods, people who want to sell real estate, and more.

There are also other ebooks you can give away, pages that educate on some aspect of Internet Marketing, free tools and services, etc, etc. All of which place your cookie on the visitor’s machine, so that if they purchase SBI! after browsing through the website, you get the customer.

#6: The Best Support Forums I’ve Seen Yet

The SBI! forums are simply the best I’ve seen yet, with members helping members and quick responses from SBI! employees, too. There are lots of ideas for promoting SBI! there, including some great offline tactics.

#5: Great Support For Offline Sales

Not only do you get tips for offline sales in the forums, but SBI! has a training package you can download designed to help you make offline sales. There’s also an order form that allows you to take orders offline and enter them yourself from your computer, ensuring you get the credit for the sale.

#4: Name Park It!

NPI! is a tool available to SBI! affiliates. You can purchase a domain name through NPI!, and redirect it to another site (such as one of the SBI! landing pages). But you also get unlimited subdomains that can each be redirected to any URL you choose. Use these to shorten URLs, or to create a unique domain for use in Adwords ads (where a given domain can only appear once in a list of ads, so if someone else is already using sitesell.com, the chances are good your ad won’t even show).

All for the same as the cost of a domain name elsewhere.

#3: Embed Videos On Your Blog That Sell SBI!

They’ve provided a bunch of videos that you can embed on your blog or other site where you promote SBI!. Just like the landing pages, there are videos targeting different markets. Here’s one targeting work at home moms:

URL= “http://wahm.sitesell.com/complete4.html”;

And here’s another targeting people who want to get out of a day job:

URL= “http://workfromhome.sitesell.com/complete4.html”;

Each video sends people at the end to a particular landing page, with your referral link.

#2: Make Money By Helping People Succeed

SBI! is one of the few “opportunities” that is really committed to helping people succeed. You earn a commission, and you help someone start an online business that could transform their lives.

#1: Get Lifetime Commissions

At SBI!, when you get a customer to make a purchase, they’re your customer for life. You not only getting a commission from the initial sale, but every year they renew their site you get ongoing commissions.

And if they ever buy more sites, which many SBI! owners do, you get commissions on those sites, too. The SBI! philosophy is, your customers are yours for life.

Conclusion

So not only am I an SBI! fan, but I think the affiliate program is pretty terrific, too. There are more than 10 reasons, but I couldn’t quite come up with 100, so I stuck with a top 10 list. If I didn’t cover your favorite reason to be an SBI! affiliate, leave a comment and let me know what it is.

If you’re not already an SBI! affiliate, click here to sign up.

As part of my effort to provide exceptional value to those who follow my recommendations, I’m starting a mentoring program for anyone who purchases an SBI! site through one of my links.

I’d been planning on offering a web site with tutorial information, similar to what I do for my Marketing Pond referrals, but the SBI! material is already exceptional. But there are aspects to the process that may not be obvious the first time through, especially if you are new to Internet Marketing.

So to provide extra value, what I’ll do is personally help anyone who purchases SBI! through one of my links to identify a profitable niche and do the initial site design (identifying appropriate keywords for tier 2 and tier 3 pages). My focus will be on helping you to build the skills and judgment needed to do it yourself, rather than simply doing it for you. But I’ll offer advice on what I would do, too.

This offer is also good for whoever wins the January contest, so good luck to everyone who enters!

Also, I’ve recently received notice that the buy-one-get-one-free Holiday special has been held over until January 4th. So you still have a couple of days in which to get two SBI! sites for the price of one. SBI! is a great value as it is, cutting the price of two sites in half is even better. And now, you can also get personal mentoring from me as you work through the action guide.

Click here for the two-for-one special.

Note that you’ll purchase your first site through the order form. When you receive your “Get Ready For Site Build It!” email with details on getting started with your site, there will be a link at the bottom of that email for redeeming your free site. You have 9 months in which to redeem that second site (or give it to someone else), and the one year subscription for that second site doesn’t start until you redeem it. So you can take your time building your first site, and only redeem the second when you’re ready to start another site.

If you purchase an SBI! site through my link, use the contact form at this blog to request your personal mentoring. Send me your first name and the last four digits of your telephone number, to allow me to verify the purchase. Also let me know how far you’ve gotten in the SBI! action guide, and we’ll go from there.

P.S. To be certain of getting credited as my referral, and being eligible for the mentoring, it’s best to clear your cookies before clicking through my link to order.

I’ve posted a lot about the SBI! process, and the value of the SBI! tools.

Most people feel that the cost of SBI! is high, which is only because they’re looking at it in conventional web hosting terms. $299 for a year’s web hosting is high. With SBI!, though, you get not only web hosting, but the Site Builder tool with it’s Analyze It! technology so you don’t have to be so disciplined to remember every little SEO trick for every page you create or edit. You also get other services included that more than make SBI! a bargain.

And at this time of the year you can buy an SBI! membership and get one free. The free membership can be used to create a second site for yourself, or you can give it as a gift for Christmas. SBI! is suitable for just about anyone, as long as they have a desire to create a web site to make money online. The process outlined in their Action Guide can be followed by anyone, even if they know nothing about SEO or online business.

You have until the stroke of midnight on Christmas day to take advantage of the special. At that point the banner in this post will automatically change to a regular SBI! banner, until their next special rolls around.

I’m not finished creating content for my Site Build It! powered niche site yet, but have done enough to be able to comment on the tools.

The core of day 6 is the Site Builder tool. This is what allows anyone to create a professional website even if they know nothing about HTML.

Site Builder, like most of the SBI! tools, favors efficiency over glitz. The tool is not a What You See Is What You Get graphical editor of web pages, but a block by block editor. You can drop into your page multiple kinds of blocks, including headlines, text paragraphs, links, images, and more. You can also upload your own HTML if you prefer to write your own pages.

While I’m comfortable with writing HTML, I wanted to use Site Builder the same way a novice would. So I’m sticking with block by block editing.

The first step in Site Builder is to choose your site’s look and feel. There are around 100 prebuilt themes that you can use with a single click. Each can also be customized in various ways to make it your own. You can also use a completely custom theme by uploading the files to Site Builder.

The second step is to write your site’s home page. The home page does not have all the options that other pages in the site do. A home page is basically a headline and a big text block. The goal is to keep the home page simple, and get visitors to click through the various navigation links to other pages in the site. Site Builder does let you easily enter META keywords and description.

Where Site Builder really shines is in the Analyze It! button.

As you’re creating a page, you can click Analyze It! to get an evaluation of your page. It checks the keyword density of the page, the inter-site linking from page to page, the presence of the page’s keyword in key areas, etc. Basically, every SEO trick the Site Build It! team could come up with is programmed into Analyze It!. The result is that you don’t need to know SEO yourself in order to build a nicely optimized page. Just follow all the Analyze It! recommendations.

Some lesser used features that are also built into the tool are the ability to pop under one of your pages when your home page is displayed, and the ability to require a password be entered before a page can be viewed.

Day 6 also involves setting up email for your site. I opted to use Google Apps for the domain, and the SBI! guide has detailed instructions on getting that setup.

The only problem I had with Site Builder is that there’s no “save as draft” feature. So you can’t write a dozen interrelated pages and then publish them all at once. Pages must be ready for visitors when you publish them. This isn’t a problem when you first start building your site, since the search engines don’t know about it yet, but after you’ve started to get some traffic you need to make sure any page you publish is suitable to be seen by real visitors.

I estimate that I’ll have anywhere from 40 to 50 pages in the site when I’m done. The amount of keyword research credits Site Build It! gives you was more than enough for identifying the main keyword for the site, and the keywords for all the tier 2 pages. There won’t be enough, though, for identifying all the tier 3 keywords. And the SBI! keyword research tool is really overkill for tier 3 pages. I plan to use the Google Adwords keyword tool for tier 3 keywords, and save my remaining SBI! credits for researching entirely new niches.

I’d say I’m about 15% done with Day 6. Day 7 is about traffic generation, but I don’t expect I’ll be there for some time yet. Meanwhile, the neglected site on this same niche has been submitted to directories already, and is waiting for traffic to arrive.

Click here for a quick tour that includes some screenshots of Site Builder.