Sitesell and SBI are going to play a big part in my 2012 marketing

Several important currents are coming together to make 2012 a much more productive year for me. Sitesell is going to play a very big part.

1. I am recovering from a very serious illness and I finally feel like working on my sites again. It has been a difficult period (almost three years), but I’m ready to go. During this time, my income was decimated, so I’m basically starting over.

2. I have closed over 50 websites that I built over the last decade (non-SBI). I started about half of them before SBI was introduced and the other half to test ideas and to see if I could put together a system that was better than SBI (for my own use, only, not to sell to others). I tested many different ways of building websites and blogs, and some of them were successful, but all of them had problems. Problems that I’ve never experienced on either of my SBI-powered sites.

I am a firm believer in testing to see how well something works. I don’t believe what people say, until I test it for myself. That’s probably a character defect and it has caused me a lot of unnecessary work, but I’ve reached my conclusions based on my own experience, not from someone else’s untested claims.

3. The release of BB2 is coming at just the right time. I’ve spent the last three or four months brainstorming and planning and thinking. I’m going to rebuild both of my sites and I’m going to take the time to do it the right way.

When I built my first SBI site in April 2004, it was basically to learn how SBI worked so I would be better as a 5P affiliate. At the time, I was building a couple of large (1,500+ page) sites using a database created by Dave Winer (one of the inventors of RSS and an early blogger, as well as a very talented programmer and application developer) and which I had modified heavily by tweaking the programming and adding my own modules.

The sites I built were very successful until North Carolina passed the nexus tax law in 2009 and Amazon.com cancelled my affiliation. Several other large merchants also dropped me at the same time. I had been an Amazon.com affiliate for 13 years and all of my sites were heavily monetized through their affiliate program. *poof* *gone*

This happened just as I was getting so sick that I had a very difficult time thinking straight and trying to make the necessary changes. A few months later, I was so sick that I could not work, at all.

So, my first SBI site was something I built because it was a subject that is important to me, not because I thought it was something that would make a lot of money. I liked how SBI made it easy to build and manage the site and how it did so much for me behind the scenes.

I was heavily focused on other ways of building money-making sites, at the time. I’ve built social communities, forums, websites, blogs, and even an article directory (for awhile). I wanted to know, from the inside, how these various sites worked and performed — and what were their benefits and problems.

I was a 5P affiliate before there was an SBI. Before even Page Build It! So, I had the chance to watch as SBI grew and expanded and expanded and continued to get better and better, year after year. And, I noticed that the price has not increased, even though the product is many times better than it was all those years ago.

(Actually, I think the price did increase for awhile, but I don’t remember the details. I also know that the C2 module used to cost about $100 per year in addition to the SBI subscription. C2 is now included free. I may be wrong, but I seem to remember that SBI cost about $500 per year at one time. Can anyone else verify this, or is it just another hole in my memory?)

Despite inflation and all the new and improved modules, the price for SBI remains at $299 per year. (Or, you can get it for $29.95 per month. You save almost $60 per year if you pay for it annually. Plus, there’s no risk. SBI comes with a 90-day no-risk money-back guarantee. Sign up today and try it for yourself!)

I spend a lot more than that for coffee. (…and Reece’s Pieces…)

I’ve also observed, for about 13 or 14 years the high levels of intelligence, honesty, ethics, integrity, innovation, and good-judgement that are possessed by the people who make up the Sitesell team. I’ve observed how the company has adapted to a changing world, not by following every fad, but by evaluating each new innovation from a business standpoint and then deciding whether or not it would have a long-term beneficial or detrimental effect on all of Sitesell’s subscribers. (Known affectionately as SBIers.)

I have observed how deeply focused all of the people on the Sitesell team are on helping all of us to succeed. They don’t just say it. They do it. Much of it for free. The members-only Sitesell Forums are dedicated to helping and being helped, and I have observed more times than I can count or remember how SBIers help each other. Individuals on the Sitesell team offer their help, too, above and beyond their official duties.

Day in and day out, for years.

When I built my first SBI site, in early 2004, things were very different from what they are, now. (I also have to admit that I thought I was something of an expert in building websites and I didn’t pay as close attention to the advice I got as I should have.)

The brainstormer was impressive and was a FileMaker runtime database that actually ran on our own computers, before being rebuilt to run entirely on Sitesell’s servers. That was a big change. It’s even better now, and the improvements that are planned for next year will be important improvements, also. SBI comes with an impressive list of tools and many of them are scheduled for improvements in 2012.

I don’t remember there being an Action Guide, although there probably was. I know, if it even existed, it was nothing like what’s available now.

Until last year, I lived where there was no high speed Internet and I had a very, very slow dial-up connection. Last year, I moved about four miles away and jumped into the 21st century, complete with high-speed broadband. For the first time, I was introduced to video on the Internet and it changed my whole approach to using the ‘net. I discovered the video Action Guide and watched all of them, but remember almost none of it. My illness left me with some real memory problems, but that’s getting better, too.

I’ll be re-reading the Action Guide and re-watching the videos as I work though my site redesigns and expansion, next year.)

As I said, I closed most of my websites and I’m changing my focus. For a decade or so, I was wide and shallow — lots of websites with not too much depth to any of them. I spent a lot of time on various forums and commenting on other people’s blogs.

I actually believed the nonsense about having 100 sites producing $1 a day being a good way to earn $100 per day. Now, I know that this is ridiculous. That’s a whole lot of work to earn very little money. Now, I know that it’s much, much better to focus on a few sites and build them so that they attract thousands of readers and earn much more money.

Of course, there’s more to choosing and building an income-producing niche-focused original content website, but some of it can only be learned by doing what you think is best and then adapting and improving the things that don’t work.

And, I want to emphasize this — it takes work! To be successful, you have to plan, organize, and then implement. SBI makes it easier, but it DOES NOT DO THE WORK FOR YOU! If you don’t want to invest your work, time, and creativity into building your online business, stay away from SBI! Go waste your time blogging. Did you know that you can do that for free — sort of?

To be fair, there are some good reasons for having a blog. If there weren’t, this site would not be powered by WordPress. However, I have proven to myself that blogging has been mostly a waste of time — for me. When I get my other two SBI sites situated, I am seriously considering rebuilding this site as an SBI site, instead of a blog. Those plans are on the drawing board, but I have a lot of other things that must be done first.

I did not focus on my own business as much as I should have, but there were other, more important, things I was doing, at the time. Caring for Mom, primarily.

Now, I’m moving to narrow and deep — a few websites that will go as deeply as I can on their topics.

The planning is mostly done. The mind maps are created, the site blueprints are completed, copious notes have been written, and now I’m waiting on BB2 before I completely revamp my two SBI sites.

Even though I made some mistakes when I chose the niche for the first site, I’m going to work through the Action Guide and do my best to correct some of those mistakes and then proceed forward with a patched foundation.

So, 2012 is going to be a big year for me.

BB2 and the new site design features and templates are going to make it much easier to build the sites I’ve envisioned, but was unable to build (due to overextension on other sites and a debilitating illness).

This time, I’m going to stop fighting the things I didn’t like about SBI (the main one being no integrated blog module with commenting) and start fully using all the tools that ARE available.

(It turns out that blogging is fun for me, but doesn’t produce any real income, so the lack of an integrated blog or forum module in SBI no longer bothers me. In another year or two, John Dilbeck And Friends may be my last blog. I’m considering turning it into an SBI site, too, but don’t have any firm plans, at this time.)

I’ve learned, after a decade of blogging, that I don’t make my money on my blogs. I enjoy writing them, but the money is made on my websites, and that’s what I am going to focus upon next year.

So, in summation (finally!!), this old dog is going to try to learn some new tricks. I’m going to forget about using PHP and PERL and Frontier and Radio Userland to accomplish things and I’ll adapt to the tools that SBI offers. The new reusable blocks that make server side includes available to people who use the block builder editor will make it possible for me to do some things I’ve long wanted to do.

My first SBI site may never be a real moneymaker. It’s always paid its way and made a profit, however. My second SBI site is the one around which I’m rebuilding my marketing business.

If you hear that SBI is only for beginners who don’t know how to do the technical stuff, part of that is true. It is perfect for beginners, but it is also perfect for us old propellerheads who have been slinging computer code for decades and building websites for almost as long as the World Wide Web has existed. Some of us have proven to ourselves that SBI offers a better way of building the kinds of sites we want to develop.)

(If you need SQL databases, scripting, and other similar features, SBI is not for you. If you are unsure if you can do what you want to do with SBI, you can always ask your questions. Answers are free and there is no obligation.)

And the price? $300 per year, per site?

That’s a bargain.

I know.

You have to look at the big picture. SBI is much more than just a webhost.

SBI is an online business success toolkit, complete with detailed instructions that you can adapt to the niche of your choice. It comes complete with a set of tools that are unmatched in one service — anywhere. (Remember that there were no challengers in the recent $50,000 Sitesell challenge!) SBI offers a forum with a friendly, helpful atmosphere where fellow subscribers enjoy helping each other succeed.

Only for beginners? Not true.

Too expensive. Not true.

I spend several hundred dollars every month for webhosting, email mailing services, domain names, and other expenses related to my online marketing business. Only $60 of that is for my two SBI sites. By comparison, they are a bargain.

The best way I know to build a successful online business, no matter how much experience and technical skill you have, or don’t have? Absolutely true.

But, I’m just one of nearly 50,000 fans of Sitesell. If you want other opinions, just ask.

I intend to be here when there are 100,000 Sitesell fans on Facebook.

Perhaps you’ve been wondering if you can be successful at building a business with SBI. What do you know that other people want to know?

That’s part of the beauty of SBI. The Action Guide includes 10 steps (metaphorically known as days, although some may take much longer to complete), and it teaches you all about building a website, identifying your strengths and interests, and helps you choose a niche, before you decide upon a topic and domain name.

Most people put the cart before the horse when building a website, but SBI’s Action Guide teaches you a much better way of approaching building an online business.

If you’ve been on the fence about trying SBI, or if you’re skeptical because you have been burned by online scams and get-rich-quick schemes, I understand your reticence. I’ve been burned by a few of them, too.

I have never had a bad experience with Sitesell. Never. Not once. In over a decade.

I can’t say that for any other company. I won’t say that for any other company, even if they offer to pay me.

You never know what you can accomplish until you get off the fence and start working to build a better future for yourself and your family.

Will you get rich? I am almost positive that YOU WILL NOT GET RICH. Possbily, but the odds are stacked against you, by far.

Can you earn a few hundred dollars to supplement your income while you learn new skills, probably, if you follow the Action Guide and do the work. Don’t expect it immediately, it may take a year or two to start earning real money.

Can you quit your job? A few have been able to do that, but I’m sure the majority have not.

Maybe you don’t want to quit your job. Maybe you’re retired and want something interesting to do, and maybe earn a bit in the process.

(I’ll be 60 in 2012 and I’m thinking about my retirement. But, I don’t think there will be much difference. I already work at home, at my own pace, on my own schedule. I enjoy researching and writing, and continuing to build websites really appeals to me — and so does making extra money.)

Maybe you’re a work at home mom or dad and you’d like to supplement your income.

Maybe you’re a student or recently-graduated young person and you’re having trouble finding a job that will help you grow and learn more. Why flip burgers or do something similar when you can learn valuable skills that will help you earn more in the 21st century. Learn how to build effective websites that earn real money. Do it for yourself. Perhaps you can leverage your new skills into a better job. I know several people who have done that after they spent a year or so learning what SBI teaches.

Students, and their parents, invest thousands of dollars in formal schooling, some of which actually helps them in life.

Why not invest another $300 in something that will help you (or your children) learn real-world skills related to business and 21st century communications and marketing.

Did you know that one of the more famous SBI-powered websites, Anguilla Beaches, was built by Nori Evoy (Ken Evoy’s daughter)? Would you believe she was only 14 years old when she started the site? It’s true. Now, she’s a college student who already has a profit-making online business.

Maybe you’d just like to earn enough to make payments on a new (or newer) car or save money for a vacation.

All of these are possible. I personally know people who have done all of these, and some of them didn’t know any more about building websites than you do, when they started.

Get off the fence.

Do something.

Thousands of people took the chance and ordered SBI. The great majority of the ones I know are happy that they did. That’s why they continue to renew their subscription year after year and even purchase several subscriptions so they can build multiple sites.

But, slow down. Start with one. Give it a try.

Take it one step at a time, and learn from the people who have helped thousands of people like you.

What will it cost? $300.

What about all the options, upsells, continuity programs, bundles, and all the back-end products they’re going to try to sell you?

There are none. They provide optional coaching services (by the hour), if you need them to get past something you don’t understand, but they are optional.

There is no hard sell.

$300 per year. That’s it.

Order SBI today.

Do it now. Six months from now, you can comment and tell your story. Is it working for you, or not?

Try it for up to 90 days risk free.

You can’t find a better deal than that. At least, I can’t find a better deal than that, and I’m always looking.

Are you satisfied with what you’ve accomplished in 2011? If you said yes, say it again, proudly. Congratulations!

If you said no, then think seriously about how 2012 is going to be the same, or different.

I can’t speak for you, but for me, 2012 is going to be different.

Sitesell and SBI are going to help me.

I choose to invest time, energy, and money in myself and my future.

Act on your dream!

JD

A few thoughts about webhosting and building websites

This morning, I received an email notice that someone had submitted a new site for the Sites Built With SBI list on my Site Build It, a revolution in website design, hosting, and promotion lens on Squidoo.

I usually wait until I’ve received several such notices before I go to either approve or delete the entries. Usually, 80% of the entries are spam for sites that are not built using SBI. I’m not sure why anyone would think I’d approve those sites for the list, but I get regular submissions for sites built using other methods and most of them are built with WordPress.

So, I go look at each site and, if it’s built with SBI, I accept it. Otherwise, I delete it.

Designing and building websites

I’ve been thinking a lot about SBI sites lately, because Sitesell has been building a new site editor called Block Builder 2 (or BB2) and it is set for release in December. They have spent a couple of years and several million dollars developing it and it recently completed alpha testing.

(Unlike other sitebuilders, SBI offers 70 or 80 integrated tools that are part of the process and features of building sites the SBI way. This new BB2 has to integrate with almost all of them, and the central database had to be modified and expanded to work with BB2. So, this was probably a larger, more difficult project than the original creation of SBI about a decade ago. Updating and expanding a system that powers thousands of websites is not the same as building an HTML editor that just builds pages or adds blog posts. It’s a very big job.)

Beta testing starts this week with a couple of hundred volunteers, who will be added in groups over the next couple of weeks.

If you’re interested, here’s a pre-release sneak preview of using the new block builder 2:

Sneak peak of Sitesell’s new block builder 2 for SBI!

I’m one of those volunteers, and I’m looking forward to getting my hands on it, soon. I have plans for a complete make-over and extensive additions to both of my SBI-powered sites, and you can bet that I’ll be talking about it over the next few weeks.

This new editor is going to make building sites and pages much easier than before and I’ll finally get to do some of the things I’ve done on other sites, but much more easily. This includes using Server Side Includes for things like links to particular pages, affiliate programs, Google Adsense ads, and more, using their new Reusable Blocks tool.

Even for an old-timer like me, who can dream in HTML, this is going to be a nice, easy way to build a site. For someone who is not technically-inclined and doesn’t like coding HTML, it’ll be wonderful. Once again, SBI helps people focus on the business of building their business, not endlessly tinkering with all the tech stuff.

Of course, there are lots of site builders out there, so this isn’t what makes SBI special. Sitesell continues to be focused on helping their subscribers create successful, profitable businesses, and not just websites.

So, with the imminent release of BB2, look and feel, and site design has been on my mind a lot over the last couple of months.

I think it is better to make sites simpler and faster, rather than confusing with lots of distractions. (You can’t tell that by looking at my blogs, because I add a lot of things to a blog that I would not put on a website.)

Meanwhile, back at the Squidoo ranch…

I noticed that one of the sites on my Squidoo lens (out of over 100) was now powered by WordPress, rather than SBI. It has been over a year since I’ve gone through the whole list to check, so I spent some time this morning going through each of them.

Out of over 100, six were now powered by WordPress, two were standard Linux-hosted websites, and three domains had been allowed to expire or put up for sale. So, a little less than 8% had left SBI over the last year.

I got to thinking that there seems to be a lot less churn with SBI sites over the years, even though a lot of people just can’t seem to wrap their minds around why I consider each SBI-powered site to be a bargain at $300 each per year.

For the last couple of decades, I’ve seen webhosting services come and go and I’ve used a number of them. I’ve watched as websites move from one service to another, and often I can see the change only because their name servers change.

Hosting sites and blogs at HostGator

For professional technogeeks and web designers, I recommend HostGator.

For the last ten years, or so, all of my traditionally-hosted sites and WordPress-powered blogs have been hosted by HostGator, and I’m very happy with the service and features I get there. I have a reseller account, so I can host more sites than I care to, all for about $25 per month. That includes several sites and three blogs. At one point, a couple of years ago, I was hosting many more sites with them, but I’ve closed those sites as I focus more on my main target market.

As I said, I’m very happy with HostGator, but I don’t go out of my way to recommend them, even though I’m an affiliate.

Why?

Over the years, it has been my experience that building websites and managing blogs is a pain in the rear. This is definitely NOT for everyone. If you are not technically inclined and if you don’t like tinkering “under the hood” all the time, then I urge you to avoid traditional webhosting services.

If you don’t love writing, day in and day out, all the time, don’t even think of building websites or blogging. If you don’t love the subject for your site enough to write a book, or even a magazine article about it, you WILL NOT enjoy an online business.

I’ve been doing this a long time, and I know how much work it can be. Especially, when some jerk decides to hack a site and either destroy it or break in and install malware. All of my traditionally-hosted sites have been hacked at least once, and most of them several times, over the years.

(Note: Neither of my SBI sites has ever been hacked, and I’ve never spent even a minute thinking about site security for either of them.)

HostGator is very good about watching for this and notifying me if someone has hacked a site and installed malware. They shut down the domain and then I have to go find and delete the cause of it.

If you’re looking for a good place to host a WordPress blog or you need scripting and databases for your business, I highly recommend HostGator. They are the only traditional hosting service that I’ve used for years with no complaints.

If you want an account with them, I’d be happy if you click my link and purchase your subscription to HostGator.

If you are unhappy about the amount of work it takes to build a site or blog and if it doesn’t open the automatic magical Internet dollar machine to make you rich overnight, don’t complain to me. That is a fantasy.

The reality is this: building websites and blogs and earning a profit takes lots of hard work and time. It’s not as hard as digging ditches, but it’s not nearly as easy as some people want you to believe.

Trust me. I know.

Weebly – Webhosting for real people

These days, I urge people who want a basic website — and who don’t want to have to roll up their sleeves and get under the hood — to use a service like Weebly. I’ve been using them for a little over a year with excellent results. I particularly like their sitebuilder and think most people can use it to build a reasonably good site. If you have the skills and the knowledge, you can build an excellent site using their service.

If you want to put up a brochure-like website for your brick and mortar business and you prefer to do it yourself rather than hire someone to do it for you, Weebly is a good choice. If you want to purchase a domain for your website, it makes sense to purchase through Weebly, because they’ll do the set-up for you. If you prefer to purchase a domain elsewhere, they have instructions on how to set up the DNS, but, unless that’s something you like doing, you’re better off buying the domain through them and letting their propeller-heads do the work.

—–Sidebar—-
Just in case you’re not familiar with the lingo, here’s the deal…

What is a domain?

This blog is on the 21stCenturyAffiliateMarketing.com domain. I have another one at JohnDilbeckAndFriends.com and another one (rarely used) at MurphyNC28906.com.

Those names that end in .com, .org, .info, .biz, .mil, and others are domain names.

So, if you’re a plumber and own We Fix Leaks, you could register WeFixLeaks.com — if someone else hasn’t already done it. [Someone already owns that domain.]

You could also host it on Weebly at wefixleaks.weebly.com, and that’s called a subdomain. The word to the left of Weebly.com — separated by a period — is the name of the subdomain.

In general, that’s not a good idea if the top level domain is already taken. It could lead to things like trademark infringement, legal actions, bad feelings, and other things most of us would prefer to avoid. It’s not exactly illegal to do it, but you’ll sleep better at night if you avoid those kinds of tactics. It’s better to find a top-level domain that nobody has claimed, and that can take some time and creativity.

Weebly hosts thousands of subdomains, and thousands of full domains, for their clients.

I hope that explains it. I’ve been doing this so long that I forget that this is brand-new to some people.
———-

If you want to build a site for something like a family reunion, big picnic, community event, or something similar, and you want a good place to do it for free, Weebly is a good choice.

If you want to combine a website with a simple blog (and don’t want to hassle with WordPress upgrades and plug-ins), Weebly is a good choice.

You can host a couple of sites for free at Weebly, or you can upgrade to their professional level (at about $50 per year) and host up to 10 sites. I’ve had a professional account with them for a little over a year and it has worked very well. No hassles, good price, easy to build and maintain.

You can start for free and test it, and then if you want the features that are available only for the paid professional level account, it’s easy to upgrade.

That’s the route I took. I have a couple of fully functional sites hosted by Weebly and five others in various stages of completion. All for the low annual price. I spend a lot more money on coffee every year than I do on hosting professional sites at Weebly. (grin)

I sometimes use their service to test an idea by building a site on one of Weebly’s subdomains, so I don’t even have to register a new domain to see if I like it, or not.

(I don’t know about you, but I have a lot more ideas for things to do than I have time and energy to get them all done. In the past, I’d rush to register a domain, build a site, and see how it worked. I’ve done way too much of that, and now I stay much more focused on my core mission. Still, now and then, mostly for fun, I like to try out an idea and see what I think about it. Some people watch TV, movies, or sports. I build websites.)

I have a couple of old sites that are currently hosted by HostGator that I’m slowly adapting and moving to Weebly, and I’ll be changing the DNS to point their domains to the new sites sometime this winter.

SBI – The place to go if you’re interested in long-term online business success

If you want to build an income-producing online business, my top recommendation is still Sitesell’s SBI, and that’s where I’ll be putting at least 80% of my efforts next year.

My two SBI sites have been sadly neglected over the last couple of years (along with all my other sites), but now that I’m recovering from the cancer that tried to kill me last year, I’ll be getting back up to full speed, soon.

So, that’s my round-about way of saying this…

As I looked at all of the sites on my lens that were built with SBI, I realized that there is a remarkably low rate of churn with SBI sites. Most sites that are built using SBI stay there, year after year.

I know from talking to friends and colleagues that people have real businesses based around their SBI sites. They earn good money every year, and there is very little temptation to leave. Some have added WordPress blogs to their sites, but this is an additional part of the site, not a replacement.

It’s kind of tricky to add a WordPress blog to an SBI site, because SBI doesn’t allow the use of databases and scripts. So, SBI added a feature called Infin It! a few years ago. This makes it easier to add an e-commerce store, blog, forum, or other feature that won’t run on SBI, and combine it with your main site using subdomains.

You need both MySQL and PHP in order to host a WordPress blog, so the way it is added to an SBI-powered site is this: You have to host the blog on another service, such as BlueHost or HostGator and then attach it to the main domain by adjusting the DNS entries so that the blog is a subdomain of the main site.

It’s a little complicated, but the directions on how to do it are well-written and quite a few people have done it. When it’s set up (a one-time thing), the store, forum, or blog is treated as a part of your domain, rather than as a stand-alone site on a different domain.

Personally, I prefer to keep my blogs separate from my sites, but that’s just my own take on how to do it. People who prefer to do it the other way can make that choice for themselves. I know several webmasters who have chosen to go the Infin It! approach.

Not as easy to spot an SBI site as it used to be

I noticed, today, that it is getting harder to tell a site that was built with SBI from sites built using other services. One reason is that people are uploading their own HTML using a variety of templates. This Upload Your Own HTML (UYOH) feature was added a few years ago, for people who wanted designs that could not be built with the original (and now ten years old) block builder.

So, a few years ago, I could tell at a glance if a site was powered by SBI or something else. Now, it’s not so easy. A couple of times this morning I had to look at the source code to see if the site was built with WordPress or SBI, and twice I had to go to BetterWhoIs.com to see where the domain was registered and what the domain name servers pointed to.

(I also noticed that some people do not have a good eye for design — not that I can brag about my own good taste. I know I’m not a visually-oriented designer. While some people don’t like the original SBI templates, they had the advantage of being simple and did not distract from the main purpose of each page — also known as its Most Wanted Response. This morning, I noticed that several of the sites were full of junk that just made it more complicated and less clear about what the owner was trying to do with the site. There were way too many distractions. Sure, that’s their choice, if they want to go that way, but I think they’re making a mistake.)

With the introduction of BB2, next month, it’s going to be even harder to recognize that sites are built and powered by SBI. There will be a lot of new templates, and BB2 offers many new features that allow for massive customization of a site and of individual pages. The new templates are all CSS enabled, and that allows for further, easy customization.

I won’t talk much about BB2 until I get my hands on it and see for sure how it works. Then, I’ll be talking about it. When it is fully-released next month, I’ll probably talk about it a lot, as I test what it can do.

I still believe in simple websites, but I think my sites will be a bit less simple than they currently are, although I hope I never make them as crowded as I do my blogs. And I know I won’t be junking them up with a lot of unnecessary doodads and thingamajigs.

If I go that route, please feel free to smack my little hand and get me back on track. (grin)

Now, back to working with Aweber the rest of the day

So, with that said, it’s time to turn my attention to building a new template for sending newsletters using Aweber. I have to complete that template within the next day or two, because the first issue will be published the second week of January, and that’s fast approaching.

The new editor of the newsletter is patient with me right now, but if I don’t get this done this week, I don’t think she’ll be as patient. I can hear her foot tapping as her impatience grows — and she lives several miles from me. (grin)

Happy Thanksgiving!

If I don’t write anything else here before Thursday, I want to wish all my friends a very Happy Thanksgiving!

I’m looking forward to setting my work aside for a day and spending time with my family. There is a poor unfortunate turkey who is going to be a big part of the day, too.

Act on your dream!

JD

Sitesell 5 Pillar Program changes how cookies operate

I’ve been thinking about this for almost two weeks, before I decided to write about it — and I’m still not exactly sure what I’m going to say here.

In the private 5 Pillar Forums, Ken Evoy, Founder of Sitesell, announced on September 18, 2011: 5 Pillar Program Switches To First-Exposure Cookie.

You must be a Sitesell affiliate to gain access to those forums.

So, how is this different, and why is it important?

The announcement about the change is rather lengthy, as are the reasons for making the change.

I’m going to summarize parts of that announcement here, but — for the full story, including background information — you’ll need to read what Ken wrote and then all the questions and answers that followed.

To give just a little background, the 5 Pillar Program was founded when Sitesell had one product: Make Your Site Sell!

(You can go to that site and read about it, and download it for free, if you’re interested. I keep a copy of this book on the desktop of my work computer and still refer to it on a regular basis.)

That was when I joined Sitesell’s affiliate program — in the late 1990s. I bought, studied, and implemented what I learned, and then I told more people about it. Even now, nine years after the last revision, I still use and recommend that book.

Here’s some of what Ken said about that…

Before SBI! existed, 5 Pillar Affiliates were all “Internet Marketers” (“IMers”). They reached people who were looking for information about SEO, or affiliate marketing, and so forth.

They promoted “Make Your Site SELL!” to them, followed by each book in a a growing range of Make Your __________ Sell!” books. Those were the pre-SBI! days.

Today, half of all SBI! owners become 5 Pillar Affiliates. They speak of SBI! with first-hand experience and with passion. Their sales cycle is different.

They are “regular” people who reach more “regular” people, folks who are specifically looking for information about Anguilla or turtle-breeding (or whatever). IMers’ audience seeks info about starting a business online or SEO or social marketing strategies, etc.

This shift in sales cycle dynamics happened slowly over time. As SBI! grew, more SBIers reached more “regular” surfers who were NOT seeking information on SEO, for example.

I’m in both categories. One of my SBI sites has nothing to do with Internet Marketing and the other has a few sections where I talk about it (or will, when I get all the pages written). On those sites, I have the “Powered by SBI” footer on most pages, and that’s an affiliate link.

I also actively promote SBI on other sites, including here. (I bet you’ve already noticed that!)

Before September 18, 2011, the 5 Pillar program used a last-visit cookie. When it was mostly IMers promoting the system, it pretty much averaged out. I might have lost a few commissions that should have been mine, and I may have received commissions that should have gone to someone else.

I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with Sitesell’s management and tracking. It’s just a natural way that affiliate commissions work with any program that uses exclusively first-visit or exclusively last-visit cookies to track commissions.

Sitesell has always had a hybrid system. It basically worked like this…

If you click on a link on Site A, Sitesell sets a cookie on your computer that shows affiliate A as the referrer. That’s a pretty standard first-visit cookie, but it’s also a last visit cookie.

If you then go awhile and click on affiliate links on other sites, each click will generate a new cookie that links to that affiliate (the last one you clicked on).

So, if you spent three months reading about SBI on this blog, but finally decided to purchase after clicking a link on the other site, the owner of that other site would get the commission.

Fair or not?

I think that’s fair. The last visited site that got the click earned the commission.

At the point of sale, things changed. As soon as you purchased Make Your Site Sell!, or, later, SBI, Sitesell wrote a permanent cookie on your computer. If you happened to purchase from one of my links, then you were permanently cookied to me and I would receive residual commissions when you purchased other products or renewed an SBI subscription.

To summarize, the affiliate whose site was last visited (and whose link was clicked) before you purchased earned the commission and was awarded the permanent cookie and a new lifetime customer.

Pretty cool, huh?

Over the years, however, as the number of SBI subscribers grew, the majority of them were not Internet marketers. They were regular people building websites about topics in which regular people are interested — people who may never have considered building an online business.

As time went by, some of these people (who are also affiliates) would spend time telling interested people about SBI and would set a cookie at the time, but, later, when the sale was made, would not receive a commission.

Why not?

Because, more often than not, the last click before purchase would be on an Internet marketer’s site.

Did the IMer deserve the commission? One view is that they did, because they closed the sale. Another view is that they didn’t, because the other person introduced the new subscriber to SBI and may have spent some time discussing it with the new subscriber, who just happened to make the final purchase decision after clicking on the IMer’s site. The “regular” SBI subscriber who did the introductory work did not receive a commission for their effort, and many of them felt it was unfair.

Sitesell could have changed to a first-visit cookie, but that would also be unfair in a different way. IMers could do lots of promotion and set cookies on lots of prospects’ computers, and even if someone else closed the sale months or years later, the original person would get the commission.

That’s not fair either.

(I’m not going to go into the discussion about a lot of the factors that apply due to the rather long sales cycle for SBI conversions. That’s covered in the announcement I linked to at the top of the post.)

So, this month, Sitesell went to a hybrid system that is more complicated, but may prove to be more fair for all affiliates.

That’s one of the things I really like about Sitesell. The people in charge really care about their customers and their affiliates and those who fit into both categories. So, they decided to correct this emerging and ever-more-unfair path to conversion of prospects to customers…

A while back, we realized that the current cookie arrangement, “last exposure gets the commission,” was not fair to SBIers who were 5P affiliates.

When we first chose “last-exposure” instead of “first,” it really did not make much of a difference since all affiliates were IMers. They generated their own traffic, “competed” for that last-exposure. There’s no perfect system, but it all worked out fairly in the end…

Sometimes, you might get the last-exposure just before a purchase. Sometimes, you might lose it to someone else.

In the long run, it all evened out.

But, now that the 5P Program has two different groups, it no longer evens out…

Net marketing professionals reach people who are much closer to purchasing a business-building solution. They are often just a click away from purchasing.

SBIer-affiliates reach folks who do not even know (yet) that they want to start an online business. Some of those seeds start to germinate, of course. Months later, sometimes, years later, they purchase.

First, though, those prospective SBIers search for information related to IM. And that is when they encounter an IMer, one of tens of thousands of 5P affiliate who focus their efforts on some aspect of IM.

As a result, many of these about-to-become-SBIers (originally exposed to SBI! by “regular” SBIers) have their cookies “overwritten” by IM affiliates.

The median time for conversion of “first-time exposure” people is 9 months. They would not otherwise have been interested in building an SBI! business.

Whereas it used to “all even out,” it no longer does since folks interested in Net marketing do not head in the opposite direction (ex., towards SBI! sites about Anguilla — SBI! sites that MIGHT be on the pathway go onto a no-overwrite list).

They considered several alternatives, including splitting the commission between first visit and last visit cookies, but that would have been a nightmare to track, because of the resulting permanent cookies and lifetime customer status that is assigned at the time of purchase.

The solution is rather complex, but is essentially this…

The first time someone clicks on an affiliate link, they receive a cookie, but, instead of being a temporary cookie that will be overwritten by any subsequent clicks on other affiliate links, it results in a fixed cookie, and that cookie will not be overwritten for nine months — approximately the time it takes for most sales conversions from first exposure to the sale.

So, this gives all affiliates a more equal opportunity to get a commission, if the sale occurs within this nine month window.

After nine months, the cookie changes from fixed to temporary and will be overwritten by any other affiliate’s cookie, until the sale is made, like the original system.

There are some other conditions in the new arrangement…

If a visitor with a FIXED cookie clicks on a link of the same affiliate some time later, the FIXED date is extended to 9 months from the date of the NEW exposure.

For example, suppose Affiliate A is a “first exposure.” 90 days later, suppose that the prospective customer clicks on another link BY THE SAME AFFILIATE. The date of expiration of that cookie is now 9 months FROM THAT MOST RECENT EXPOSURE.

However, as usual, once the 9 month period has expired, the next RR URL link that the person clicks will overwrite the previous cookie to the NEW affiliate’s cookie.

You can see that this is a more fair arrangement for the “regular” SBI owner who is an affiliate, since it increases the likelihood that he/she will receive a commission.

It should also be remembered that this also helps the IMer who actively promotes SBI, because their first visit cookie can be extended indefinitely, if subsequent clicks happen during the nine month term of the fixed cookie, or the new nine month term, if it is extended.

After the fixed cookie expires, then the commission is “up for grabs” by whomever generates the final link that results in a sale.

I think this is a rather elegant solution to a problem and I like the fact that Sitesell’s management analyzed the situation and came up with a solution that may very well be more fair to all affiliates.

Most companies would not go to the bother. Most use either a first or a last visit cookie and most have very short time spans for being credited with a sale.

If you are a 5 Pillar Program affiliate, you should read the thread and follow through Ken’s longer and more detailed explanation.

If you would like to become an affiliate, then you can apply for the 5 Pillar Program.

As I’ve stated many times, I am a very satisfied Sitesell customer and affiliate. I use the products and I’m happy to recommend the service and the people behind the service. They are one of the best groups of people with whom I have had the pleasure to be associated.

This is a rather long and complicated post. The main point I wanted to get across is that changes have been made in an attempt to correct what had become an unfair system. I think it will make a difference.

If you are an SBI affiliate, what do you have to do differently?

Nothing. The affiliate management team and programmers did all the work. Your links will continue to work as they always have, except that you may receive more sales commissions.

It’s too early to know for sure how it will work. I’m optimistic.

I’m going to leave the last word to Ken Evoy, the man who founded the company and conceived of SBI. It has changed the lives of thousands of customers — including me.

Act on your dream!

JD

Sitesell Facebook page approaching 25,000 Likes

It’s hard to believe how quickly the number of people who like Sitesell’s Facebook page is growing. 10,000 a few weeks ago, then 20,000, and now they’re less than 350 away from 25,000.

Guess what, it’s going to be a party.

I know what one of the surprises will be. As soon as there are 25,000 fans, there will be a strictly time-limited 72-hour-only Buy One and Get One Free special for SBI.

If you haven’t already, go like their page and keep a lookout for the special offer announcement. It’ll start today or tomorrow, as soon as they reach 25,000 fans.

That’s the best deal they will offer this year, I’m sure.

When you buy one subscription to SBI at $300 per year, you get a second subscription free and have up to 9 months to start the second one. (Each will renew next year at the standard $300/yr.)

If I had more time and energy, I’d take advantage of this offer. I have two more websites planned and I’ll power them with SBI, but it’ll be next year before I can get started. (sigh)

This is a great deal if you and a friend each want to start an SBI site and see what all the fuss is about. Or, buy one for yourself and give one to someone in your family.

As usual, the 90-day money back guarantee applies.

How do you take advantage of this special?

It starts by liking the Sitesell Facebook page.

Then, today or tomorrow, when they get over 25,000 people who Like the page, the special will start. Look for the announcement when it’s posted.

Be sure to follow the directions in that special announcement. Do not just go to the regular SBI order page. Follow the special link from the Sitesell Facebook page.

Three days, only. This special is worth $300 to anyone who takes advantage of it.

Buy one and sell one to a friend. Each of you can get started for only $150 each (one has to buy at $300, but then you can transfer the second site to your friend).

Please, if you take advantage of this, slow down and follow the action guide. The first five “days” are critical to the long-term success of your online business.

Act on your dream!

JD

SBI urban myths

Sitesell has been around for over a decade and SBI is getting close to a decade old.

Along the way, a lot has been written about the company (Sitesell), the product (SBI), and the founder (Ken Evoy).

Some of it has been accurate and truthful.

Some of it has been inaccurate and misleading.

Some of it has been a scam to promote something else that doesn’t work.

So, if you’re like most of us, you’ve learned about affiliate marketing and how to approach it from different people here and there and, most likely, you have learned a lot of conflicting information and advice from a lot of different people.

I’ve been there.

Really.

I mean, I’ve really been there.

I’ve read thousands of websites and blogs, have joined and tested hundreds of marketing systems, have bought and read dozens of books and ebooks (really studied them), and have subscribed to hundreds of mailing lists and newsletters.

I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve read one person recommend something as the very best approach, only to have that contradicted by someone else who says it’s the absolute worst approach and doesn’t work.

The truth is, that there are many different approaches to building websites, blogs, and an online presence and what works well for one person may be entirely ineffective for another.

We all have our own personal approaches, preferences, filters, and blinders, and I guarantee that you and I can look at the exact same thing and have different opinions about it. That’s basic human nature.

But, through research and testing, we can try various approaches and find what works best for us. Right?

Or, we can just try the “flavor of the day” approach and never really know what works and what doesn’t. Right?

It’s okay to do something on a whim or as a hobby. We all do them.

It’s a different thing if you want to build a business that can provide for you and your family.

I have a couple of websites that I’ve built just for the fun of it. I like to write about different things and I’d rather do it on my own sites than on a bunch of free sites where my writing is lost in mix of stuff from thousands of others.

So, I really do know, and appreciate, the difference between doing something for the fun of it, versus building a business with the intent to earn a profit.

I’ve tried and tested hundreds of approaches and have settled on a very few that I know work for me. Whether they’ll work for you, I can’t guarantee.

What doesn’t work for me?

MLMs and Network Marketing. I’ve spent thousands of dollars and hours trying to build a team and offer support and training in order to leverage their efforts into a profitable business. Huge.waste.of.time — at least for me. Maybe I don’t have the right personality. Maybe I chose the wrong merchants. Maybe I attracted the wrong people. Maybe I just suck at multi-level marketing.

I’ve watched others and some of them seem to be successful. I know a few, personally, who are successful with MLM — very few — count em on my fingers and have fingers left over.

I think, for many people, it can be a way to earn some extra money. For a few, it can be a really good business. For most of us, nope.

I could go on and on with many other examples.

Build a hundred sites and earn a buck a day from each of them. Nope. Doesn’t work. Lot’s of effort for no return.

Downline builders and traffic exchanges. I had some good results with some of them. But, I got tired of the whole “work at home” and “make money online” niche. For me, semi-successful. Don’t like the feeling of running on a treadmill to nowhere.

Yes, SBI is a system that’s designed to help folks make money by building an online business, but the focus is definitely not on the get rich quick schemes that are so prevalent in the “work at home” niche.

Over the years, I’ve heard lots of things about SBI and Ken Evoy that just aren’t true. Some of them are even malicious.

Yes, we can all have different opinions, but I just don’t see a reason to lie about something.

When I want to know about something, I want to know as much as I can learn about it. I buy the product or service. I read all the instructions and participate in the forums. I write support to see how they solve problems. I follow the steps and do my best to make it work. I join the affiliate program (if it has one) and try it out. In short, I do all I can think of to see if this is something for me, or not.

Many things, even those that look attractive, just don’t work. Maybe they once did. Maybe they never did.

A few things that I’ve tested really do work. And they work for lots of different people in a lot of different industries and niches. Those are the gems that make it worth sifting through all the duds.

SBI is one of the gems.

Mailing list services like Aweber and MailChimp are gems. I’ve used Aweber successfully in the past and intend to use both services effectively in the future.

Last week, I identified a new gem that is going to help me with SMS text message marketing to opt-in lists. EzTexting looks like a very good system and has passed my initial tests with flying colors. So, now it’s time to invest some money in it and put it to work in a real-world environment.

Other gems include WordPress and Hostgator for my traditional websites. I’ve used the combination of a WordPress blog on a domain hosted by HostGator for years. That’s how this blog works.

But, I’m moving away from that particular combination. I’m also moving away from Hostgator and that style of hosting using cPanel and all the other traditional Linux/Unix hosting. I want to concentrate less on tech stuff and more on business and marketing.

For my small websites and simple blogs, I’ve started using Weebly. I have several sites that I’m transitioning to their service and my Dilbeck Marketing site/blog will be hosted there.

I’ve been testing Weebly for the better part of a year (mostly with one of my client’s sites) and I am very happy with their service. I like how they combine a tier-structured website with blogging and e-commerce features. I also like that they automatically serve a site using mobile formatting when it is appropriate. I’ve tested it with feature cell phones, smartphones, iPods, and other similar mobile devices and it works very well — and I didn’t have to do anything extra.

So, I test a number of different approaches, including many I haven’t mentioned. I’ve been doing this for a long time.

I won’t say bad things about the ones that don’t work for me. I generally don’t mention those companies, systems, or individuals. I believe this, “if you can’t say something good about someone, keep your big trap shut.”

My approach is to identify the gems and then discuss why they are gems.

Others, however, take a different approach, and that brings me back to my original topic: SBI urban myths.

(About time, JD!)

Yes, I tend to write long posts and go in multiple directions. If you can hang on, it can be a fun ride. (grin)

Some people write about Sitesell, SBI, and Ken Evoy and give a totally different view from what I’ve observed over the last decade+.

If I had to name one person that had the most to do with my online marketing success, it would be Ken Evoy. He has never lied nor mislead me in over 10 years. He has never tried to sell me something I don’t need just so he can make a profit. He has never given me bad advice. I like and trust him.

Ken Evoy was already successful before he founded Sitesell and wrote his first ebook, Make Your Site Sell!

He was an emergency physician. Later he became a very successful developer of toys. He developed a product for a very narrow niche that was successful. From that experience, he wrote MYSS to help others learn how to build websites and make profits.

That’s how I got my start in online marketing. I am forever grateful that I bought that book and met Ken (online). One of these days, I hope to meet him in person and shake his hand.

He learned from the experience of writing that book and helping the people who bought it, that there is a minority of people who really want to succeed in an online business, but most of us don’t have all the skills to make it work. So, he started developing Site Build It! which is now generally known as SBI.

I don’t remember exactly when I first subscribed to SBI to start building my Act On Your Dream! site. I started that site because it involves something that is important to me. I truly believe that anyone who is willing to set a goal and work to achieve it can become a very different person in as little as a year from now. It may happen sooner, or it may take longer, depending upon the goal, but I have seen many people do just that.

Act On Your Dream! is more of a philosophy and hobby than a part of my business. I’ve worked on it here and there and it’s been earning a profit for years, month in and month out, with very little attention from me.

Now that I’m no longer caring for Mom and I’ve kicked cancer’s butt, I’ll be putting more attention and effort into that site. I have a lot I want to add to it.

People ask me why I spend $300 per year on that site when I can host it free on my HostGator account (I have a reseller account). That’s simple. It earns a profit every year and I have never had one single technical issue with it. Not once. I can’t say that for any of the sites I have hosted by HostGator, and I know they are a quality service.

Act On Your Dream! just works. Now and then I add to it, but mostly I just ignore it for weeks or months at a time.

It used to be even more successful when I advertised products sold through the Amazon.com affiliate program. But (you’ve probably heard this already) all the Amazon affiliates in North Carolina (including me) were dropped when our politicians passed the ill-advised nexus tax law in 2009.

The important point is that I earn a profit from that site. It’s not an expense, it’s a reliable, sustainable profit center even though there is much I can do to expand and increase that profit.

I earn more from that site in a year than I have from all my blogs (except this one) and all my forums ever did. And I’m not even really trying.

My other SBI-powered site, Murphy Gold, will be my primary revenue producer and focus for the coming years. Even in it’s present form (just a tiny part of what it will be), it has been profitable from the very first month I started it and that was back when I was so sick I could barely do anything. Now that I’m feeling better, it’s going to start shining!

This month, I’ll send out invoices to my clients on Murphy Gold and will earn more than I will from all my other sites combined for an entire year. I don’t give out my income figures to anyone but the IRS, but I’m talking a few thousand dollars — and that’s just the start.

In the process, I’m helping real people in the real world. It’s going to be even more exciting as it picks up speed.

That is the central hub of the biggest project I’m working on in my marketing business. I’ll be earning a full-time income from that site within another year.

Am I unhappy that I have to pay $300 per year for a site that earns many multiples of that investment? Not a bit.

The best part is that Sitesell continues to add new and better features to SBI that I can use in my sites and they haven’t raised the price in years. SBI is a much better deal now than it was when I first subscribed.

I can’t say that about any other business that I’ve worked with in my online marketing career. None of them.

Am I a raving fan of SBI? You bet I am.

Am I tired of all the misinformation about Sitesell and SBI. You bet I am.

That’s why I write about them now and then on this blog.

I know it looks like that’s all I write about, and that’s true for the last year or so while I was so sick, but it won’t be true over the coming months. I’ve joined and am in the process of learning and testing a variety of other affiliate programs that I’ll tell you more about as soon as I know more facts.

Hey, JD!

What?

You said you were going to talk about SBI urban myths.

Yes I did. And I’ve been addressing several of them already. Here’s the link to more information about some of the SBI! Urban Myths as presented by Sitesell.

I’m going to stop here. I have a lot more I could say, but I’ll leave it for another day and maybe another site.

So, what do you think? Questions? Comments?

I always enjoy hearing from you.

Act on your dream!

JD

PS. You do realize that this is about affiliate marketing, too, don’t you? I am an affiliate for Sitesell and I believe they have the best affiliate program on the planet. I haven’t tested all of them, of course, but of the several hundred I have tested, Sitesell’s 5 Pillar Affiliate Program is the best. I’m not surprised. They are very good at what they do.

Your Facebook page – what would you do if it suddenly disappeared?

On Wednesday, I wrote about Sitesell’s Facebook page disappearing. *poof*

You might want to read that before reading the rest of this article.

If you don’t want to go read it, here’s a brief synopsis. Sitesell’s Facebook page was doing very well. They had invested months of time, lots of money, and the energy of several employees to build it to where it was. There were over 16,000 people who Liked the page. There was hundreds of pages of content and thousands of interactions. Interest was growing. Activity was increasing. More people were liking it every day.

Then, Facebook shut it down.

*poof*

No warning. No explanation.

*poof*

Gone.

What would you do if your Facebook page was your primary marketing site for your business? (It wasn’t for Sitesell, but it was becoming a very valuable resource.)

What if all your marketing was to send people to your Facebook page? What if all your marketing suddenly sent people to Facebook’s home page, instead. No warning. No explanation.

I bet you’d be reaching for the antacid to put out the fire in your belly. I know I would.

Ken Evoy, the founder of the company, blogged about it. He linked to other businesses that had similarly had their Facebook page shut down. I urge you to read that blog post: Urgent! We Need Your Help!

Now it’s back again and you can see it here: SiteSell.

Still, there’s been no explanation or apology forthcoming from Facebook.

Think about this.

Don’t put all your promotion eggs in Facebook’s basket. Have at least one website you own and control.

Even if you have your own website and/or blog on a domain you own, you’re still at least a little bit at the mercy of the company that hosts your site for you. But, I think, there isn’t nearly as much of a risk as there is at Facebook.

One of my Facebook pages was shut down

I have a website at Murphy Gold that I use for promoting select locally-owned businesses in Murphy, NC.

As part of my marketing, I set up a Facebook page for Murphy Gold.

I let it languish for a few months, while I was undergoing chemotherapy and just didn’t feel like working on it. One day, when I was feeling relatively well, I noticed that I had over 25 likes on the page. That meant that I could apply to Facebook to get a shorter page URL than the one that is automatically assigned when you create a page.

I wrote a note about that on my Dilbeck Marketing page: How to get a better URL for your Facebook pages.

Of course, I wanted Murphy Gold to be in the URL. So, I applied for the URL I wanted and it was denied, because it was already in use. Of course, I went to the URL to see it. In this case, it wasn’t a page, it was a personal profile, and it was inactive, having only a couple of status updates from a year earlier. There was no tie between the person using the URL and themselves, and I’ve claimed common law trademark on the phrase “Murphy Gold” as you’ll see on the bottom of just about every page of my site.

So, I filed a trademark infringement claim and requested the URL be applied to my page, since it rightfully belonged to me.

What happened?

The next day my page was shut down for trademark infringement.

So, I know about the fire in the belly when that happens.

Fortunately, it was not a major problem, but it was still wrong.

So, I appealed with an explanation that I was the one who had filed the claim against the personal profile that was infringing on my intellectual property.

I went on to other things, including my next chemotherapy treatment. A few days later, when checking my email, I received a message that my page was restored with the URL I requested.

No apology.

It was just another case of Facebook being the sole judge, jury, and executioner when it comes to their site and all the work we put into building it for them so they can make hugemongous profits.

Fortunately, it worked out for me. It doesn’t for some.

I know that Facebook is a free site and they can (and will) do what suits them. I knew that going in. But, still, I expect them to follow their own terms and conditions as well as the policies they adopt. What we don’t get is clear lines of good communications.

I could have demanded a full refund for what I paid them, but that wouldn’t have helped. (grin)

I urge caution, if you’re using a Facebook page as a primary source of contact with your customers and prospects. Make sure that you have another site where you can be reached and where you can explain what’s happening, if you encounter a situation like this.

In fact, I urge you to use a website or blog that you own and control as your primary marketing venue. Other sites, like Facebook, Squidoo, Hubpages, and so forth, can be good adjuncts to your site, but should not be your only, or even primary, representation of your business.

Likewise, be careful of building your website on a free service using one of their subdomains.

I’ve cautioned about building a site on a free service and promoting it using their url.

For example, I’ve been testing a new site here: johndilbeck.weebly.com

Soon, I’ll be working on that site on a regular basis, but I won’t be promoting it until I set it up as DilbeckMarketing.com. It’s not a lot of work to do. I already own the domain and I want to replace my old site with this new one. It’s just a matter of setting aside a few hours one day when my head is clear and I’m thinking straight and then doing the work.

You can learn more about Weebly here: learn more about Weebly

(Yes, that’s an affiliate link. It’s what I do. It’s how I’ve earned my living for over ten years. Many of the links in this article are affiliate links. When you buy through one of them, I earn a small commission. It’s what pays the bills. Thank you! If you buy direct by going to their site instead of through my link, you won’t save any money. You’ll just let the company keep the commission I might have earned by telling you about these resources that can be very useful for you.)

(By the way, I don’t promote just anything — even if they would pay me a commission. For instance, I don’t promote credit cards, insurance companies, multi-level marketing companies, and many, many others that I could. Yes, they pay very good commissions. However, I decided that I will only promote products and services that I would use myself. Or, which I would recommend to my family and best friends, even if I earned nothing from it. I use all of the services I suggest in this article and I’m happy with them. Now, back to the subject at hand…)

Weebly

Weebly provides both free and pro hosting services. I paid for the pro service and it’s only about $50 per year and offers more features than the free version. I’m not positive, but I think you can host up to five websites on a pro account, for the same price.

I recommend Weebly to my friends, family, clients, and you.

If you want a good looking website with lots of features for a low price (or free), and you don’t want to learn all the technogeek stuff you need to know to code a site from scratch (the way I do some of my sites), then you ought to look into Weebly. After all, it won’t cost anything to sign up for a free account and spend some time learning how it works.

That’s the reason I first signed up for Weebly. Sitesell’s next version of SBI is going to have a greatly-enhanced version of their sitebuilder and they’ve said it will be similar to Weebly’s. So, I initially signed up for a free account at Weebly so I’d be prepared when Sitesell rolls out their new version later this year.

In the process of using it, I really liked it, and that’s when I decided to upgrade to the pro version of Weebly. Now, I just need to knuckle down and build my new Dilbeck Marketing site, there.

Here’s another professional website hosted on Weebly: Images By Courtnie Photography

Weebly offers lots of great features and what I think is the best site builder software on the Internet. By that, I mean the best interface for easily creating HTML pages with all the bells and whistles, without having to learn all the code.

Check it out, if you want to build a website. It’s a great place for personal sites in addition to business sites. Want to build a website for your club, family reunion, church group, or something similar? Try Weebly.

HostGator

I’ve tested dozens of ways to build websites, forums, online communities, blogs, and even obscure things such as an article directory of my own.

After building dozens of test sites, I’ve narrowed my choices, considerably.

I still have some blogs at Blogger.com and WordPress.com and a few other free sites, but they are more or less inactive at this point. Now and then I post something. I mainly keep them around to retain control over the URLs that I have heavily promoted in the past.

These days, I host my traditional sites, including websites and self-hosted WordPress powered blogs (including this one) at HostGator. I’ve been doing this for years and it has been very cost effective and reliable.

It takes a lot more technical knowledge to build a site at HostGator than at Weebly, but HostGator offers features that are great for programmers and developers to add additional functionality to a website. I use PHP and PERL programming on some of my sites to do things I can’t on other webhosting services.

On the downside, we open ourselves up to more security risks when we use scripts — both custom and open source — on our websites. Scripts are the main way in which criminals gain control of our sites and use them for their nefarious purposes, such as hosting phishing pages and/or using them to send spam emails without our knowledge. Or, sometimes, they just like to take control and either deface or destroy the site. I’ve had all of those things happen to my traditionally-hosted sites, multiple times, on HostGator and other similar hosting services.

I can’t think of a single open source script I’ve used, including WordPress, that hasn’t been hacked at least once, over the years that I’ve been doing this. And, to be totally honest, it might be going on right now on one of more of my sites without my knowledge.

The last phishing scam that was installed on one of my sites was caught by HostGator security. They disabled and removed the offending scripts and pages and notified me. Then, I spent the next day or so going over the site looking for other problems. That was a totally non-productive, but necessary, use of my time and energy.

I’ll continue using HostGator for most of my current sites (except for a few, like DilbeckMarketing.com, that I’ll be moving to Weebly.

I have a couple of large websites hosted there…

JohnDilbeck.com (which has lots of custom programming I added over the years)

It used to be a much larger site (nearly 2,000 pages) before the NC General Assembly passed the nexus tax law in 2009 and Amazon.com dropped all affiliates in North Carolina. I lost several hundred dollars per month in income as a result of that decision and removed hundreds of pages on the site that were designed for and had links to products that could be purchased on Amazon.com.

GeorgiaDragRacing.com (which will be taken down one of these days due to my brother’s bad health)

I seem to recall something about drag racing in my senior yearbook entry when I went to Campbell High School in Fairburn, GA. (Howdy, class of ’70!) This website proves how much David and I loved drag racing. There are some great photos of the Houston Brothers and their ‘vettes. They owned and operated Houston Brothers Dragstrip in Fairburn for a number of years.

(If we were going to keep that site up, I’d add lots of videos of drag racing from YouTube. I think that would make an even more interesting site.)

My three active blogs will continue to be hosted on Hostgator:

John Dilbeck And Friends

21st Century Affiliate Marketing (you’re here right now. Thanks for reading!)

and the smaller, and less active

Murphy, NC 28906 (It’s being replaced by my MurphyConnections.com social networking site.)

All three of those sites are powered by WordPress and some custom programming I’ve added here and there.

I like HostGator and all they provide at a very reasonable cost, but their hosting service takes more technical skill and savvy to use than Weebly.

Sitesell and SBI

Now, if you’re very serious about building an online business and you want the best combination of tools, training, support, and an outstanding members-only forum for helping and being helped, then the only company I suggest is Sitesell.

(By online business, I don’t just mean making money online. See: Make money online vs. Build a business online for more of my thoughts on this subject.)

Yes, Sitesell is the company that had their Facebook page taken down for almost two days and that’s what prompted this long post.

Here’s the link to their blog post about this episode: Urgent! We Need Your Help!

and here’s a link to Sitesell’s Facebook page.

A little history, if you’re new to reading my scribblings…

I would not have been able to build my online marketing empire (grin) had it not been for what I learned from Ken Evoy (founder of SiteSell and the visionary behind SBI).

I found him over ten years ago, when I had quit programming and consulting and returned to blacksmithing — an old family tradition.

I enjoy making things and I was planning to make custom-made arms and armour. I did some of that, but along the way, I took a path less traveled and made a steel rose for Dena, my beautiful daughter.

My friend George Kelischek, a master violin maker in Brasstown, NC once told me, “Anyone can learn to make something, but you can’t build a business until you learn how to sell what you make.”

Truer words were never spoken.

So, since the Internet was starting to get popular, I went searching for information on how to build a website that could help me sell my roses that never wilt.

I already knew how to build websites, and I was already an Amazon affiliate, earning a hundred or so dollars a month, so I already knew a little about the subject.

What made the difference was finding Ken Evoy and buying his book, Make Your Site Sell! That was by far the best $20 (or so) I ever spent. I’ve recouped that investment and much more, many times over, and I’m still earning from work I did years ago. (I love passive residual income. I wish I had a lot more of it!)

The book cost about $17, if I remember correctly, and with the second edition the price was increased, to around $30. That was for three volumes and about 1,500 pages of very good information.

Now, you can get it as a free PDF download of Make Your Site Sell!

That book changed my life. It took a lot of studying and a LOT of work, but before long, I was selling all the roses I could make to people all across the USA and Canada and made some lifelong friends in the process.

I was getting inquiries from Ireland, England, Australia, New Zealand, and other far-off lands.

I was even getting requests for custom-forged daggers, crowns, jewelry, and other items from people as far away as California. A good website that could be found in the search engines really extended my marketing reach.

Then, Mom got sick with cancer. I’ve written about that over the years, so I won’t repeat the story here. I cared for Mom for years following her cancer surgery and then spent a couple of years fighting my own battle. Thankfully, Dena and Stacey cared for me when I needed it.

Here’s something I wrote about Mom, following her death: In memory of Mattie Lee Dilbeck

Here’s something I wrote following Mom’s death (before my cancer fight started) that shows some of my thinking and the state I was in: Site Build It! or WordPress? Which is Best? Why?

It’s safe to say that the last nine years were devoted to caring for Mom and fighting my battle with cancer. What little free time and energy I had, I continued to maintain my sites and company as well as I could. If it had been anything but an online business that mostly ran on automatic (except for the research and writing, of course), I would have had to shut it down. That came very close to happening last March. It looked like I wouldn’t live much longer and I didn’t have the strength to work on it. I came very close to pulling the plug on Dilbeck Marketing and shutting down all my sites.

Even without much input from me, there was enough income to cover the expenses, so I left it running. Good thing. I didn’t have the energy or enough of a clear head to shut it down gracefully. All I would have been able to do was cancel the hosting accounts and stop paying the expenses. That would have left remnants all around the Internet from all the work I’ve done over the last 10 years.

So, I left all the sites up. Now, we’re continuing to kick cancer’s butt and I’m getting stronger every day. There’s a lot already in place, but it feels a lot like I’m starting a new business. I have to clean things up and start running on the treadmill that powers everything. Fortunately for me, the treadmill is actually the keyboard I’m pounding on right now.

Make Your Site Sell! and all the work I put into building these sites and relationships kept me going financially, even when I could not leave home for more than an hour or two to run errands the last few years I was caring for Mom, and the last couple of years while Dena and Stacey were caring for me.

But, a lot of people who read MYSS! did not have the technical skills to follow the advice in that book, so Ken Evoy took it up a notch and created Site Build It, now referred to as SBI! ver 2.

Now, back to the present…

Henceforth, I’ll be putting about 80% of my efforts into building two sites I own that are powered by SBI: Act on your dream! and Murphy Gold.

I believe that almost anyone can make their life better by choosing their most important dream (not sleeping dream, but something you want to achieve), and then making it real. I think you can be well along the way to realizing your dream, once you’ve made that decision, in as little as a year from now.

For the last year, my dream has been to kick cancer’s butt and get back to work. (check)

Now, my dream is to do what I can to inspire others to live their dreams (using the first site) and to promote some of the very best business owners in Murphy, NC (the second site).

I’ll be spending about 15% of my work time on Act On Your Dream!, 65% on MurphyGold.com and MurphyConnections.com, and the remaining 20% of my time on running the business, accounting, maintaining all my other sites and blogs, occasionally updating my profiles and interactions on sites such as LinkedIn, MerchantCircle, and Squidoo, posting updates and teasers on Twitter, and playing — with a little work — on Facebook.

The plan is in place and the goals are set. Now, it’s time to start working on each of them and drawing a big heavy black line through each item when it is completed.

Ken Evoy and SBi have given me the knowledge, tools, and guidance I need to live my dream, just as they have done for thousands of others around the world, including a few who are reading this right now. They continue to evolve their product, let us know about new techniques that have been proven to help us build our business, and provide ongoing support and encouragement through their newsletters and forum.

Right now, I’m sitting on the front porch in the mountains while I’m working on my blog. That’s the life I love.

If I had to focus on just one thing, and that may very well happen one day in the future, I’d focus on promoting the people of Murphy, NC on MurphyGold.com and MurphyConnections.com.

And what’s going to make that possible? Yeppers! That’s right, Sitesell and SBI. (And Ning, for hosting Murphy Connections.)

Oh, yeah, LinkToDetails.com is a domain powered by SBI that makes it possible to have my own link shortening service like tinyurl.com, or bit.ly, or the others — but it is one I own and control, so I’m not subject to any whims or changes of direction on their part. Don’t bother going to look at it, I use it only for redirecting links, mostly affiliate links, to the businesses I promote.

The primary work I do is done on my own domains. The ones I own and control and over which I set my own policies. (I may be vulnerable to my own capricious or birdbrained decisions — like almost shutting all of them down last year — but not to anyone else’s.)

Facebook can be like that. They can be capricious and they can make mistakes. Sometimes, but not always, those mistakes are resolved properly. Unfortunately, they can be very difficult to communicate with and many of their communications are less than forthcoming and can be difficult to decipher.

In the case of Sitesell’s page and all the great community interaction there, it was a good outcome — but terrible communications.

Today, I took most of the thoughts I wrote on a thread on my Facebook profile and reworked them into this blog post on 21st Century Affiliate Marketing. I want them on a site I control. I want them where I can find them in the future. I want them on a site where YOU can find them.

Do you own a business?

Where and how are you promoting it? If Facebook or another free site is your primary marketing venue for your business, I think you’re making a big mistake.

It works great as an adjunct to your main site(s), but not as a primary contact point.

Facebook is great when used as another entry point to your marketing funnel, as long as you’re bringing more people to your main site(s).

If you want to learn more, but not spend any money on it, download and read Make Your Site Sell!

That book is excellent, even though a lot of things have changed over the few years since it was last updated. Still, there is some outstanding advice about researching, understanding your clients/customers, talking to them, and promoting the services and products you offer. That information and those techniques will never go out of date.

If you want to learn more about how to build a real online business and get all the tools, support, training, and a great community forum all for the ridiculously low price of only $300 per year (or $30 per month), the primary business I will recommend is the one I use myself, Sitesell.

They offer the best tools, best service, and best communications (even from the founder and department heads) of any company on this quaint little planet that I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with.

As with anything else, it takes a combination of work, time, money, tools, strategies, and help to build a successful business. Don’t you owe it to yourself to use the best tools to help you do the work?

Please, don’t put all your eggs in the Facebook basket.

That’s a huge risk to take if you are serious about building a real business.

What do you think?

Act on your dream!

JD

Are learning curves stopping you from making a profit?

I was going to post this as a reply to a comment Delena Silverfox posted on the Weebly adds collaborative website editing post I wrote a few days ago, but I decided to make it a post of its own.

Here’s part of what she said:

…You make a lot of reeeeally good points here. Like the learning curve with self-hosting services. That’s the biggest reason I’ve kept my blog(s) on Blogger rather than anything else.

I’ve tried hosting with HostGator and GoDaddy, but when I got my URL and hosting, then went to the dashboard of my services and realized I knew absolutely nothing about how to actually get a site up and running, my projects were dead in the water. I just don’t understand how it all works. My brand of geek is more the sci-fi and gaming variety of geek….

Delena, you bring up a very good point — learning curves.

When I first started blogging, it was as a hobby. Later, it became an integral part of my marketing business. It was much more effective when blogs were new and there were few competitors. Now, my blogs convert much poorer than my tier-structured websites. That’s why I’m putting much less effort into blogging this year.

Every time we encounter something new on the Internet, there is a learning curve. Some things are easy to use — like Twitter. But, there is still a learning curve involved in learning how to use each of them effectively for our business and/or personal purposes.

For several years, I tested every blogging platform and every social networking site I encountered. Most were a complete waste of time and diverted me from actually working my business. Yes, my business is marketing online, so it wasn’t entirely wasted, but it did not help in producing revenue.

If I were in a different business, all of that effort would have directly competed with actually working my business and that would have been a Bad Thing.

I’ve known lots of small business owners who wasted months of time and put up really lousy websites, when they could have paid a pro a couple of thousand dollars and would have had something that looked good, attracted visitors, presented good calls to action, and produced results.

On the other hand, lots of small business owners tend to be generalists and do-it-yourself-ers. Many are highly skilled in several areas. I’ve seen lots of excellent blogs and websites that they built themselves.

In many instances — perhaps most — we’re better off getting better at what we’re already good at, rather than trying to improve those things we don’t like to do or are not good at.

So, each of us has to decide for ourselves where our skills are strong and where they’re weak. Also, we have to consider what we enjoy doing and what we can’t stand.

Then, time, energy, skills, interest, and profit have to be factored into your own personal equation to help you decide what you should do yourself and what you either don’t do or hire someone else to do for you.

It’s a case of penny (dollars) wise and pound (time) foolish. The one thing that small business owners all have in short supply is time and that’s what is frequently squandered in a misguided effort to save a few dollars.

A blog can be a really good thing for a business and I believe that a website is a requirement, but I don’t think everyone has equal talents when creating and maintaining them. In many cases, business owners would be much better off hiring a pro to build and maintain their websites, and hiring a professional writer — who understands the psychology of marketing — to write the pages and blog posts.

I just don’t see much of this being done by most small business owners.

To me, it makes good business sense to pay someone $500 (for example), if what they do produces an extra $1,000 (or any amount over $500). Not only does it produce a profit on its own, but it frees up the owners time to do things directly related to the business (or have time for a nap or a day off now and then).

I’m way off topic for a blog about affiliate marketing. These days, I’m splitting my time between affiliate marketing and promoting local small businesses. I see some similarities and big differences.

For those of us who earn our living by publishing on the Internet, it can be a very wise investment of our time and energy to learn how to build good, productive websites and blogs. That’s a core part of our business.

For other business types, it can be a huge distraction filled with multiple learning curves.

For those of us whose geekiosity runs to tech things, this can be a good way to build a business helping local folks who don’t understand it.

(Technogeeks usually have poor people skills. It’s a stereotype, because it’s true more often than not. They are wise when they team up with a marketinggeek who knows how to sell. Apple would not have been the same if it hadn’t been for Steve Wozniak teaming with Steve Jobs, both of whom were geniuses in their own realms.)

For folks whose geekforce runs to other things, I think blogging on Blogger and building websites using tools like Weebly makes a lot of sense. I just don’t see any reason why you should have to face the hassles, uncertainty, and displeasure of doing the tech things you don’t want to do.

I do think it’s a good thing to invest in a domain name you own and can market. You can publish through Blogger to your own domain. (You may need to hire someone to set it up for you, if you’re completely baffled.)

You can have your own domain name with Weebly, too. If you register a domain through their service, they’ll set up all the tech stuff for you. If you register a domain through a different registrar, you’ll have to do it yourself, or at the risk of sounding like a broken record, hire someone to do it for you.

I think it is important to learn all you can about your business and effective ways to promote and market it, but I think there is a limit that you reach at some point. Promoting your business and the products and services you offer is important. Very important. Learning to market your business more effectively is a good path to more profit, but don’t waste time when you don’t have to.

Are all the learning curves stopping you from making a profit?

Act on your dream!

JD

Weebly adds collaborative website editing

Have you ever wanted to have two or more people help you build your website, maintain the information on it, monitor comments, or assign different people to edit specific pages?

Now, as of today, you can do that on Weebly. This is a feature that was greatly desired by some people who choose to build their websites on Weebly. Now it’s available.

You can build a free site, or pay a reasonable fee to get more features.

I’ve used it both ways and like it. It’s one of the few website builders I recommend.

Dena Howard uses Weebly to build and maintain her website and blog for Images By Courtnie Photography in Murphy, NC.

I’ve started a site that will eventually become DilbeckMarketing.com at johndilbeck.weebly.com.

Unlike using WordPress on your own domain, there is a full tech staff that handles things like security updates and maintaining and improving the code used to power the sites. That means that you don’t have to be a technical whiz to create a website that can optionally have a blog, too.

If you’re not using Weebly already, and you’re looking for a good way to build a website, visit their site and get started today.

Act on your dream!

JD

What is your time worth?

And, even more directly, what is my time worth?

That’s the question I’m asking myself this morning.

This evening, a little over 100 miles from here, my high school classmates are having our 40th high school reunion and I would love to go and see them. We’ve become reacquainted this year on Facebook and we’re sharing tidbits about our families and what’s happening with all of us.

That makes this year different.

In the past, I didn’t mind missing the reunions because I’d lost touch with everyone, even my best friends from high school. This year, it’s different. I’m reading their stories and they’re reading mine. We’ve reconnected — as people and not just names and memories.

40 years is a long time, and yet, in many ways, it seems to have flown by. In other ways, it feels like it’s been an eternity since I saw any of them.

Since I had to make the decision, this morning, that I couldn’t make it to this reunion, due to being weak and tired from this week’s chemotherapy, I got to thinking about other things I’ve done with my time.

I look back on the last 40 years and I like that I concentrated on computers and mastered them enough to build a decent career as a consultant, teacher, programmer, and administrator. It made it possible for me to move here to Murphy, NC, and I love living here in the mountains and out of the rat race. I invested over a decade in the big cities of Atlanta and Phoenix and was then able to bring myself and my business here.

I like that I have good friends who care about me as much as I care about them. That, too, takes time.

For the rest of this post, I’m going to concentrate on the last decade or so.

As you may already know, the last decade has been full of challenges for my family. For over seven years, I was the sole, full-time caretaker for my elderly mother as she battled cancer and the after-effects of the surgery. I cared for her as long as I could but she had to go into a nursing home for the last few months of her life. At least, I helped her live at home for a few more years.

This year, I’m fighting my own battle with cancer and the tide seems to have turned. I intend to win this war and get healthy and stronger. A year from now, I intend to be much better than I am today.

During all this time, my online marketing business allowed me the time to stay home and care for her, and now for myself.

(In my own case, however, I’ve had to file for disability to pay for all the medical bills and my living expenses until I can really resume working. These days, I’m able to do a bit here and there, but nowhere nearly as much as I used to do. Up until this summer, my online marketing business provided 100% of my income for most of the last decade. As soon as possible, it will once again provide the income for me to live my life as I like it.)

Just out of curiosity, I went to Alexa’s Way Back Machine and looked at the first few days of JohnDilbeck.com as it looked on October 18, 2000 — just over one more week from its 10th anniversary. (Actually, I registered the domain a few months earlier, on my birthday. In many ways, it looks much the same now as it did back then: JohnDilbeck.com)

Even in my earliest attempts, I was using affiliate marketing to earn a living. This site brought in thousands of dollars over the years.

Even my very first domain, Need-Sleep.com, was a money maker, primarily because I was one of the earliest Amazon.com affiliates. That look into the Way Back Machine shows my first money-making site as it looked about 13 years ago.

(I miss my HyperDimensional Book Nook.)

All my sites that depended upon the Amazon.com affiliate program for income took a dive when Amazon terminated all their associates in North Carolina following our legislature’s misguided attempt to bring in more taxes with their new nexus laws. Unlike some people, however, I relied on Amazon.com as only one stream in my income river, so although substantial, losing Amazon and other big retailers did not put me out of business. However, that, coupled with the massive downturn in the economy, really did put a crimp on my income. It’s a good thing I have no debts and my overhead is very low. Even with the lowered income, I was able to weather the storm and I’m starting to see my income rise, again, even though it’s only a fraction of what it once was.

Both sites were rather crude and certainly did not contain any eye candy to keep anyone entertained. Yet, both of them made money for me.

I only wish I had been smart enough to sell the Need-Sleep.com domain to someone rather than just letting the domain registration lapse.

I just looked and the domain is available. I almost registered it for old time’s sake, but decided not to. I’ve registered way too many domains over the years and most of them have been failures. Besides, now that I’m no longer a computer consultant working all around the clock, I no longer need sleep. (grin)

I won’t bother you with them, but I’ve looked at some of those old domains this morning and recognize all the hard work that I put into them and all the time that was wasted over the years.

If I had avoided all the shiny red balls that kept bouncing across my marketing pathway, and had concentrated on building websites with depth and authority, I would have earned more for my efforts.

As a consultant, I knew the value of being paid for my work and I charged accordingly. I don’t know why I forgot those hard-won lessons when I turned to Internet marketing.

I also know the value in paying for expert help when I need it, so why did I spend thousands of hours (and quite a bit of money) learning and relearning how to build “free” websites over the years? Looking back on it from my new perspective, I just don’t understand it.

Still, some of my websites did well enough that I earned a decent living, where I wanted to live, doing what I wanted to do, so that I could invest waste time learning all the new scripts, building forums, article directories, blogs, playing on traffic exchanges, learning I don’t do well with MLM, and learning another half-dozen programming languages.

What do I have to show for all that? A few dollars here and there. It’s true that I know more about all this stuff than I did, but it’s worthless knowledge, because I’ll never be able to recoup the value of the time I wasted in the process.

I’ve told you before — and some of you may be sick of hearing it — that I’m moving away from blogging (which I’ve been doing for over 10 years) and back to building hierarchically organized static websites. Over the years, even though I put more of my effort into blogging than I did into building content focused websites, very little of my income has come from my blogging efforts.

I got other things out of it, however. There was the social interaction, meeting new friends, and sharing new discoveries, but there was very little money added to my income streams.

I don’t have the exact numbers, but I’m sure my income from my best websites (which I sorely neglected over the years) outperformed my blogs by at least a ratio of 50 to 1, and maybe a bit more.

I was just looking at the first available page of my first blog (on the Way Back Machine), John Dilbeck’s Ramblings, and noticed that even the name shows my lack of focus. John Dilbeck’s Ramblings is no way to inspire confidence and help readers focus on what I’m writing about.

So, over the next ten years, I plan to focus most of my attention on two sites, Act On Your Dream! and my primary site at Murphy Gold.

Not so coincidentally, they are both powered by SBI.

I knew that SBI was a great way to build a site, but something in me, probably a personality defect, drove me to try all these other things and see if I was able to do better with them than I could by using SBI and following the Action Guide.

The only really good result from all my testing is that I have proven to myself that I’ve been spinning my wheels for many years and now it’s going to be much easier to follow what I learn from all the folks at Sitesell.

If I were starting over a couple of years ago, I would have slapped up a new WordPress blog and started rambling. Now, I’ve relearned what I learned a decade ago and I won’t make that mistake.

Ken Evoy makes the point so well on the WordPress or SBI page.

While I was playing and testing on WordPress, and making a hundred dollars here and there, my SBI sites were generating the income that gave me the free time to waste. (Two of my other sites were built based on the principles of Ken Evoy’s Make Your Site Sell! ebook, and they also generated income. They were built before SBI was available, or they would have been powered by SBI, too.)

I’ve given a lot of things the benefit of the doubt, and that includes blogging, building forums, creating article directories, and much more, and it just has not been worth the effort. If I were getting paid by the hour for all the work I’ve done on them, I would have made less than minimum wage.

What does that say about building a business? I could have earned more money with less work by slinging burgers at the local greasy spoon. Sigh.

Fortunately, a handful of websites pulled their load and earned much more than the others. That’s the direction I’m moving in, once again, following a very long detour.

So, what’s your time — and your creative talent — worth? Are you satisfied earning a few hundred dollars per month from your online business, or do you think you’re worth more?

If someone offered me $200 to be their consultant for a month, I’d turn them down, without even having to think about it. So, why would I settle for that as income from blogging all month?

Sometimes I just don’t understand myself. At least, I can learn from my mistakes.

What about you?

What is your time worth?

Act on your dream!

JD

Building a serious business website that gets results

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.

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