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.

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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.

2 Comments

• At February 3, 2009, Ruby wrote:

  I didn't realize that your last post was so long ago. What are you up to lately?

• At November 23, 2009, Jay wrote:

  Hi Ruby, I've been pretty busy with some exciting non-IM projects in my teaching job. I'll try to give some attention to the blog now and then, though, rather than let it go. Thanks to everyone who has poked me asking about my absence!

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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.

6 Comments

• At October 24, 2008, Terry Hull wrote:

  Jay...I write three blogs; the oldest is about three years old. I am preparing to launch a new site and revamp one of the others for 2009.

  I came across a mention of Site Build It, which led me to the SBI site, where I found an article contending that blogging is NOT always the best answer. That initially struck me as heresy, since my online activity began with blogging and I have accepted by faith that blogging is the big wave to catch. But a lot of what SBI says in that article struck a chord with me.

  So, I searched for other SBI reviews, which brought me to your blog. I have read ALL of your SBI posts. I became curious to know who you are, so that led me to numerous other Internet locations -- your personal blog, your Squidoo pages, Hubpages, Ezine articles, etc. Looks like you have experimented with just about everything, from MLM to niche websites to blogging and all things in between.

  Suggestion for a blog post (or website or Squidoo lens or ebook or whatever): You know what I would really like to know? Having experimented with so many different online activities, which ones are the ones that are REALLY worth the time, and which ones not so much? Your approach seems to be to make a little bit of money in a host of of different ways. But surely some of these activities have proven to be more productive than others. Are all of your multiple income trickles adding up to a healthy stream? Or if you had it to do over again, would it have been better for you to have put more of your online eggs in fewer baskets?

  Perhaps your answer is that there is no way to know which ones will pay off and that the best strategy is to try a little bit of everything. If that's what you think, then an article fully elaborating on that view would also be very interesting.

  Thanks for a couple of hours of informative reading. I think I'm going to give SBI a try -- sure hope you aren't steering me wrong. I'm going to wait and see if they repeat the Xmas special they offered last year -- two sites for the price of one. When I sign up, I will come back here to do it through your link.

• At October 24, 2008, Jay wrote:

  Hi Terry! Definitely wait for the SBI Christmas special before investing in it. That's a great deal.

  That's also a good idea for a blog post, although I don't know that I have a conclusion yet. What is worth the time depends a lot on the person.

  For example, I'm not at all attracted to dropshipping via Ebay. But people make livings that way. I *am* attracted to content creation, but have fairly limited time to spend on it, so my results are limited. Give someone who was out of a job an SBI site, and they'd likely do very well.

  But even with part time effort, niche sites are bringing in most of my online income. It's all additive, so none of your effort is wasted. It just takes longer if you don't spend the time on it.

  The main benefit that SBI gives you is the ability to compete in more competitive keywords. My SBI site currently gets about 75 visits a day via search engines, and that's with an almost total neglect on my part (I add about one page a month to it). Other niche sites I've created using Wordpress get 10 to 15 visits a day (also with almost total neglect).

• At October 24, 2008, Terry Hull wrote:

  Thanks, Jay. What you say really rings true with me. All three of my blogs are Wordpress blogs. I also do not have the time to post frequently, and my traffic is always at the 10 to 15 visitors a day level. 75 visitors a day would be a real blog storm for me.

  My remaining question about SBI is how well it works to incorporate a blog as one feature on an SBI site. SBI says it is doable -- but others out there don't seem convinced.

• At October 24, 2008, Jay wrote:

  I haven't tried blog integration yet with SBI, but from all I've read on the SBI forums it works well. You basically set up a Wordpress blog on your own hosting, and SBI redirects blog.yourdomain.com to that. It's on you to make that look like part of your overall site, but if you spend the time on it you can get a seamless look.

• At December 16, 2008, Terry Hull wrote:

  OK, Jay. As I said I would, I just purchased the Xmas Site Build It special. I clicked through from your site. Thought I'd let you know (I'm always distrustful of whether affiliates always get their affiliate credits.) ... Terry

• At December 19, 2008, Jay wrote:

  Hi Terry, I did just get the notification, thanks! Let me know if you have questions as you go through the Action Guide. It's worth the time to take it step by step, even when you think you can skip ahead. The SBI software works very well with its intended uses, finding high traffic keywords to compete in and letting you focus on content creation, and the Action Guide makes sure you're feeding it the right info. Most of the people who have trouble with SBI skip parts of the Action Guide, and end up choosing keywords with too little traffic, or too much competition, etc.

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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.

3 Comments

• At April 1, 2008, On Stage Lighting wrote:

  I couldn't agree more, Jay.

  I have dipped my toe in the MFA and neglected niche site pond but they never build up web "capital". It is difficult to take any really interest in them and Google gets wise and sends measly traffic.

  The best neglected niche techinique I do use is a tips website. Each set of tips is researched and aimed at a neglected niche and ranks well for specific search terms. The bounce rate is high and CTR not great ( I am using the Blue Sense theme for AS) but I don't do much work on it and the domain gets aged. It generates a bit of income.

  If every website, or even page, is your product then building something people actually want is key. We don't have a physical product and what is have is mostly given away for free.

  Every bit of time I spend not producing good content is like a business overhead. Site setup, coding and design is all necessary, but it isn't the product. I know creating lots of sites can work for some people but it's not for me.

  Aaron Wall over at SEObook.com has some interesting thoughts on modern internet business models and how they stack up.

  Best wishes

  Rob

• At April 1, 2008, Jay wrote:

  [quote post="530"]Every bit of time I spend not producing good content is like a business overhead. Site setup, coding and design is all necessary, but it isn’t the product. I know creating lots of sites can work for some people but it’s not for me.[/quote]

  Not for me, either. I've seen comments on the DP forums from people who work site creation as a mass production business, but I get a lot of satisfaction out of producing content that's truly useful to people, rather than just search engine bait (ideally, the content will be both, but it has to be useful most of all).

• At April 6, 2008, Jean wrote:

  Thanks for the interesting thoughts. I have several SBI sites and I know that everything is handled for me. The time that we are 'forced' to wait until we advertise means that the site is maturing naturally.

  Also we can't get away with keyword stuffing because the analyser doesn't like it!

  So all in all it is necessary to follow the guidelines set by SBI and this is what leads to success.

  Thanks again

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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.

5 Comments

• At February 25, 2008, Harmony wrote:

  Really, Jay? They make you wait til you have 30 pages of content to monetize? Perhaps that is appropriate for total newbies but that would send me demanding a refund if I didn't have full control over the timing of when I implemented what on my own site that I paid $300 for. Otherwise the tools sound great.

• At February 25, 2008, Jay wrote:

  [quote post="502"]Really, Jay? They make you wait til you have 30 pages of content to monetize?[/quote]

  The Monetization module isn't available until you have 30 pages, because it depends on stats from visitors actually visiting your site to make recommendations on which pages to monetize first. And before you have 30 pages, the chances are good that you don't have enough stats to make any analysis meaningful.

  Actual monetization is you putting Adsense (or whatever) code in your pages, and you can do that at any time. If you want to monetize from day 1, you can do that, and the analysis tools will still be unlocked when you hit 30 pages.

• At February 25, 2008, harmony wrote:

  [quote comment=""][quote post="502"]Really, Jay? They make you wait til you have 30 pages of content to monetize?[/quote]

  The Monetization module isn't available until you have 30 pages, because it depends on stats from visitors actually visiting your site to make recommendations on which pages to monetize first. And before you have 30 pages, the chances are good that you don't have enough stats to make any analysis meaningful.

  Actual monetization is you putting Adsense (or whatever) code in your pages, and you can do that at any time. If you want to monetize from day 1, you can do that, and the analysis tools will still be unlocked when you hit 30 pages.[/quote]

  Thanks for clearing that up for me, Jay. I, personally, think any page with content on it is suitable for adsense. I don't see any reason to lose those early visitors. So, I always monetize from day one. As for SBI locking the stats... Well, I guess they have to have something to work with to give you a better idea of where to focus your efforts. Anyway...

  Thanks Again!

• At February 25, 2008, Jay wrote:

  [quote post="502"]I, personally, think any page with content on it is suitable for adsense.[/quote]

  That's one of the things I love about the SBI! monetization module. Once it has the stats to work with, it'll tell you if you might be losing money by using Adsense ads over Yahoo ads. Or vice versa. The two services don't pay the same, and some keywords might work better with one over the other. You can mix them on a site, as long as a single page only has one or the other.

• At February 25, 2008, Jay wrote:

  [quote post="502"]I don’t see any reason to lose those early visitors.[/quote]

  SBI's philosophy is that you have a limited amount of time to work on your site. Most people are doing this sort of thing part time, working it in between family responsibilities, etc.

  In the early days of a site, if you spend part of your time monetizing, you're slowing the growth of your site because you're not creating content. And it's content that gets you visitors.

  Personally, I find that anytime I start monetizing a site, my perspective shifts from providing valuable content to optimizing my monetization efforts. So I like delaying monetization until I have enough content that the site can stand on its own for a bit until I come to my senses and start providing valuable content again.

  But I also create content at a snail's pace, due to everything else going on in my life. People who can generate content quickly and can "monetize and forget" wouldn't have the same problems.

---
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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.

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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:

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

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.

4 Comments

• At January 10, 2008, MakeHowTo wrote:

  I'm thinking of signing up, not much to loose since it is for free and it looks like you could make money online this way. My question now is, do you actually work with it yourself or do you just refer affiliates?

  And if you do work with SBI, do you make money with it? As much as the mentioned 1000 $ breakthrough per month?

  Thanks

• At January 10, 2008, Jay wrote:

  [quote post="466"]My question now is, do you actually work with it yourself or do you just refer affiliates?[/quote]

  If you look at the posts in my Site Build It! category, you'll see that I've started using SBI! to build a niche website relatively recently. I was so impressed with the product that I bought a second one for another niche website, and am giving away one in a contest this month.

  [quote post="466"]And if you do work with SBI, do you make money with it? As much as the mentioned 1000 $ breakthrough per month?[/quote]

  Since I just started recently, no to both. SBI! encourages you to wait before monetizing your site, for various reasons, until your traffic is at a certain level. I'm still building content and am just starting to build traffic.

  Once traffic is at the right level, I'll add Adsense ads and some other monetized links.

• At January 10, 2008, Paul wrote:

  [quote post="466"]#3: Embed Videos On Your Blog That Sell SBI![/quote]

  This is a very nice feature, I'm sure it must convert well. Thanks.

• At January 31, 2008, Trendy Money wrote:

  [quote comment=""][quote post="466"]#3: Embed Videos On Your Blog That Sell SBI![/quote]

  This is a very nice feature, I'm sure it must convert well. Thanks.[/quote]

  Hadn't actually heard of SBI before, does sound really interesting though - thanks for posting about it.

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• Evaluating A Site’s Product Potential

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.

4 Comments

• At January 31, 2008, Harmony wrote:

  That's a very generous offer, Jay. How many hours/days do you think someone starting up their SBI website would need to get things rolling? I'm guessing freshies would need more than the 10 days in the 10 day process I've seen you mention in another post. Hope you don't end up with any clingy pupils ;)

• At January 31, 2008, Jay wrote:

  *laugh* Each of the 10 days is more like a biblical day, they take as long as they take. Some go quickly, and hour or so, and others stretch for weeks. Content creation, for example, takes the most time and that's one day in the guide.

  I don't mind getting lots of emails from students (that's what I do in my day job, too!) If it helps them succeed where they might have given up, that's worth it.

• At April 30, 2008, Gwen wrote:

  Is your mentoring offer still open??

• At April 30, 2008, Jay wrote:

  Hi Gwen, the offer is still open, although the two-for-one special has since expired. When you purchase SBI through my link, just send me a message through the contact form on this blog letting me know the name you used when buying it, and I'll match that up with the info SBI! gives me about purchasers, and we'll go from there.

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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.

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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.

10 Comments

• At December 7, 2007, Lori wrote:

  So how is the Site Build It Going? I am considering about purchasing...what do u think?

• At December 7, 2007, Jay wrote:

  Hi Lori, at the risk of sounding like an SBI! fanboy, SBI! rocks! I'm still creating content pages, but I'm more and more impressed with how much the Analyze It! tool does. And the parent company, Site Sell, has become my new definition of an ethical company (I've got a post for next week on this topic).

  So, yeah, I highly recommend giving SBI! a try. I think there's a 30 day guarantee, so you can get your money back if you decide it isn't for you.

• At December 7, 2007, Lori wrote:

  Thank you Jay! I bookmarked your page to check up on you next post!

• At December 10, 2007, Jay wrote:

  Lori, if you haven't signed up to SBI! yet, hold off for a few days. There's a special coming up that you'll like.

• At December 14, 2007, Lori wrote:

  Really, I havent purchased it yet! Do you know when this special offer is?

• At December 14, 2007, Jay wrote:

  It's going on now (started Wednesday), until Christmas. You can read the details at How To Give A Free SBI! Membership For Christmas.

  It's basically a two-for-one deal, two sites for the price of one.

• At December 14, 2007, Lori wrote:

  THANK YOU JAY! YOUR THE GREATEST!!!!!!

• At March 18, 2008, Brenda wrote:

  Jay, I was wondering how far along are you now with your site? I have been checking into SBI! for about a year now and am one of their affiliates. I am planning to buy it hopefuly in the next couple of months. Is it possible to make one site worth enough to replace an income? Would you need to have more than one site?

  I just heard about their Store Build it! Do you know anything about it? Does the Blog Builder come with SBI! or does it cost extra?

• At March 18, 2008, Jay wrote:

  Hi Brenda! It is possible to build one site that replaces an income, but it'll take a bit of luck and some time. The luck is in having a personal interest fit well with a popular niche. You can make money with *any* niche site, but the amount depends on the demand for information on that niche online.

  The time is going through the action guide and working through all the steps. While it's a 10 "day" action guide, replacing an income isn't going to happen until you have a lot of content and have done the traffic building.

  Plus learning proper monetization of your niche, etc.

  The case studies at SBI! are fascinating to read, especially the one where the niche is kids birthday parties.

  So it's definitely possible, but like anything else it's equally possible to give up too early and not see it through.

  I just put some Adsense ads on my site a week or so ago to test the waters for monetizing it, and have been earning about $1 on 20 to 30 visitors a day. That's promising enough to have me looking into building more traffic and more effective monetization options.

• At March 24, 2008, Jay wrote:

  Brenda, sorry I missed your question about Store Build It and blog builder. Store Build It is extra, and I haven't used it yet. It's really only for full scale online stores. You can use Paypal without it to test the waters and see if a store is something that will work well for your site.

  Every SBI! site has a built in blog, where every change you make to the site gets an entry. But if you want a full blown blog, you'll probably want to integrate Wordpress into the site (which can be done using InfinIt).

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