21st Century Affiliate Marketing

I want to preface this post by saying that I learn much better when I teach myself or learn from an individual than I do when I’m in a classroom. I don’t know if I’m in the minority or the majority in that respect, but I know that all of us learn differently.

I prefer to read and learn. Perhaps you enjoy interacting and learning.

Do you learn better in a classroom setting?

One of the things that Sitesell offers that I haven’t talked about very much is their eLearning course. This is an online version of the course that is taught at a number of universities and colleges around the world.

Since the eLearning course was first introduced, you could enroll in the course at a discounted introductory price. That price expires on January 31, 2010 and the normal price takes effect on February 1, 2010.

If you are one of the people who learns better in a classroom setting - in the comfort of your own home, no less - then you may want to look into what the SBI eLearning course offers.

Here’s a brief video that explains it in just under ten minutes:

Perhaps you’re a self-learner

On the other hand, if you’re a self-learner, like me, then you may be more interested in the standard SBI Version 2.0 subscription. It offers much of the same training and support without having to attend a class.

Would you rather hire someone to help you build your online business?

Maybe you’re one of those people who has more time than money and you’d rather hire someone to build your online business for you, or at least to help you get it started.

Sitesell Services will work with anyone who wants them to “do it for me.” That doesn’t mean you won’t be involved, however. The webmaster who builds your initial site will consult closely with you to make sure it meets your needs.

Three great ways to get started with building a real online business

Now, Sitesell offers a great way to get started with building your online business regardless of your learning style or business preferences. You can do it yourself, learn in an online class, or hire someone to do it for you.

If you’re seriously interested in building a profitable online business, you owe it to yourself to quit flitting around from this to that and focus on building a business that you can enjoy working and promoting.

This is not get rich quick! It will take an investment of time, effort, creativity, and money to build a real business.

Don’t forget.

The introductory pricing for the eLearning course goes up in just two weeks.

If you want to take the class and save money, don’t delay.

Act on your dream!

JD

If you’ve been reading my blogs or sites for any length of time, you know I live in an area where only dial-up Internet access is currently available, and it’s also an area with old, copper phone lines so that means I’ve been connecting at much slower speeds than my equipment is capable of.

This wasn’t much of a problem a few years ago.

Now, however, it has become a much bigger problem, especially for someone who earns his living from online marketing.

For the last week or so, I’ve had access to high-speed broadband and it has made all the difference in how I perceive what I and some of my friends are doing online.

For example, I’m a huge fan of Mitch Mitchell’s I’m Just Sharing blog and Aussie Sire’s Wassup blog.

As much as I enjoy both of their blogs, sometimes it has been frustrating trying to get them to load. Many times, I would have to load a blog post two or three times before the entire page would load.

This week, however, they load the first time, every time and do it quickly. That has made it much easier and more enjoyable to read what they have to say. The same holds true for quite a few other blogs I read on a regular basis.

The benefit to me is that I’m less frustrated and can read more in much less time. That increases my motivation to participate and also decreases the amount of time I spend waiting — and playing solitaire while the pages load. (In fact, I’ve only played two games of solitaire in the last week, and there were many times in the past few years when I would play several games while waiting on one page to load, so that’s a huge difference.)

Broadband makes it much easier to edit my sites

Truthfully, it hasn’t made much of a difference in editing my own blogs and sites, because I tend to do a lot of low-bandwidth things on them and intend to continue with that approach. Still, high-speed broadband opens the door to working with video in the future, especially when promoting local small businesses on Murphy Gold. This is something I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time and I’m looking forward to it.

I can view and edit my Squidoo lenses, now

Where it has made a huge difference is being able to once-again edit my Squidoo lenses reliably and easily.

I was having a problem even seeing my own Squidoo lenses the last year or two. Editing them was even more problematic, especially some of the larger lenses such as my Site Build It lens.

The result of my problem with loading the lenses with slow dial-up was that I became more frustrated and less prone to update the lenses when people added sites to the voting Plexo modules.

The benefit of high-speed broadband is that I find it easy to view the lenses and edit them. Now, instead of being frustrated when I receive an email telling me that someone has added something to a Plexo module, I look forward to seeing what it is.

Usually, unfortunately, it’s some lame-brained spammer trying to spam their totally off-topic link on my site, but there are some nuggets in all the mud where people are suggesting excellent sites and lenses that I’m happy to add.

Publishing the lenses is much faster and much more reliable with a fast Internet connection, too.

The result is, over the last week, I’ve updated more lenses than I did in the last several months combined.

I can see my CafePress store much better now

Over the last couple of years, it seems that it has become harder and harder (and much slower) to edit my CafePress store and do all the things that are necessary to keep it up-to-date and to add new designs. As a result, I just stopped updating it.

We all know that makes a great recipe for stagnation, fewer sales, and loss of income. It’s exactly what happened.

Now, however, I can load the store in seconds, as opposed to sometimes taking ten minutes or more for pages with lots of products.

I’ve only tested editing a couple of pages, but I was able to make changes in five minutes or less that would have taken over an hour with my dial-up connection — if it were possible to successfully complete them at all.

A lot of people don’t care for my designs, and that’s okay. The good news is that I’ve sold a lot of products through my CafePress store and look forward to selling lots more. I have over 100 designs that I’ve never added to my store because it just wasn’t worth the time and effort.

I’ll be adding quite a few of them in the coming days and I’ll be promoting my CafePress store much more actively in the future.

In fact, I’ll probably be opening more stores that are focused entirely on a single niche and I’ll be promoting them heavily on several sites.

Will that increase sales? I’m sure it will. I’ll know for sure a year from now.

One of the things I’m sure will increase sales is lowering the prices.

In the past, I’ve used a premium pricing strategy for my CafePress shop. I expected few sales, so I raised the markup I’d receive on each sale.

Now that I have reliable, fast access to editing my shop, again, I’m changing the strategy.

I just lowered the prices on all the products in my store to reflect a moderate pricing strategy. I’ll earn quite a bit less per sale, but I expect that to increase the number of sales.

So, just a few minutes ago, while writing this post, I lowered the prices of every product in my shop, some of them substantially.

A fast broadband connection even makes Site Build It better

I intentionally design both of my sites that are powered by Site Build It to be low-bandwidth friendly.

I want people with slow connections to be able to read what I write and I want those pages to snap on the screen for people with faster connections.

I’m not going to make many changes in that regard, with the exception of adding a few videos.

I’ve known for some time that the popularity of video on the web has been exploding, but it was a waste of time and effort to even try to view them with my slow connection. This week, however, I’ve found how easy it is to watch video in real time with a fast connection and I know that video is more interesting to lots of people than pure text.

I still remain a text-oriented person, but I recognize an opportunity when I see it.

Another very interesting thing occurred to me this week. For all the years that I’ve been a Site Build It subscriber, I’ve always read the Action Guide and never even tried to view the video version of it.

That changed this week. For the first time ever, I watched the entire video version of the Action Guide and I have to admit that hearing someone speak while watching animation that was used to illustrate some of the processes really did make some of it more understandable. In fact, I’m going to watch the Days 2 and 3 videos again this evening.

Even though I have a good understanding of the three-tier structure of a successful website, the new tier-structure video made it much more understandable and I’ll be implementing some changes to both of my SBI sites over the coming days, as a result.

A fast connection doesn’t lessen the work, but it does make my efforts more efficient

I don’t know of anything that is reliable and honest that reduces the amount of work that it takes to be a successful online marketer, but I do know that a fast broadband connection makes a world of difference in improving efficiency.

Of course, that makes sense, but it has been a real eye-opener for me.

Back when I was a Systems Administrator for a local ISP I had direct access to a fast broadband pipe and it was nice, but that was before so many sites relied upon javascript, java, audio, video, and other things that benefit from high-speed pipes.

So, I was able to do just about anything I needed to do from home on dial-up almost as efficiently as I could do from the office using broadband.

But, that was a decade ago and things have changed drastically.

Now, there is a world of difference between slow dial-up access and high-speed broadband. That difference is much bigger and more important than I realized, and it is a very important difference for anyone aspiring to make money online from affiliate marketing or just about any other form of marketing.

Now, I’m wondering what other things I’m going to discover that will make my online marketing more effective.

What about you?

Do you have any thoughts or opinions about the differences between slow and fast Internet connections and the effectiveness of your online affiliate marketing efforts?

I’m looking forward to reading your thoughts.

Act on your dream!

JD

I’ve done my share of whining about how hard 2009 has been, and frankly I’m done with that and I’m looking for this year to come to a close in a few days.

I wrote about it on my Act On Your Dream! site:

I survived 2009 and I think that was a success!

(If you have any interest in doing so, you’re welcome to comment on that page. Although you can’t use HTML in your comments, if I recognize you as a regular commenter here on this blog, I’ll be happy to make an active link back to you in your comment. Just post the full URL you want me to link to and I’ll take care of it. Of course, it has to be a link to one of your sites, not an affiliate link or anything inappropriate.)

So, as I said, I’m done with whining and I’m done with 2009. I still have a few more days to generate a little more income before the year is over and then I’m turning all my attention towards the future.

I expect 2010 to be a much better year.

I’m doing things differently next year.

For the last few years, I’ve tested a lot of things and most of them didn’t work at all, or had limited success. I don’t know if all of that was wasted time and effort, or if it was just a necessary part of testing the options and learning what works best for me.

Since I depend upon the revenue I earn from my online marketing, that’s what I use to evaluate if something has been valuable and successful for me. However, even the things that did not produce any appreciable income had other aspects that were very successful.

For instance, I’ve met lots of great people that I may never have met otherwise and I value that.

But that doesn’t pay the bills!

Over the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of time blogging and I’ve learned a lot. Even though it has not been successful as a way of generating income, I believe it has been a valuable learning experience and it has helped me spread my brand to a much wider audience.

I’ll be doing much less blogging in 2010, but I’m not going to abandon it entirely.

I built a number of portals over the last few years using Mamba and PHP-Nuke. Every single one of them was hacked and I finally got tired of rebuilding them. All of them are closed.

The only thing I learned from that experience is that it was wasted effort and there are serious security holes in open source scripts. I won’t be going that route again.

I’ve had good and bad experiences with forums (fora?) over the years.

I’ve met lots of great people and I would be worse off if I had not participated in them.

I have had better results from participating in forums than I have in building my own. That’s a lesson I’ll remember.

I have two forums that are still open at AYearFromNowForum.com and WesternNorthCarolinaForum.com, but I’ll be shutting them down in January, after I’ve had the time to find any content that can be repurposed on my static sites. Then, they’ll be gone forever.

Social networking has been a lot of work, but it has been satisfying in several respects. Although I can’t attribute any specific revenue to social networking, I do believe it has contributed by widening my readership to people who may not have found me otherwise.

It’s also been a great way to interact with lots of different people. That’s very important to me, because I live alone and work at home. There are times when I go several days without seeing another person in real life, and the interaction on the social networks has been very important to me.

I’ll be narrowing my social networking to just a few sites and don’t feel the need to be on nearly as many as I’ve tried over the last few years.

Things have changed and my focus in social networking has changed, too.

For example, I used to be very active on Ryze.com, but I hardly ever go there anymore. They fell behind the times when they didn’t implement RSS and they missed the boat when they required their community leaders to be upgraded members.

I was enjoying MySpace.com for awhile, but they jumped the shark when they started redirecting external links from our profiles to their own home page. As soon as they did that, I jumped ship.

I’m still enjoying Facebook.com, but I don’t spend a lot of time there. One of the most annoying things about Facebook, for me, is the plethora of applications and the ease with which my “friends” can spam me with them. I don’t know how many of those applications I’ve blocked, but I still block several more every time I go there.

My two favorite social networking sites are communities I’ve built on the Ning.com platform. I created and manage Squidoo Marketing and Murphy Connections, and I intend to do much more with each of them in the coming year.

I’m not earning any money (well, not much money) from either of them, but now that I have sponsors for each community at least they’re not expenses out of my own pocket. I’ll be working hard to make sure the sponsors get their money’s worth, too.

I have mixed feelings about Squidoo.com and HubPages.com. I’ve earned some money from Squidoo every month for the last several years, but that income continues to decrease. If the lenses I have there weren’t already built and attracting some readership, I probably would not make the effort to build them, now.

On the other hand, sometimes building a lens at Squidoo.com about one of my other sites is a good way to get the free traffic started both through referrals from the lens as well as free traffic from the search engines.

When I started Murphy Gold this year, I built several lenses for the site and for my first several clients. By syndicating the RSS feed from Murphy Gold through the Squidoo lenses, it attracted more visitors initially and continues to bring new people to the site.

However, now I’m getting many more visitors from Google, Yahoo, and Bing than from Squidoo, so it isn’t as important to me now as it was initially.

I have never really understood article marketing and I don’t think I have given it a fair trial, yet. To learn more about it, I opened and managed 21st Century Articles for over a year. I put a lot of work into that site and met a few good authors, but most of what was contributed was drivel and I deleted at least 95% of all the contributions.

It was built using a popular article directory script and was hacked several times. Eventually, it was no longer worth recovering the site and continuing.

I learned that there are some good authors writing quality content, but they are in the minority. I also learned that it takes a lot of time to manage an article directory, if you’re interested in quality. Since I moderated every submission, I believe I had a high-quality directory, but it would never have been a top-tier article directory, so closing it down was not a hard decision, in the end. Also, even with thousands of pages of content — all with Adsense ads on them — it generated only a few dollars a month and that certainly was not enough to pay me for my time and effort.

So, what have I learned about online marketing over these last few years?

I’ve learned that you can invest a lot of time and effort into something that never produces the results you want. It is very easy to do.

I’ve learned that every time you try something new, it takes you away from other things that are working for you, so you need to be careful and keep your focus. I believe that it’s always good to learn something new, but not to the point where it impacts your business negatively.

So, I’m happy that I learned how to use lots of different scripts for building portals, my article directory, and blogs, but I’m not happy that they did not produce any significant revenue.

What has worked for me?

Now, I know that what works for me, may not work for you, and vice versa. So, just as successful bloggers recommend blogging, I’m going to recommend building static niche-oriented websites.

I have a couple of large websites that I built over the last few years, and even though they are pretty much running on automatic now, with just the occasional addition or modification, they consistently produce revenue from several sources. Over time, their popularity rises and falls, but they are getting more readers and page views now than they were when I was actively building them.

The problem with them is that they don’t provide a way of getting easy feedback from their readers or to engage in any online conversations. I’ve tried using blogs and forums for each of these sites, but that really didn’t produce the results I wanted.

So, now, they just sit there and serve pages to people who are interested in the subjects, with very little input from me.

Most of my effort in 2010 will be building my two static sites that are powered by Site Build It!

Now, up until this year, it was appropriate to consider them static sites, but that has changed with the introduction of SBI version 2.

With the introduction of Content 2.0 as a standard part of SBI sites, now we can take advantage of some of the web 2.0 features that allow interaction with the readers without having to deal with all the insecurities of open source software.

So, I’ve been working hard over the last couple of weeks to update and revise my Act On Your Dream! site and to get it ready for lots more work in 2010.

I’ve added several pages that invite readers to submit their stories or articles and once they are accepted and published on the site, we can comment and/or rank them.

In some ways, this is similar to blogging, because we can carry on conversations in the comments. It is different from blogging, because it doesn’t just make it easy for the webmaster to add content, it also invites the readers to add content.

Yes, it’s similar to blogging, but different. Only time and experience will tell if it is better or worse, for me, than blogging has been.

Many people consider all the plug-ins that are available for WordPress to be one of its primary benefits. I’ve come to consider them to be drawbacks that waste my time at least as much as they help me.

With SBI version 2, there are no plug-ins. I don’t have to do anything to deal with security updates, plug-in updates, or anything else. I just use it and let the propeller-heads at Sitesell manage all the technical stuff for me. I like that. It allows me to concentrate on producing more content and not on just keeping the sites running.

From a blogger’s point of view, especially those who believe that commenters and do-follow links are important, there may be some drawbacks.

For example, this blog, and many others, use the CommentLuv plug-in which makes it easy to link back to a commenter’s blog via their RSS feed. That’s a nice feature, but I’m not personally convinced that it is valuable economically.

Contrary to what some bloggers believe, I have not seen any correlation between the number of comments on a blog and the income it generates, but I’m not even nearly an A-list blogger, so what do I know?

Yes, leaving comments on others’ blogs brings more readers to my own blog, but I believe that most of those readers, especially the ones who leave comments, are primarily motivated to bring other readers to their sites. This isn’t a particularly bad thing to do, but I do believe that it is unproductive in terms of generating revenue, if that is your primary motivation.

Having said that, I value a number of people who read this blog and some of my others and regularly comment on what I have to say, no matter how bone-headed I might be now and then.

I enjoy the conversations and I’m happy to link back to their blog posts. I don’t see anything wrong with it.

But, it doesn’t help me pay the bills, and until I get that firmly under control, that’s going to be my primary motivation.

It is my belief, in most instances, that bloggers are sellers, not buyers. We’re interested in promoting products and making sales through affiliate links. Or, we’re interested in selling advertising to generate revenue. Perhaps we have sponsors who cover the costs. For most of us, we want to either supplement our income or generate all of it from our online marketing.

So, increased readership from other bloggers may be satisfying on several levels, but I have no statistics that show that it adds to my bottom line. Some bloggers are generating six and seven figures a year in income, but they are rare, and they don’t include me.

So, as I’ve said previously, I’m going back to what has worked for me for about a decade.

In 2009, my income, such as it was, was generated primarily from three sites. Two of them produced affiliate income and Adsense ads revenue, primarily. One of them generated direct advertising revenue from paid clients. The latter one produced several times the revenue the two others did.

But, all three of them consistently bring in money and are easy to maintain and expand, so I’m going to focus on them primarily in the first six months of 2010.

To put other things in perspective, any one of those three sites brought in more revenue than all my other websites, blogs, forums, and social networks — combined!

But, I don’t think they would do as well in total isolation. So, I believe that blogging and social networking has brought more readers to those sites and helped them. The syndication of their RSS feeds on a variety of sites brings in readers, because I can see the referral numbers in my statistics.

So, I’ll continue to maintain quite a few sites that will not be my primary focus, but which add to the funnel that brings readers to the sites that I will be focusing on. Fortunately, most of the work in building that infrastructure is completed and just needs a little maintenance work now and then.

Even though I totally lost focus on my Act On Your Dream! site over the last three years, now that I’ve almost completed rebuilding the site, updating all the pages, and adding some pages that hopefully will lead to more interaction with the readers, I’m once-again looking forward to helping others identify their dream(s), setting goals, and working to achieve them. I enjoy helping others get what they want. I may not be able to do a lot to help, but I’m happy to do what I can.

Perhaps you would like to be a part of that process.

To get started, I have a couple of pages that I’d like to invite you to visit. Each of them has a form where you can contribute a story or article, and all submissions are moderated. Even though the form says otherwise (which is something I can’t change, yet), you must use your name and location when submitting something, or I won’t accept it.

To put it bluntly, submissions from anonymous people or from anyone who uses keywords as their name will be summarily rejected and trashed.

On the other hand, quality submissions from real people are welcome and I look forward to publishing them on the site and maybe in my ezine.

You are invited to visit and submit your entries to the following list of pages. They are new and may not have any, or many, submissions yet, so you can be a trend-setter!

Reader submitted entries are listed below the forms, so even if you don’t want to submit anything, you can scroll down below the form and see what has been published already.

Your comments and ratings on the items are welcome, but please use your real name. As with the submissions themselves, I don’t accept anonymous comments.

Do you have a dream? (I’m talking about something you aspire to achieve or acquire, not a sleeping dream.) You’re invited to share it with us at Your Dream.

Do you have a success story you’d like to share? Successes come in all sizes, so it doesn’t have to be a blockbuster, runaway success to be valuable to our readers. Share Your Success Story.

How do you Define Success?

Do you have an original article that you’ve written about success, failure, time management, goal setting, making your dream come true, the law of attraction, or similar topics? If you do, you’re invited to Submit Your Article.

(I turned off article submissions in early November, because I was being bombarded by off-topic, spammy submissions every day. Now, I’m trying a different approach and look forward to publishing your quality original articles on topics related to the Act On Your Dream! site.)

I’ll be adding more pages to the site and asking for your participation. In the next couple of days, I’ll add a new page that lists all these pages where you are invited to submit your thoughts, opinions, stories, and articles. I’m not sure what I’ll call it, however. I’m leaning towards “Your Thoughts,” but I’d welcome any suggestions for a better title.

So, those are my plans for the first half of 2010 and I’m looking forward to working on them.

What about you?

What are you going to be focusing on in 2010?

Act on your dream!

JD

BTW, while I’m thinking about it, the SBI version 2 two-for-one holiday special has been extended until Monday, January 4, 2010. This will be your last chance until next Christmas to get two SBI subscriptions for the price of one.

Of course, you don’t have to buy two, even if the second one is free, if you don’t want to. The choice is yours.

As long as we’re thinking about our futures, I think SBI, and all it includes, is an excellent investment, and, yes, I get a commission if you buy from my link. More importantly, however, I know from experience that my investments in SBI have produced very good returns. It’s not magic, but it is a time-tested process and set of tools that has produced great results for a lot of others, too.

As with all things of any value, it takes work, effort, time, and money to succeed. If you want overnight success without working for it, don’t bother trying anything. It won’t work for you. Go play another video game or watch some more TV.

On the other hand, if you’re willing to devote some time to building your online business, and you’re willing to follow a guide that has helped thousands succeed, then maybe SBI is right for you. If you try it and don’t like it, you can get a full refund in the first 30 days and a prorated refund after that, so there’s very little risk in trying SBI to see for yourself what you think of it.

Have you been interested in trying to build your online business with Site Build It?

If you have, and you haven’t taken the plunge and tried it, yet, now is the best time to get started.

Throughout the year, at major holidays, Sitesell offers a buy one get one for only $100 more special offer. Since SBI costs $299 per year, that means that you can get two sites for only $399.

You can get the two sites for one year at the discount price, but remember that each of them will cost $299 to renew each year — a bargain when you consider all you get with SBI.

But right now, until Christmas 2009, you can buy one and get one free. That’s right, get one SBI subscription for $299, or get two of them for the same $299.

Why would you want to buy two subscriptions?

Buy both of them for yourself. You can start one site now and have up to 9 months before you have to activate the second site. That gives you time to start earning some money and staggers the renewal cycles so you don’t have to pay both of them the same month.

Or, buy one and give one as a gift. Helping someone learn how to build an online business is a much more valuable gift than something they’ll play with for awhile and then lose interest in.

Or, buy them and give both of them as gifts.

The choice is yours.

I have a couple of sites powered by SBI and I intend to build more in the future. I’ve been a satisfied customer for years.

So, I recommend Site Build It version 2.0 to you without any reservations, and, yes, if you buy from this link I’ll earn a commission. I recommend SBI, however, because it works. I can earn commissions from lots of other things, but you don’t see me promoting them, do you?

Site Build It is not magic

Don’t misunderstand me.

This is not some pie-in-the-sky, get-rich-quick deal.

Building a successful website takes time, energy, money, creativity, dedication, and work. There’s no way around it.

I can’t tell you how much time and money I’ve wasted over the years trying lots of different ways to build an online business. I hope you don’t have to waste all the time and energy I have.

While SBI is not magic, it does offer a proven, time-tested, set of tools, support, training, and step-by-step guide to help you find a niche for which you have a passion. Then, you’re taught how to structure that site, publish the content, and start building an audience who is interested in the same subject.

You will not be an overnight success!

If you want to do something free and get rich, stop reading right now. This is not for you.

But, if you are willing to spend the same amount of time and energy that you would expect to learn anything else of value, then you owe it to yourself to try the best.

You get a full 30 day money back guarantee. If you don’t like what you see, ask for a full refund. If you refund after 30 days, I think the refund will be prorated, and I think that’s fair.

Even though there is a special going on right now, you don’t have to buy two of them if you don’t want. The choice is yours, but as long as you can get two for one, maybe you can find a friend or relative who would like to try it. You can split the money and each of you can get a full year of using SBI for only $150 each. Now, that’s a real deal!

You can learn together, motivate each other, help each other get over any rough spots, and each of you can learn valuable new skills.

Or, just buy one site and get started building it.

Or, if you can’t afford the $299 right now, and in this year of unemployment and lowered incomes, many can’t, you can now subscribe to SBI for only $29.95 per month, right from the start. However, if you choose this monthly payment approach, you can’t take advantage of the two for one offer.

As soon as I publish this post, I’m going to log in at Sitesell and spend the rest of the day working on my two SBI sites.

As I’ve said in a previous post, I’m leaving blogging and going back to what I know works for me - and earns money - and that’s building more websites focused on particular topics and powered by SBI.

While SBI isn’t for everyone, I know many more people who have been successful in building their online business using what it offers than from any other approach.

Your mileage may vary, close cover before striking, etc.

It works for me and for dozens of people I know who purchased from my recommendations — most of whom are renewing their subscriptions every year.

Sure, some people don’t like it and they get a refund. That’s fair enough.

But the ones who really take the time to study and understand the action guide, learn how to use Brainstorm It!, and build a site around a profitable niche for which they have passion, are succeeding.

I can’t tell the future and I can’t guarantee your success, but I can tell you that Sitesell guarantees their offer. You can’t lose anything but a little time by trying SBI.

Learn how to build your own online business. Buy SBI version 2.0 today. (And, yes that’s an affiliate link.)

The choice is yours.

Act on your dream!

JD

I enjoy blogging and I’ve been doing this for a long time, back before the words weblog and blog were even coined.

This is the last year where blogging will be part of my marketing plan, however.

The plain truth is that blogging hasn’t been worth the time and effort in terms of receiving an income from all I’ve done. So, since I’m going to be concentrating on increasing my revenue next year, I’m going to focus almost entirely on what works for me and I’m dropping what hasn’t been fruitful.

There is a good chance that this blog won’t be here a year from now.

I’m turning my attention back to what does work for me - what pays the bills - and another thing I enjoy, which is building static, hierarchical websites focused on particular topics.

I’ve been building websites since shortly after the introduction of the world wide web and I have used lots of different tools to build sites that attract visitors and earn money from sponsorships, advertising, affiliate sales, and in other ways.

One site, that I’ve sadly neglected because of health issues that have interfered, still earns more in one month than all my blogs earn in an entire year — and I haven’t done much to that site at all in the last year.

That should be a lesson to me. Concentrate on what’s working and stop playing with all the shiny red balls that bounce by.

I enjoy blogging

I enjoy blogging and the social aspects of commenting on other blogs. These discussions have been fun and I’ve met some great people around the world as a result.

But, let’s face it. We talk to each other, but we don’t buy from each other. You don’t buy from me and I don’t buy from you. That’s the bottom line when it comes to a marketing business.

I’m still going to follow blogs and bloggers that I like and I’ll still have something to say now and then when Mitch or AussieSire, or several others I enjoy reading, writes something of interest, but I’m not going to spend nearly the time and effort that I have in the past on my own blogs.

I don’t like being poor

My goal in having an online marketing business is to earn a good living at it, not just barely get by.

This has been an unusually hard year for me, but that’s the way life happens. I’m hoping that it was just the bottom of a bad cycle and that things will start moving upwards, soon.

That’s another reason to concentrate on what’s working.

The majority of my income this year has been from a brand new site I started back in July when I had to replace the affiliate income I lost.

I’ve been playing around with promoting my adopted home town and the people and organizations here, but I turned that into a business this year when I launched Murphy Gold and its companion social networking site at Murphy Connections.

This is a more-traditional business structure.

Local business owners pay me to promote them and I write about the products and services they offer and other things they do throughout the year, such as special events.

Over time, even in a small town like Murphy, NC, this can be profitable.

Now that I have all the infrastructure in place, it’s time to hunker down and focus on that.

So, you’ll see less of me here. I’ll still drop in on your blogs now and then and I’m following some of them in email and RSS, but I won’t be saying much, unless you write something that really captures my interest and I think my comment may add value to what you’re saying.

This answers my question: WordPress or SBI?

I can clearly show on my profit and loss statement that SBI delivers much more income and more visitors who actually buy something than all of my blogs put together.

SBI takes less work, doesn’t have to be updated every time I turn around, and now with Content 2 being available to all of us who power our sites with Site Build It, it gives me an easy way to let others write pages for the site and comment on them.

That adds the social aspect to SBI sites that I’ve enjoyed on blogs.

So, there you have it.

I’ve been promoting SBI for years and telling you how much I love it, so I’m going to go back to using it and rebuilding my online marketing business.

Blogging has been a fun experiment.

Act on your dream!

JD

Breaking news!

For years, SBI has been available only as an annual subscription.

For awhile, it has been possible to switch to monthly payments when it was time to renew after your initial first-year subscription of $299.

Now, you can subscribe to SBI starting with monthly payments of $29.99 instead of a lump-sum annual starting cost of $299.

Here’s what Ken Evoy, founder of Sitesell, had to say about this…

Times are tough. Money is tight. So demand for a monthly subscription format for SBI! has been high, according to the good folks who handle questions from the Web site.

I’ve always believed in an annual model, using the $299 as a reasonable way to make sure folks are COMMITTED. The Guarantee protects new SBIers…

… But the psychological impact of “$299″ and “1 year” sets the correct mindset. Now, though, I believe that we’re in a period where, with unemployment rates so high and cash so tight, more people are simply MOTIVATED. Period.

And more than ever, they want something real. So…

Starting now, your visitors have the option of paying $29.99 per MONTH for their SBI! 2.0 subscription instead of the usual $299 yearly price. Check it out at the Order Page.

This is a limited time “soft” launch, without the usual shout-it-from-the-rafters pomp.

Why?

We’re not sure about the level of commitment. So we’ll observe how they’re doing. Frankly (very frankly), we don’t market SBI! to collect cash like a cable company if people are not serious about really using it to build the kind of business that will change their lives.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be watching the commitment level of these new SBIers with great interest. If the monthly option results in less serious SBIers, the time limitation will expire.

Have you wanted to try SBI but couldn’t afford the initial annual fee?

If that’s true for you, now is the time to take advantage of this offer and start your SBI version 2.0 site with an initial investment of only $29.99.

Folks, that’s only a dollar a day starting from day one!

Now, I don’t know how this impacts the Thanksgiving holiday special offer, but I do know a good deal when I see one.

Let me caution you

However, before you jump on this, let me caution you that building a site with SBI version 2.0 is not like what you may have done in the past or what you may have observed others doing.

If you want immediate gratification, don’t subscribe to SBI. Go with a traditional webhosting package somewhere and throw up a blog. You can be publishing to your new blog in a few hours.

When you don’t get the success you expected, however, you may find that the initial instant gratification you felt is nullified by losing the one thing you can never replace - time.

Building an online business with SBI is different

You will not get instant gratification with SBI. This frustrates a lot of people.

Instead, if you take the time to read and follow the action guide, you’ll learn to use the tools that help you identify a niche with profit potential, plan the site, research keywords to help you get free traffic from the search engines, and then build an evergreen multi-tiered website according to the plan you developed while working within the SBI C-T-P-M system.

So, you’re going to have to invest some time up-front, reading the action guide and/or watching the action guide videos. Some people don’t like to do this, and they’re the ones who typically fail with an SBI site.

Sitesell contrasts the hare approach to the tortoise approach. Blogging and free websites, including sites like Squidoo and HubPages, are more for the hares among us.

SBI is for the tortoises. We like to research and plan something before we do it. We like the slow and steady approach. We like to learn from others how to build an online business using time-tested methods.

We don’t like to run hither and yon looking at every shiny red ball that happens to bounce by.

That’s why the tortoise is the mascot for SBI.

If you’re not going to follow the guidelines, don’t bother subscribing to SBI.

But, if you truly want to learn how to build an online business, I personally recommend SBI version 2.0 as the way to go about it - especially if you’re a beginner.

There are many advantages to SBI if you’re a grizzled old-timer like me who has built many websites using lots of different tools and platforms.

I have to admit that I have both tortoise and hare qualities and that I’ve done a lot of research using lots of toys. I think that I’ve been building expertise in learning all the different approaches, but, in truth, part of it may have been enjoying playing with the shiny red balls that bounced along the path in front of me.

Either way, I’ve learned my lessons and now I know effective ways to build websites that attract lots of visitors. While I admit that there are several ways to do this, I’m positive that the SBI method and the tools they provide are the best combination for the majority of people who want to build an online business.

All of my new sites will be built using SBI version 2.0. I’ve tried lots of others, but I recognize the best when I see and use it.

With the addition of Content 2.0 as a standard feature of SBI version 2.0, I don’t see any more advantages to blogging, unless you’re building a site based on news or other time-sensitive information.

Content 2.0 adds the interaction that we look for with blogs, such as comments, and also makes it easy for your readers to submit new pages to your site.

(I’ll be adding these features to both of my SBI-powered sites over the coming weeks.)

This interactivity ratchets up the effectiveness of SBI sites to a new level.

And, now, at least for a limited time, you don’t have to swallow hard and spend $299 up-front.

You can get started for only $29.99, payable as a monthly subscription.

If you can’t afford that, I really don’t see how you can afford to build an online business at all. Just give up one cup of coffee or a sandwich every day and that will cover the cost.

Of all the products and services I recommend, SBI version 2.0 stands at the top of the list. I’ve been a happy Sitesell customer for several years and don’t see any reason not to continue for a long time to come.

Try SBI version 2.0 for yourself. Get started today.

Act on your dream!

JD

Thanksgiving Day is coming up quickly and Sitesell wants to help you this year by offering their $100 Thanksgiving holiday special offer.

That’s right. From now until November 30, 2009, you can get a one year subscription to SBI version 2.0 for $299, or you can take advantage of the special and get two subscriptions for only $399.

Keep both for yourself if you want. (You have up to nine months from the purchase date to activate your second site - and renewals for that site start on that date.)

If you don’t want to develop two sites, you can go in with a friend and each of you save money by splitting the cost and effectively saving $100 for each of you for the first year.

Or, give one - or both - subscriptions to someone you care for. An SBI version 2.0 subscription will help them develop the skills necessary in the 21st century.

There are many reasons that you might want to take advantage of this special offer.

If you haven’t already done so, take some time and look into SBI version 2.0 today.

I have two SBI sites and I’m happy I do.

With all the new features that were added to SBI in the last year, you’re already getting a discount on what you would have paid this time last year.

For example, just from the value of Content 2.0, you’re already saving $100. Just a few months ago, there was an additional charge of $99 per year for adding the features of Content 2.0 to an SBI annual subscription.

In October, however, Sitesell announced that Content 2.0 is now available for all SBI subscribers, and the price is now included in the $299 annual subscription. That’s more features for your site and a DECREASE in price!

One of the beauties of SBI is that their technical staff of programmers, developers, analysts, and other propeller-heads are always finding ways to make the product better, and they implement these improvements behind the scenes. You wake up one morning and learn that you can now do more with your site, usually with very little effort on your part.

Another great feature is the members-only Sitesell Forum where SBI webmasters help each other succeed with their online businesses.

Did you know that some SBI webmasters get over a million unique visitors per month? It’s true. See for yourself. Go to the Sitesell case studies page and scroll down to read Elad Shippony’s case study.

Pay particular attention to his November 2009 update where he talks about getting 1.5 million unique visitors per month over his three main SBI sites.

Now, we all know that everyone won’t achieve these levels of success, and it certainly won’t come overnight. Elad has been building his sites for several years, but now it’s his full-time business.

Can you do this well, or better? I don’t know.

I do know that SBI offers the tools, training, support, and help from other subscribers so that you can succeed if you follow the time-tested action guide and build a site that sells.

Until you try it, I don’t think you’ll ever understand what makes SBI version 2.0 different from traditional webhosting.

If you already have experience building websites that have not succeeded for you, take a little time and compare SBI version 2.0 with traditional Windows or Linux hosting.

If you have no experience building websites, but you do have a strong desire to learn how to effectively earn money with an online business, then you owe it to yourself to start with SBI and not waste a year or more of your time learning all the things that you’ll need to learn when building a site using other techniques.

Still, as much as I love building sites with SBI, it is true that SBI version 2.0 is not suitable for everyone or every project.

The good news is that your investment in SBI is guaranteed. If you find it isn’t for you, you can get a refund.

Not sure if SBI will work for what you want? If you have a question about SBI you can call toll-free during normal business hours or fill out a form to ask your question. An experienced SBI webmaster will answer your question, at no cost to you.

Thousands of people, many with very little - or no - previous experienced have succeeded in building an online business with SBI. Now, version 2.0 offers even more tools to help you succeed.

Not everyone who tries will find the success they want, not even with SBI helping them, but I believe you have a much better chance of success by following the time-proven methods that you’ll learn when you subscribe to SBI version 2.0 and follow the action guide in building your business.

Even with SBI, there’s a lot to learn, or possibly un-learn, but I’ve been looking for years to find something better and I haven’t found anything yet.

See for yourself.

Give SBI version 2.0 a try. It is helping thousands of people around the world change their lives for the better.

Act on your dream!

JD

I was reading several blogs and forums where people were talking about how much money they earned (or didn’t earn) from affiliate marketing in October.

The more I read, the more I realized that I’m not doing as badly as I have been feeling.

After all, I earned a living from this for quite a few years, and, even if my income has dropped quite a bit over the last year, I’m still earning more than many people are.

Now, I know that sounds selfish and I hope each of you has greater success with your affiliate marketing efforts in 2010 than you’ve had in 2009.

What I’m trying to say is that I’ve been reading about many people who are working hard to earn something and still haven’t made any money at all. I can remember how frustrating that is. When you’re doing everything you know how to do and it isn’t producing any results, it can be a very difficult and disheartening experience.

I remember how happy I was to get that first commission check from Amazon.com quite a few years ago. Over the years, I’ve received checks from a number of companies and I still get a thrill when I endorse and deposit them.

Although they aren’t coming nearly as frequently as they used to, a few are still arriving and I’m thankful for each of them.

I’m wondering now if I’ve lost my way with affiliate marketing. At one time, I worked hard to send people to Amazon.com and looked forward to commissions from them. It was fun finding products and telling my readers about them.

Those were products that real people were interested in.

When I say “real people,” I’m talking about folks who aren’t interested in affiliate marketing. They were people who saw a link to something that interested them and they purchased it. Sometimes they purchased several things totally unrelated to what I was writing about and I earned a commission on each of those sales.

Now that Amazon.com dropped me after NC passed the new tax law this summer, I’m wondering if there is another company that would be a good substitute. I still love recommending books and some other consumer products, but don’t know of a good company with which I can work.

Do you have any suggestions?

As those of us in the United States get closer to our annual Thanksgiving Day holiday, I’ve been looking at things from a different perspective.

I think I’m over being stressed out about all the things that have gone wrong in the last year or so and I’m starting to focus more on what can go right over the coming year. I’m grateful that I’ve been able to hang on this year and now I’m setting my sites once again on prosperity instead of mere survival.

A year from now, I expect to be in much better financial shape than I am today, and to get there I’m going to have to create a new plan and work hard to achieve it.

One of the things I’ve identified is that this blog is not an income producer. Lots of people read it, but few purchase anything. Most of my sales come from sites that have absolutely nothing to do with making money online.

Years ago, I was advised by someone who knows a lot about online marketing and he said then, and it is even more true now, that the world doesn’t need any more websites and blogs about making money online, especially when the people building those sites are not very successful themselves.

I’ve talked about being interested in too many things for my own good, and not being specifically interested in a few things I could build a site around.

My brother, before he became disabled, loved drag racing. It was a life-long love and a few years ago I started building Georgia Drag Racing for him. He was working to write a book about the golden years of drag racing in the Atlanta area and was making great progress before he got to the point where it hurt too much to sit at a computer for very long.

So, that site has seen its best days and will be declining over time as less content is created. Still, surprisingly, it remains one of my best-earning websites, even though it has many links to Amazon.com that aren’t earning me anything and which I haven’t had the time or energy to remove.

It’s not at all about earning money online and I think that’s the key to its success. It attracts people who enjoy drag racing and they’re willing to spend money on their hobby.

I’ve watched as others have done the same thing. I know of people who have built successful, money-earning websites based on such diverse topics as dealing with insurance problems, telling Halloween and ghost stories, juggling, repairing computers, kitchen counter tops, organic gardening, hydroponic gardening, modeling advice, and dozens of other niche subjects that interested them and which they built into sites that produce a substantial annual income.

I have been trying to find a niche for myself in which I could do the same thing, but so far I haven’t found it.

At least, now, I know all the things I will need to do to build and publicize such a site if I can ever identify a topic that I can love and be willing to write about every day.

I’ve come close to such a niche, but it is not really what I’m talking about.

I love living in the mountains of Murphy, NC and I love the people, scenery, and pace of life here. I’ve been promoting the area and a few businesses off and on over the years and this year I’ve been concentrating on building Murphy Connections, a social networking site, and Murphy Gold, a site for promoting a few locally-owned, small businesses that are located in the Murphy NC 28906 ZIP code.

I’m starting to have some success with those sites and look forward to spending a lot of time working on, and improving, them over the coming months.

Another site that I enjoy, but whose earnings have dropped dramatically since I removed all the Amazon links is my Act On Your Dream! site.

Basically, I lost focus on that site, but I’ve been brainstorming a lot of ideas and now have a plan for updating that site on a regular basis. Now that Sitesell has made Content 2.0 free for all SBI sites, I’ll be adding more interactive features to it over time. In fact, I think that I’ll be blogging less as a result.

In fact, I’m going to be taking some of what I’ve written in my blogs and repurposing it on that site to see how it works.

Even though I’ve just gone through the worst 12 months of my life, I still believe that we can achieve what we want if we identify our goals, make good plans to accomplish them, and then put in the required work to make it happen. In as little as a year from now, we can make big changes in our lives.

I’m going to be acting on that belief.

What about you?

What do you think?

Is affiliate marketing working well for you?

Have you identified niches that are good income earners?

What company do you recommend as a substitute for Amazon.com?

I welcome your comments and look forward to discussing them.

Act on your dream!

JD

Normally, I would have jumped on the introduction of Site Build It! Version 2.0 last week, but I was busy with an offline project that had a real deadline I had to meet.

Today is the first time I have the time to talk about this new version of SBI.

Although they finally decided to call it version 2.0, SBI is actually much farther along than that; they’re just recognizing the value of changing the version number to indicate a serious upgrade.

If you’re not an SBI webmaster, you don’t realize that the great folks at Sitesell are always upgrading and improving all that SBI offers. The beauty of this is that it is all done behind the scenes and, unlike upgrading a WordPress blog, it doesn’t require any work on our part.

New features just appear on a regular basis.

Ken Evoy and team recognized this, and with a few major upgrades last week decided to call this SBI version 2.0.

It’s about time.

In addition to all the upgrades to the help files, the Action Guide, SBI tips, and other things that help us keep current and on-track, they introduced a couple of pretty major changes.

Brainstorm It! version 3.1

With this upgrade, the keyword research tool gives us more features and we can add new filters to make our research faster and more efficient.

Within a few hours of finding the upgrade active, I added several new filters and saved them as custom tasks. Now, some of the things I had to do manually after a new brainstorming session are automated and I can click a button and do in a matter of seconds what used to take a significant part of an hour to do.

I’m sure, as I get more experience with what I can do with all the filters, that I’ll get even more efficient with this new version of the tool.

Content 2.0 is now free

I’ve been wanting to add the Content 2.0 features to my SBI sites, but haven’t had the time to do it the way it needs and, therefore, could not justify the additional $99 per year cost of adding the module to my sites.

As of last week, however, that cost is no longer a consideration. Now, I just need to make the time to rebuild some of the pages of my site to use C2.

What is C2? You can learn more about it on the SBI version 2.0 page.

Conclusion

Continually added and updated tools on a regular basis along with a drop in price(!) means that SBI is a better value than it was the last time i raved about it.

Thanks to all the people at Sitesell.

Now, I have a couple of SBI-powered sites that need some work so I can take advantage of the new tools.

Act on your dream!

JD

I haven’t been doing much writing this month, but I have been doing a lot of thinking, reading, and planning.

As much as I love writing, it’s almost impossible for me to string two sentences together when I’m running a fever and feeling terrible. So, a whole month of fall allergies combined with some gut bug I can’t seem to kick have kept me off the computer for most of the month.

There is an upside to this, however.

Since I no longer get TV since the switchover from analog to digital, I don’t waste a lot of time watching TV.

I am a happy NetFlix member, however, so I’ve been rewatching the entire StarGate SG-1 series and the StarTrek Next Generation series. The beauty of this is that I can pick the time I want to watch, instead of being forced to watch on someone else’s schedule.

So, when I was feeling bad and could manage to stay awake for awhile, I’ve been watching a couple of my favorite science fiction series.

When I was feeling good enough to concentrate on something more serious, I’ve been re-reading three books that have made an incredible difference in my life over the years.

So, since I really don’t know where I’m going with my affiliate marketing business right now, I decided it was time to get back to the basics and rethink my goals and strategies to achieve them.

I’m not giving up on affiliate marketing. I enjoy getting paid to recommend quality products to people and I’ve earned thousands of dollars over the years as a result.

Even though I’m going through a slump, I won’t let it continue indefinitely.

So, what am I reading, and why?

Napoleon Hill

When I was a teenager, a friend at church gave me his personal copy of Think and Grow Rich. He was employed at IBM and knew that I was interested in computers. This was way back in the 1960s. He told me that what he learned in this book was one of the major reasons he was enjoying his career at IBM.

The book was full of underlines and margin notes. He had questions about certain paragraphs and notes about how important some of the main points were in his success and for others he knew who worked through this book.

Now, since I am a good affiliate marketer, here’s a link to MindPerk, where you can purchase several items authored by Napoleon Hill, including Think and Grow Rich.

I am happy, also, to link to a page on my Act On Your Dream! website that offers some quality quotations from Napoleon Hill and his best-selling books.

It’s easy enough to find. You can borrow it at just about any bookstore. I’m pretty sure there are free versions available online.

Or be nice to a struggling business in your town. Go to your local bookseller and buy a copy. If they don’t have it, they can order it for you.

When my friend gave me his copy of the book, he said there were two conditions. I had to actually read the book, work through the exercises, and apply what I learned to my own life. And, when I met someone at a crossroads in their life, that I would give them my own copy of the book, with the same conditions.

Over the decades, I’ve given away several dozen copies of that book and I’ll continue to do it as long as I’m able.

As much as I love what’s in Think and Grow Rich, however, I’m currently re-reading Napoleon Hill’s much larger book, Law of Success.

Earlier today, I was reminded of the self-assessment test in Think and Grow Rich, and it sparked an idea I’m going to put into action on my John Dilbeck And Friends blog.

There are fifty-four questions in that test, and I’m going to be giving my answers and thoughts on one or two of them as close to daily as I can manage. I may miss a day here or there, but I’m going to follow through until I reach the end of the test.

I’ve started the series of posts on John Dilbeck and Friends with:

Think and Grow Rich self-assessment test

I could do this just as well in private, but I’m going to answer the questions publicly. I may reveal more than I want about myself in a few of them, but that’s okay.

Even more importantly than giving my answers, I hope the series of posts will spark some intelligent discussions and maybe lots of people will benefit, instead of just me. We’ll see how it goes.

I plan to answer the first question or two this evening.

There are many, many good pieces of advice in Think and Grow Rich and Law of Success and I’ll be blogging about them, too. Even though some may be related to affiliate marketing, I think they’re better suited for my John Dilbeck and Friends blog than they are for here.

One reason I’m mentioning it here, though, is that Law of Success has been called a master course in salesmanship and I think there is a lot of truth in that.

So, who else am I re-reading?

Ken Evoy

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know that I am a huge fan of Ken’s Site Build It! service.

Currently, I’m using SBI to manage a couple of my static websites and I’m getting good results from both of them.

A Year From Now is a site where I talk about setting goals, and then acting on achieving your dream.

I haven’t done as much with that site over the last couple of years as I would like, but I’ll be adding more to it in the coming months.

One of the things I’ve discovered about myself while reading Law of Success is that my Definite Chief Aim is no longer what I thought it was a few years ago, and I’m going to be revising that.

I truly believe, if you are honest with yourself, assess your skills and limitations accurately, set goals you really believe in and want to achieve, plan how to approach all of it, and then act on your dream, that you can be substantially more successful a year from now.

So, I’m going to do that and apply it to my major websites and blogs, in the process.

My other SBI-powered site is MurphyGold.com and it is all about promoting some of the best small business owners in Murphy, NC and the goods and services they provide to our friends and neighbors in our small mountain community.

Even though the site is barely more than two months old, it’s already doing well and I have several more business owners I’ll be adding to the site in the next few days.

I liked the product so much I bought the company

I’m sure you’ve seen that commercial. It made a big impact on me the first time I saw it.

Victor Kiam was the man who coined the slogan, “I liked the shaver so much, I bought the company.” The company was Remington Products, a maker of razors and similar appliances.

I like Site Build It! so much that I’d love to buy the company, but that hasn’t been possible. So, since I can’t buy the company, at least I can help recommend the service and earn a commission in the process.

So can you.

But, first, I want to talk about a couple of ebooks that Ken Evoy wrote a few years ago that changed my life almost as much as Think and Grow Rich did.

A few years ago, I quit working as a computer consultant and systems analyst and intended to take life easy as an artist blacksmith. I started smithing Steel Roses That Never Wilt and wanted to sell them to as wide an audience as possible.

I added a section about blacksmithing to JohnDilbeck.com, but was getting practically no responses.

I don’t remember exactly what year it was, but it was about ten years ago when I stumbled across an ebook called Make Your Site Sell!.

It was written by Dr. Ken Evoy and sold for $17.

I didn’t expect much for that much money, but I bought the ebook, downloaded it, and started studying it.

I rebuilt my website, following his advice, and before I knew it I was getting requests for more information about my Steel Roses from around the world and I was selling as many as I could make to people across the USA and Canada.

That little investment brought in thousands of dollars of revenue. The ebook didn’t do it, however. I did.

I had to study it, learn the principles involved, and put them to work for me. So, in a way, it was a partnership between myself and Dr. Evoy.

I learned a lot from that book and it changed my life for the better.

Later, in 2002, the book was revised and the price was raised a bit. I bought the new book and put into practice what I learned from it, too.

So, how much does it cost now?

Not a single penny.

In fact, you can download Make Your Site Sell! at no cost, and you don’t even have to give your email address to join a mailing list.

The book was recently revised and now it tells how Site Build It makes much of the old tedious handwork obsolete.

In fact, that’s how Site Build It came about: to help people put into practice what Dr. Evoy covered in the book.

No matter how you build your website, or even if you prefer a blog, you can learn something of value from Make Your Site Sell!

But, don’t expect to discover the secrets of making a gazillion dollars with no work.

This ebook weighs in at about 1,500 pages over several PDF files. If you want to learn what it offers, you’d better set aside some time and be prepared to spend some effort.

Otherwise, don’t bother. It won’t do you a bit of good sitting on your harddrive.

I didn’t buy the business, but I did become an affiliate

If you know anything about me, you may know that I had to close my blacksmithing business in 2002 when I became the full-time caretaker for my mother, following her cancer surgery.

I cared for her 24/7 for over six years and I was as much of a shut-in as she was the last two or three years.

I had to find a way to make a living while not being able to leave the house, and affiliate marketing became the vehicle to make this possible.

Again, it was an ebook written by Ken Evoy that made the difference in my life.

Many people, including me, think that the Sitesell 5 Pillar Affiliate Program is the best on the planet. I’m happy to be one of their affiliates and recommend them to you.

Over the years, I’ve received thousands of dollars in commissions and I’m still earning for residual sales of annual resubscriptions from happy SBI webmasters.

I was a happy Sitesell affiliate long before Site Build It became available and I’ve earned a lot from Dr. Evoy about affiliate marketing from his weekly newsletter for affiliates, his frequent postings in the Sitesell forums and from his ebook, the Affiliate Masters Course.

This free ebook, which was originally available as a multi-email course, offers valuable advice for anyone who wants to be a successful affiliate marketer.

I’m re-reading it as part of my efforts to get back to the basics and redefining my marketing company and the goals I want to achieve.

I’ve read over a dozen books and ebooks about affiliate marketing, some of which cost over $100, and, to me, this continues to be the very best.

I can’t say that will hold true for you, but it seems that Dr. Evoy and I think quite a bit alike, even though he is a far better business owner, team builder, and marketer than I ever expect to be.

I don’t try to model myself on him and what he does, but I do try to learn from him and adapt what I can to my own business.

Over the years, Dr. Evoy has never lead me astray. He offers solid advice for building a real business and shares what he has learned about websites, blogs, and selling.

How much are you willing to invest in your future?

You can get Think and Grow Rich from your library, and you can freely download Make Your Site Sell! and the Affiliate Masters Course.

You don’t have to invest a single dime in a quality education, great advice, and information about the necessary skills you’ll need to become successful with affiliate marketing and selling from your own websites.

But, even though you won’t have to invest any money, you will have to invest time and effort and a lot of study if you want to learn all that is offered in these books.

Nothing works for everyone

Now, no matter how much I have learned from these books and how much my life has been made better because of them, the same may not hold true for you.

Each of us has our own skills and limitations. Things that work well for me may not work for you, and vice versa.

But, I believe it is true to say that nothing will ever work for you if you don’t learn how to focus on your goals and the plans you have made to achieve them.

If you flit from one thing to another, you’ll never become successful.

It takes a commitment and lots of work to achieve what you want.

Even though I’m not a glowing advertisement for affiliate marketing right now, I’ve been successful with it for years, and I fully intend to reinvent myself and become successful, again.

Getting back to the basics, redefining my goals, making new plans, and getting back on track to achieve those goals is what I’m working on right now.

What do you think?

I’m always interested in hearing your opinions and experiences related to what I write about.

Are you an affiliate marketer? How are you doing?

Are you involved in sales in other areas? How is it working out for you?

Do you have any advice you’d care to offer on affiliate marketing in the 21st century?

When you have to get back to the basics, what books do you read that inspire you to dig deep, reinvent yourself, and start working again?

I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

Act on your dream!

JD

For years, I’ve loved affiliate marketing, but lately it has felt more like a chore than a passion and I regret that.

It seems that I find more that I don’t like about it than I love about it, at least lately.

I have been recommending products and services for several years and always felt that I was suggesting something of real value to my readers. Now, I’m not so sure.

Over the last few months, I’ve stopped everything related to “recruitment marketing.” I don’t know if there is a better name for this, but that’s how I’ve come to think about it.

For several years, I was a real fan of SFI Marketing Group and Cognigen Systems. Since both of them are MLM companies, part of the job is to recruit other affiliates and help them. One of my favorite ways to recruit new affiliates was by using the various traffic exchanges and downline builder programs.

Now, after years of this, I no longer do it. I still feel like I was giving my best recommendations and advice based on what I knew at the time, but I’ve learned a lot since then and my interests and circumstances have changed, too.

While I no longer recommend traffic exchanges, I remain a member at several, mainly because I’ve gotten to know the owners over time and I like them. I think they are genuinely doing their best to help their members, but I think that the traffic exchanges themselves are not a good way to introduce yourself and your services to people who really want to work to build their own marketing business.

After having recruited thousands of affiliates, I cannot say that I can name a single success out of the bunch. That doesn’t mean that some of them have not branched out into their own niche and become successful. I don’t know if they have or not, but I know that it was a colossal waste of time for myself and well over 90% of the people who signed up from one of my links.

Instead of trying to help others who are mostly non-responsive, I’m turning my attention to promoting a few services and products that I know are truly helpful for people who are ready to make use of them, and that they are the best of brand in their respective niches.

I’m very happy to continue to recommend Site Build It and Aweber to anyone who is serious about building an online marketing business. I’m a happy customer of both services and expect to be for years to come.

However, I’ve come to realize that both of these services are only going to appeal to a small minority of people who are seriously ready to roll up their sleeves and get to work. Both take a lot of time and work to understand, and even more to put to their best use.

Work and dedication seem to be anathema to most people who dream of having a home business. Instead, they want something automatic that floods their inboxes with money. I have yet to find such a system and I don’t think one exists, yet there are plenty of people who are willing to lie to you and sell you one, anyway.

Yes, both Site Build It and Aweber are systems, but they are tools and training that you have to put to work, not some kind of “push button success machine.” You have to invest the time in learning how to use what they offer and then follow their systems and adapt them to your own personal interests.

This takes work, money, and time.

Since being dropped by Amazon.com and several others this summer (just because I live in North Carolina), I’ve spent a lot of effort undoing years of work. While doing that, I also stopped promoting a lot of other things I promoted in the past.

I wrote about this here: Making progress by going backwards

Now, I find that I am less motivated to do all the things I used to love about affiliate marketing, such as finding and researching new products and services, reviewing them to see if I thought they had real value, and then building websites and blogs to promote them. These days, I find it increasingly difficult to even write about something I really think is a good value for some people, such as the current Site Build It Back to Work special.

I don’t know if I’ve learned some important lessons or if I’ve become disenchanted with affiliate marketing — something I never expected to happen.

I’m also wondering if I can ever recover my former affiliate marketing income just by promoting two services I really believe in. I don’t think that’s possible, and I think that I’ll lose you as a reader if all you ever hear me talk about is Site Build It and Aweber.

Those are not the only tools I use in my business. I have sites hosted by HostGator and I’m one of their affiliates, but I just don’t want to promote them. They offer a great service and I’m happy with their quality. In fact, this blog is hosted on one of their servers. Still, I just don’t want to promote them, when I compare them to Site Build It, which offers a much different set of tools, but has a system that I believe offers my readers a much higher chance of success than what they can get from traditional hosting services.

The same goes for Aweber. I’m an affiliate for several of their competitors, but after testing all of them, the only one I would use for myself is Aweber and I don’t see any reason to promote anything that isn’t the best.

So, I’m wondering if I still have a future in affiliate marketing, or if this is just some kind of phase I have to work through.

There are some excellent ebooks out there that I can recommend, but now I consider most of them to be overpriced and increasingly out of date. What they taught may have worked several years ago, but I don’t think it will now. So, I don’t promote them.

I’m hoping that I’m just going through a reassessment phase and that I’ll rediscover the love I once had for affiliate marketing. I don’t know if that’s going to happen or not.

What about you?

How do you feel about affiliate marketing these days?

What are your favorite affiliate marketing programs and merchants, and why?

I’m looking forward to reading your comments.

Act on your dream!

JD

For the last several months, I’ve been researching information to help me build a new website that will be found in the search engine results.

Choosing keywords is more of an art than a science, despite what some people say about it. It’s not enough to write pages on a site using topics related to the most searched keywords or the most used keywords.

If it were that simple, then we’d all buy a list of the top 1000 keywords and write pages around them.

If you’re new to keyword research, you may have used one of the online keyword research tools that provides a list of phrases that people have searched for lately. With some of them, you enter a word or phrase, and a few seconds later you get a list of related phrases that contain the words you entered along with other words.

For example, this morning I was doing some research on what people were really using when trying to find a place to eat. I’m promoting a local family-style restaurant, but could not find good keywords to attract visitors. So, I did some vertical research on words like eating, eat, food, restaurant, dining, and a few others. Over a couple of hours, I looked at a couple of thousand long tail keyword phrases that contained one or more of those words. None of them had the numbers I was looking for, however.

Later, I did a lateral search for keywords related to restaurants. This produced several hundred keywords that were found on the top-ranked pages about restaurants in Google, but which did not contain the word, “restaurant.”

After that, I researched the word, “dining,” but most of the good-ranking phrases were related to furniture, not restaurants.

So, that’s the challenge. I need to find what real people are searching for when they want to find a good place to eat. I’ll keep working on it.

Finding the right keywords

Earlier, I mentioned that lots of people look for the most searched keywords and use them when writing their pages.

That’s an important consideration, but it overlooks something equally, or possibly more, important — how many other people are doing the same thing. In other words, what’s your competition?

About a decade ago, Ken Evoy wrote an ebook called Make Your Site Sell!, where he talked a lot about being found by the search engines. He was the first author I found who talked about both supply and demand when it came to keyword research.

By writing about topics in the top searched keywords, we are doing part of it right. We’re writing about things that have a high demand — people searching for them on the search engines.

But, what about all the other people who are doing the same thing? How many other pages are there that are competing with you for those search engine results?

I don’t know about you, but I want to find just the right combination of words that have a high demand and a low supply. Then I’ll invest the time and effort to write about them.

If you have a choice of two phrases with approximately equal demand, but one has ten times the number of competitors as the other, which one would you choose to write about?

I’d choose the one with the least number of competitors — most of the time. Now and then, I write about something that I know I probably won’t rank highly for, just because I want to write about it.

I do basic keyword research, but don’t get bogged down in all the SEO (search engine optimization) discussions and postulating. I don’t have time or energy to waste trying to guess the exact keyword density Google wants. Page rank discussions leave me bored to tears.

What I want is a tool that helps me find the right keywords and then get on with my life.

This morning, I got a very pleasant surprise.

Sitesell introduced version 3 of their Brainstorm It! tool

Now, if you’ve been reading along lately, you know that I’m building a new site for promoting local brick-and-mortar businesses and the site is powered by Site Build It!, the main product offered by Sitesell.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been using the beta version of Brainstorm It! 3, but the actual current version was 2.2.

This morning, without thinking, before my first cup of coffee, I logged into Site Central and clicked the Brainstorming link.

I was pleasantly surprised to see version 3 load in my browser. As late as last evening, I had to go to the beta address to use version 3, but this morning, it’s the standard version.

I logged into the Sitesell members-only forums and found the announcement by Ken Evoy that the new version had been successfully deployed overnight.

Not only does version 3 produce better results, it’s much, much faster than version 2, even on the slow dial-up connection I have.

Everything is working as expected. All the hundreds of top-ranking keyword phrases I had in my Master Keyword List (MKL) were there. The changeover was painless and I didn’t have to do anything at all.

So, how much is the price of Site Build It! going up because of this new tool? Not one penny. We continue to get more and more functionality with SBI at the same price. You gotta love that.

Currently I have about 600 keywords in my MKL that have a relatively high demand and low supply. Over time, I’ll keep on researching, comparing, and pruning this list to make sure that I’ll spend my time well, writing about topics that Google may rank highly.

Although it isn’t perfect, and I have to use my own intelligence and intuition when comparing which long tail keyword phrases to use, the new version three of Brainstorm It! is already a very nice tool in my Internet marketing arsenal.

Of course, it comes at no extra charge with a Site Build It! subscription.

It almost makes keyword research fun.

Act on your dream!

JD

This is only tangentially about affiliate marketing, so you may or may not be interested in reading it.

I know of quite a few people who regularly post about how much, or how little, they earn from affiliate marketing, Google Adsense, and other related advertising and marketing methods.

I’m not going to name any names and I’m not trying to embarrass or put anyone down. That’s not at all the point of this post.

What I want to do is to offer an alternative viewpoint, for a change. Maybe you’ll agree, maybe you won’t, but I welcome your comments.

I am not loving affiliate marketing right now.

I’ve stated previously that I live in North Carolina and that Amazon.com dropped me as an affiliate a couple of weeks ago. I’m not going to talk about that here - see my recent posts if you’re interested.

What I am going to talk about is how many people are putting in a lot of work for dismal returns. I’ve done it myself, in some cases.

Yes, the opportunity to earn an excellent income from affiliate marketing exists, but most people do not achieve it. Some people earn tens of thousands of dollars per year, and others earn pocket change.

I’ve been fortunate to do okay with affiliate marketing over the years. I never got rich, but I could pay the bills and afford to stay home and take care of Mom when she needed it.

After she died last November, I’ve been re-evaluating my affiliate marketing business.

For the last six months, I’ve been brainstorming and planning a new set of websites for promoting select local brick and mortar businesses in Murphy, NC.

The cornerstone site will go live this week, but it will take several months of hard work to reach its potential.

I have to thank affiliate marketing for the skills that I’ve learned over the years that will make this new site successful. In some respects I won’t be doing much different than I’ve been doing over the last decade.

However, in one particular respect, it will be very different.

I’m getting paid up front.

For years, I built websites, communities, forums, and blogs to talk about a variety of things, with the goal of monetizing them through potential affiliate marketing commissions.

I did all the work, posted the links, and paid for everything - all for free.

Then, I hoped someone would find the sites, be persuaded that something was what they were looking for, and then purchase through one of my links.

As a result of all this work, I would receive a commission on the sale of the product.

Maybe.

Sometimes.

Not always.

Still, I earned enough to keep going - but I’m a frugal kind of guy.

Earlier this year, I realized that my circumstances had changed. Expenses were going up, income was coming down and that’s never a good pair of trends.

When your outgo exceeds your income,
your upkeep will be your downfall.

I cut my expenses to the bone and started looking for a new business model.

Now, I’m almost ready to go live with the new site.

What is significant is that in the month of June 2009, alone, I earned more from the new site than I did from affiliate marketing for the past several months combined. In fact, if I leave out commission checks from Sitesell for commissions on sales and renewals of Site Build It!, I earned more last month from this new site than I did from affiliate marketing all year.

(Google Adsense ads also played a significant part in my revenue this year, but that’s not affiliate marketing.)

Based on some testing I’ve been doing, I know that I can help these local brick and mortar businesses attract more customers and I’m going to help one of them in each business category. I’m not going to work with national chains or franchises, only with locally owned small businesses.

One of the things that drives our local economy is real estate sales and it is by far the most hotly contested and competitive environment in online marketing for our town.

Last week, I agreed to work with one local real estate agent and I won’t work with any more. Remember, only one business per category.

Some people think I’m cutting my own throat, but I’m pretty sure I know what I’m doing.

Several other business owners signed up, too.

So, with no live site, and working with only a mockup, my new sales rep generated more income in one month than I have from all my other sites combined, some of which have been online for over a decade.

That’s the beauty of getting paid up front.

I don’t know if I’ll abandon affiliate marketing

I haven’t made this decision. I know that I’m dropping underperforming merchants and Amazon.com dropped me. I expect others to drop me because I live in NC.

Depending upon how things go over the next several months, I may decide to concentrate entirely on promoting local businesses in the small mountain town that is near where I live.

There are two thoughts on this.

One: don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Diversify your income streams.

Two: put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket! I believe it was Thomas Edison or Andrew Carnegie who gave this advice.

I’m not entirely sure which direction I’ll be going on this.

I’m tired of working for free or nearly nothing

I do know that I’m tired of spending all my time and creative energy working for companies that don’t pay me for the work I’ve done.

Most limit the length of the cookie, the size of the commission, and have all kinds of loopholes to make sure I don’t get paid - and that’s if other affiliates aren’t stealing the commissions that are rightfully mine.

I’m tired of it.

With the single exception of Sitesell. They go out of their way to make sure that anyone who purchases from me remains a lifetime customer and I get paid in the future for every renewal and additional purchase they make.

It is the only affiliate marketing relationship I have that has increased in revenue over the last several years, including this year when I saw dramatic drops in my income since September 2008.

There’s a reason. Whether you like to hear me say it or not, Site Build It! works, when we follow the guidelines and take the time to build our sites properly.

Some say that it’s crazy to pay $300 per year for all that SBI offers when I can put up a WordPress blog for practically nothing. But, I’m disagreeing more and more with this.

That’s why I’m powering this new site with Site Build It!

It offers everything I need at a very reasonable price of less than a dollar per day.

You see, I intend to build a real business, not a hobby.

And, to do that, I’m going to help other real businesses attract new customers, bring back existing customers, and earn more money.

In the long-run, what they pay me will be a bargain.

And, to top it off, without even having a website yet, while working from a mockup I created, my new sales rep was able to generate more than enough income in June, alone, to pay for a subscription to Site Build It! several times over.

I don’t give actual numbers for my traffic or income, so don’t bother to ask. That’s between nobody but me and the IRS.

Will it work?

Only time will tell.

I’ll go live with the site this week, but it will take several months of hard work to make it - and the offline marketing that will go along with it - as successful as I’m hoping it will become.

I’m confident, however, that this is going to be effective and that we’ll have local business owners happy to renew over and over again. I’m looking for long-term relationships with them that build over the years, and I’m going to do everything in my power to make it happen.

I’ve learned something very important from Ken Evoy. Plan your business and then implement it over time. Always under-promise and over-deliver.

This is the very opposite of all the breathless, excited hype that is all-too-prevalent in many areas of Internet marketing.

What’s the future of this blog?

I don’t know.

It’s not looking very bright, though. And neither is the future of several other blogs and websites that are devoted to my affiliate marketing business. I already know that several will be shut down as soon as I can get to it, because it isn’t worth the time and effort to repurpose them.

This blog may survive, but only time will tell.

What do you think?

Is affiliate marketing going to play a big part in your business plans for the rest of this year and into 2010?

Do you feel like you’re getting adequate compensation for the work you put into it?

Act on your dream!

JD

I’m tired of dealing with the whole Amazon.com debacle…

Amazon.com cancels all North Carolina affiliate accounts

In yesterday’s mail, I got something that was a breath of fresh air and reminded me of the difference between a so-so affiliate program (Amazon) and an outstanding affiliate program (Sitesell’s 5 Pillar Program).

You see, companies like Amazon.com go out of their way to reduce our affiliate commissions to the absolute minimum. Their one-day cookie, alone, is almost reason enough to not promote them.

Their strong-arm tactics, like canceling all the affiliates in an entire state has proven to be enough for me to never promote them, again.

So, I was very pleasantly surprised to open a letter from Daniel Kornitzer, the CEO of Sitesell, yesterday.

In it was a short letter that talked about the new monthly renewal option for SBI owners that was introduced in November, 2008.

He explained that affiliates would still receive the standard renewal commission of 20% (based on TVI), except that it would be paid monthly on the monthly renewal amount rather than annually.

However, he went on to say, these amounts have not been paid to affiiates since January 1, 2009.

Then, he did something that made me feel very good. He apologized.

We are VERY sorry for this. We’ve worked like crazy to fix it and it is now fixed.

To me, this shows respect for the affiliates who are helping to build the business.

Then, he went above and beyond and sent me a check for all the monthly renewal commissions I had earned, regardless of my TVI during this period. He actually sent me a check for a bit more than I was actually due.

How’s that for treating your affiliates right?

While Amazon went out of its way to reduce my commissions, Sitesell went out of its way to increase my commissions - even going so far to apologize and pay me more than I was actually due.

That’s the kind of respect and service I have come to expect from anyone associated with Sitesell. Ken Evoy started this company years ago and I have always had lots of respect for him and the way he ran the business when he was both founder and CEO. Daniel Kornitzer is following in Ken’s footsteps now that he is the CEO.

Now, this check isn’t huge, but it is more than I earned from Amazon this year. The nice thing, is that it is in addition to the commission checks I’ve already received from Sitesell this year.

I’ve told you repeatedly that the Sitesell 5 Pillar Program is the best affiliate marketing program on this quaint little planet, and it is actions like this that make me believe that even more.

On this blog, we’ve been debating whether using WordPress or Site Build It! is the best way to build an online business…

Site Build It! or WordPress? Which is Best? Why?

At one point, I would have leaned a bit more towards WordPress, but now, to me, the clear winner is Site Build It!.

That’s why I’ll be introducing a new website this week that will be powered by SBI.

But, it’s not just about the webhosting, although that is very important to me.

It’s the complete set of tools, a time-tested approach, the Action Guide, continual improvements and additions, the lack of having to deal with technical issues and updating the software, the help-and-be-helped members-only forum, and the results I get that put me more firmly than ever in the Site Build It! camp.

They say that when a fish stinks it starts at the head, and this has been used as an analogy for companies getting into trouble because of actions taken by top management.

In the case of Sitesell, however, just the opposite is true. This company shines because of the top-quality management that does everything within their power to help both subscribers and affiliates do well.

I know of no other affiliate marketing program that even comes close to the Sitesell 5 Pillar Program. I urge you to see for yourself.

Act on your dream!

JD

I just read an interesting story in the New York Times…

Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest

This is another article that shows how easy it is to start a blog, but how hard it is to continue it over time. Things change. We lose interest. We become too busy with other things.

In many cases, we become disillusioned by the lack of success we had originally imagined.

Although the same can be true for a traditional website, the difference lies in the amount of traffic that continues when we are busy doing something else.

I have static websites that continue to bring in thousands of readers every month, even when I do nothing to them for extended periods.

The same just is not true for my blogs.

If I go any length of time without posting something new to a blog, regular readers notice and new readers may perceive it as just another abandoned blog.

I know I feel that way when I visit a blog that hasn’t been updated recently. Do you?

But, and I think this is important, I just don’t feel that way when I go to a traditional website. While on one of them, I’m looking for information, not necessarily the latest thing written.

As you know, I’ve been debating the issue of blogging or building traditional multi-tier websites for some time…

Site Build It! or WordPress? Which is Best? Why?

I think both have promise and I can argue both in favor and against both of them.

It is much more difficult to design and build a multi-tier website that presents information in a way that is easy to navigate and update. I know, because I’ve been spending much of my time every day for the last few weeks designing a new website.

On the other hand, I can throw up a blog in a couple of hours. All I need is an inspiration, a topic, and a little free time. I know this, because I’ve started several dozen blogs, but now I’m maintaining only three of them on a semi-regular basis, and updating a few others sporadically.

When looking at the traffic stats for all my sites, I see a definite correlation between frequency of posting on a blog that just does not exist on my traditional websites. Just as in academia, with blogs you have to think publish or perish.

Easy to start - easy to abandon

The longer I do all of this, the more I realize that blogs are easy to start. There’s very little barrier to entry. Start one free on Blogger in ten minutes. Host one on your own domain using WordPress in a couple of hours (plus whatever time it takes the domain to propagate, if it’s newly registered). Cost, little to nothing.

On the other hand, when I start a new website, it’s not so easy to start. There’s planning time that nobody but me sees. I may spend months working on the design, researching keywords, researching the competition, deciding on how much information is needed to make the site viable, and designing a three- or four-tier site structure. All of this is done before I do anything else.

I may register the domain in advance, just to make sure it will be available when I want it, or I may decide upon the domain name after I know what’s going to be on the site.

How much does it cost to host one of these websites?

If I go with traditional hosting on a Linux server, my cost is nothing. I’m already paying that cost for my other sites and have both the bandwidth and storage available to host several more domains.

If I go with Site Build It!, the up-front cost will be $300 and that pays for the first year of hosting. More and more, I’m finding that I’m not interested in building a site that isn’t powered by SBI, but I’m going to leave that for another discussion.

Getting back to the main point…

With the new site I’ll be introducing in a few more weeks, I’ve already put months into getting ready for it. I paid $10 to reserve the domain name, and I’ll be paying another $300 to host it. That’s a pretty large barrier to entry from my point of view.

It’s also one thing that will keep me motivated to continue developing the site. After all that time, work, and money, I’m not going to stop working on it until it is profitable and I’m getting income on a regular basis from it.

With a new blog, I find that I’m more of the opinion of easy come, easy go. When I abandon a blog, it’s no great loss.

But, there really is a loss. I’ll lose the time I put into building it, and in the long run that’s more valuable than any money I may have invested or not. I can recover money or earn more. I can never get back the time I lost.

When I first started debating this with myself, I was clearly in favor of blogging with WordPress over building a multi-tier website. I just seemed to make more sense.

Now, however, as I spend more time doing both and look back on the results of what I’ve gotten from each, I’m leaning much farther away from blogging and towards a content-rich, structured website.

I almost hate to admit it, because I disagreed with him when he originally wrote it, but I am more and more coming to agree with Ken Evoy and what he wrote about this subject: Blog or Build?

Finally, I’m going to disagree with some of my good friends, including Mitch Mitchell and Aussie Sire. I respect their opinions and truly enjoy interacting with them on our blogs.

What do I disagree with?

I’m finding that the number of comments or the length of the discussion on a blog post has almost no correlation with income.

Yet, it takes time to monitor the comments and respond to them, so there is a cost involved without a commensurate income to offset the effort.

That doesn’t mean that I’ll discontinue comments or discussions here. I won’t. But, I’m realizing that I’m doing it more for the enjoyment, debate, and socializing, rather than for generating income.

I earn far more from my traditional sites, and after their original design and building, I spend much less time maintaining them.

The choice is becoming more clear all the time.

I’m not trying to change your mind, I’m just passing along what I’m learning on this topic.

What do you think?

Act on your dream!

JD