Building a serious business website that gets results

March 17, 2010 by John Dilbeck · 3 Comments
Filed under: Advertising and Marketing, Attracting Visitors, Sitesell and Site Build It, Web Services, Webhosting 

I have people asking me all the time how I get so many people to visit my websites every month, and I think most of them think I have some kind of magic trick up my sleeve. That’s not it at all.

The secret?

Hard work, lots of content that people want to read, pages optimized on particular keywords and phrases to help the search engines know what they are about, and continually updating the information as it ages and things change. That’s all it takes.

No tricks. No fancy SEO techniques. Just simple HTML pages (on my big static sites) that are each built around a particular topic that fits within the site’s main topic.

As you may know by now, if you read my blogs or sites regularly, I learned what I know about this (over a decade ago) by studying Ken Evoy’s Make Your Site Sell ebook and putting into practice what I learned.

In the interim, millions of people have visited my sites and many of those visitors have made purchases based on my recommendations for what I think were worthy products and services. That’s how I’ve earned my living for the last decade or so.

I have one website that attracts thousands of visitors per month and remains a profitable site, even though it hasn’t been updated in over a year. It remains my top-earning site for Adsense income and it is a basic HTML-only static site built on the principles I learned from Ken Evoy’s ebook way back in the 20th century.

Since then, I’ve built many websites, most of which failed, using a variety of content management systems (CMS) and blogging software.

There is a lure that’s hard to resist when it comes to blogging and using a CMS system. They are easy to install and start. You get a big rush from registering a domain name and putting up new information in a few hours or days.

The problem is that the rush you get from starting the site isn’t enough to keep up the enthusiasm for continuing to build the site, and there probably was not enough good planning and research put into the topic of the site to see if it was going to be profitable or not before starting it.

At least, that has been my experience.

I’m learning that the same thing can be true when hiring someone else to build a site for you.

I’ve talked to quite a few small business owners who have wasted thousands of dollars and years of their time because they hired someone to build their website who knew how to build it but had no clue about how to attract free traffic from the search engines.

A nice site with no visitors will never be successful. A large and growing number of visitors each month is the lifeblood of selling anything on the Internet.

So, what are you to do if you know nothing, or very little, about websites, but you need one that will help you generate income and not just be a constant money drain?

You could do what I did and spend ten or more years of your life reading and studying everything you could get your eyes on and building dozens of sites to test what you learned, or you could hire someone with the experience and tools to do the job right the first time — while you concentrate on running your business and satisfying your customers.

How much would you be willing to pay to have a website that attracts serious visitors — potential customers — every month for years to come?

As a serious business owner, you probably would not throw out a number at this point, because you’d want to know more. How many visitors? How much income? What are the initial costs? How much does it cost to maintain it? Who’s going to do the work? What are the monthly hosting fees? How much trouble will it be to modify the information on the site when things change?

There are a lot of things to consider and most of them have nothing to do with HTML, CSS, FTP, and all the other alphabet-soup of acronyms associated with the technical side of building a site.

(You might be surprised at the number of websites I’ve looked at in the last couple of years that did not immediately tell what the owner was offering and why you would be better off buying from him or her. People on the web have short attention spans and they are generally in skimming mode when they first visit a website. You only have a few seconds to state your case and give them a reason that will benefit them in order to get them to slow down and actually read what you have to say. Don’t waste your visitors’ time with non-essentials — give them a reason to consider buying from you so you’ll have time to persuade them. Of course, how you do this differs with the type of site you have — sales, informational, and so forth — and the type of business you run.)

One of the things I’ve learned about most of the small business owners I’ve talked to is that the most prosperous of them are not “do it yourselfers.” They don’t have the time, energy, or desire to take on more tasks and responsibilities, because they are already doing all they have time for just running their business.

Most of them depend on others who specialize in things they need.

If they want legal advice, they hire a lawyer, or have one on retainer — they don’t go to law school at night for several years just to learn how to write their own contracts or deal with litigation.

Most of them hire an accountant and/or bookkeeper to keep their business on track and help with financial issues and taxes — they don’t become a CPA just to do it themselves.

Most of the small business owners I know who have survived the recent economic downturn have learned the hard way that there are times when it just makes sense to hire someone with experience and expertise to get the job done quickly, efficiently, and right the first time.

Perhaps you’re one of those successful small business owners who knows how to prosper by running your own business, but who feels clueless when it comes to evaluating people who claim to be experts at building websites. After all, every town has people who claim to be able to build good business websites, and some of them really do know what they’re talking about.

Unfortunately, most of them don’t.

You don’t have the time and money to pay someone to learn what they’re doing at your expense.

How do you separate the experts from the want-to-be herd?

That’s the crux of the issue, isn’t it?

This can be especially difficult when you don’t have the experience to know whether what they tell you sounds reasonable, or not.

One way to separate the experts from the herd is that they tend to spend more time asking you questions about your business and the results you want from your website than they do telling you how good they are at building them.

Another way is to talk to someone who has already been vetted by others who do have the experience and expertise to know.

That’s why I’m personally recommending Sitesell Services to you.

Sitesell is the company that Ken Evoy founded and which has grown into a top-notch service over the years. The Services part of the business is for business owners like you who want to hire someone to build an effective business website that is custom-tailored to market your business around the clock.

The people at Sitesell hire only experts with demonstrated ability and experience, and they help you select the right person to build your site for you.

Here’s a short video about how they can help you…


Once one of these experts is working for you, they follow a time-tested system to build a custom site that will market your products and services to people who are looking for what you have to offer, and these are the hottest prospects.

Is Sitesell Services for everyone? Obviously, the answer is no.

Is it appropriate for every business? Again, no.

But, you’ll never know if it could be a good match for your business unless you learn more about it and contact them.

Of course, there is no obligation.

If you’re interested in hiring someone to help you build your business online, watch the video and see what they offer.

Act on your dream!

JD

PS. If you’re a do-it-yourselfer, you can download a free copy of Make Your Site Sell! and learn more about what I’m talking about, or you can learn about SBI version 2.0 and see if it offers the tools you want to build and host your own site. I use SBI to build and manage some of my sites and it is easily my tool of choice for any new business sites I may build.

Tags: , , , ,

SBI eLearning introductory price expires the end of January

January 16, 2010 by John Dilbeck · Comments Off
Filed under: Sitesell and Site Build It 

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

Tags: ,

Broadband makes a huge difference!

January 16, 2010 by John Dilbeck · 22 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Broadband, CafePress, Opinions, Sitesell and Site Build It, Squidoo Marketing 

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

Tags: ,

Are you planning for more success in 2010? How?

December 28, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 10 Comments
Filed under: Sitesell and Site Build It, Success and Failure 

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.

Tags: , , ,

Site Build It Annual Buy One Get One Free Holiday Special

December 19, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 2 Comments
Filed under: Sitesell and Site Build 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

Tags: , , ,

I will be moving away from blogging in 2010

December 19, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 18 Comments
Filed under: Advertising and Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Sitesell and Site Build It 

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

Tags:

SBI! Version 2.0 Now Available As Monthly Subscription!

November 22, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 1 Comment
Filed under: Sitesell and Site Build It, Webhosting 

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.

SBI! Monthly Billing Option

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

Tags: , , ,

SBI version 2.0 $100 Thanksgiving Holiday Special

November 22, 2009 by John Dilbeck · Comments Off
Filed under: Sitesell and Site Build It, Webhosting 

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

Tags: , ,

Some thoughts about affiliate marketing

November 3, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 15 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Musings, Sitesell and Site Build It, Success and Failure 

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

Tags: , ,

Sitesell introduces Site Build It! version 2

October 28, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 2 Comments
Filed under: Sitesell and Site Build It 

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

Tags:

Next Page »