I enjoy blogging, even though I make little money from it. As I’ve said many times before, I make more money from a couple of websites than I do from all my other sites and blogs. Since I do this to earn a living, it’s the profit that’s important to me.

Yes, it’s easier to write pages on WordPress than using SBI. I throw up ad hoc pages on my blogs all the time about topics in which I’m interested at the moment, with very little pre-planning. I come here to share what I’ve learned and to recommend dependable products and services that produce results month after month.

It’s a fact that I’ve closed most of my WordPress-powered blogs and I rarely post on any of my blogs, any more. I’ve left a wasteland of abandoned blogs in my past. Why were they abandoned? Because they were not profitable.

As I’ve said before and I’ll say again, I am going back to focusing almost all of my attention on two things: local marketing for a select group of small business owners and a very limited amount of consulting. It is going to be very hard to become one of my clients. I’m getting pickier as I get older.

I’ll be using SBI for most of my marketing in 2012 and beyond.

If you’re a dyed-in-the-wool WordPress fan and have no intention of changing your mind, then, the show’s over. There’s nothing to see here. Move along. Don’t waste your time on this blog.

If you’re a marketing wannabee, but you’re not willing to invest money for the tools that do a reliable job of earning profit, I’m not for you, either. If you invest all your time and energy in using only the free tools you can find, I’m going to argue that you don’t have a business, you have a hobby.

That’s my position. Agree or disagree, it’s your choice.

On the other hand, if you are a business owner and you want to grow your business, serve more clients and customers, and earn more, then you may want to take a few minutes and read some of the things I have to say.

No, I’m no “Internet Guru.” In fact, I tend to avoid anyone who refers to himself as a guru.

I’m a guy who’s been in the marketing trenches, off and on, for over three decades and I’ve learned some things that work well and some that don’t.

Am I right all the time? I doubt it, but I’ve made my fair share of mistakes and have learned what to avoid and what to do. That’s part of the learning process. Maybe I can help you avoid some errors along the way.

Okay, now that the preamble to the post is out of the way, let’s turn our attention to the subject at hand: building a business by marketing online.

Whether you sell a product or service, online or offline, I think you’ll agree that marketing is a very important part of the process.

If you don’t have a steady stream of interested prospects, it’s going to be hard to have a steady stream of happy customers who buy from you over and over, and that’s a business. Not one time, here and there, sales. Multiple sales to the same person, over and over, year in and year out.

That’s my goal for 2012. To build a marketing system that does just that: attracts thousands of prospects, tells them how to scratch an itch or avoid a pain, and then recommend products and services and processes that work.

Most of this system, I’ll be building for my clients and myself and I’ll never talk about it here, but I’ll be using the tools that I write about in this blog. If you look in the right column of almost any page on this site, you’ll see the tools I recommend and use all the time to attract prospects and turn them into customers.

(Note: I’m basically starting over after a long illness, so most of the systems I’ll be building are not yet in place, but I’m working on them every day. They will be.)

So, I’ve said all of that to say this:

Do not confuse busy-ness with business. They are not the same.

A business is based on results and that usually means profit. The goal of a business is to increase wealth. I would add this, “while providing the best services and products that are available to your customers.”

I know from experience that I’ve been busy with blogging and it has been a distraction. It has taken my attention away from building a real business and has cost a lot in terms of missed income, because I didn’t keep my eye on my goals.

I was enjoying the process of playing with the technology, rather than focusing on achieving specific business goals.

Blogging — for me, at least — has been a huge shiny object that diverted me from my business for several years. Yes, it was a valuable lesson, but I’m happy that I learned the lesson and have time to rectify the problem.

Harsh words? Maybe.

But, they’re true.

I can look at my own stats and accounting reports and I know that I earn far more money from several websites than I do from all the blogs I’ve built.

I’m thinking, and have no proof, that the main reason is that people come to blogs with a different mindset and different intentions than they do when going to an information rich, niche-focused, hierarchically organized, traditional website.

People bounce into a blog, scan the latest article, and bounce right back out — mostly. That’s why bounce rates tend to be higher on blogs than websites.

At least, that’s what my stats tell me.

I’m not saying that blogs are bad. For some specific niches, they are great. If you serve a niche where the latest news and developments is important and you focus on covering those topics day in and day out, then a blog may be the best approach for you.

If you want to write about a wide range of topics and don’t want to try to organize those topics as you would have to do with a website, then a blog may work, but I’m betting you won’t get very good results from it.

What are you selling?

You have to sell something to have a business. Your income has to exceed your expenses if you’re going to have a real business.

Over a decade ago, I quit computer consulting. I became an artist blacksmith and specialized in making roses that never wilt. I was enjoying that business until Mom became ill. Following her battle with cancer, she could not care for herself, so I brought her home and cared for her for the next several years. Since I could leave her alone for no more than an hour or two at a time, I took up affiliate marketing as a way to earn a living while staying home to care for her.

It worked.

But, the main problem was this: I had no customers nor clients. I had no products to sell. None.

I earned a pretty good living by writing about things that people were interested in and then recommending products via affiliate links. I’m still doing that. I love that business.

The problem, however, is that the people who purchase (or click on the Google Adsense ads) are not my customers — they’re someone else’s customers.

So, my job has been to attract hundreds of thousands of readers and hope that enough of them would purchase so that I’d earn enough to live well.

I did all the work up front and hoped for an income. It’s been great for me, but I know a lot of people who have tried it and have not done nearly as well as they want.

Part of the problem is that it’s a flawed business plan.

We do all the work of promotion and building interest and then pass the customers off to the merchants.

We’re helping the merchants increase their herds, but we’re not building and nurturing a herd of our own.

(If you’re wondering, that’s the term Dan Kennedy uses to help remind us that a good business has a group of satisfied customers and it’s our job to provide what those customers want so that they’ll buy from us over and over. He calls it building a fence around our herd. Then, he advises that we market to our herd over and over, every month, in a way that helps them get what they want.)

That whole process has been perverted, to a degree, in the “internet marketing” business, where people who don’t have a herd of their own, are always selling, selling, selling to anyone who wanders by, and that just does not work.

Someone visits your website or blog, clicks a link, and then they’re gone, possibly never to return. Next!

You may be able to earn a few hundred dollars per month with this approach, but you can’t live on a few hundred dollars per month. At least, I can’t, and I enjoy living a relatively simple life.

So, not only do you not have a herd of your own, you don’t have anything to sell to them. All most bloggers do is try to get visitors to click on affiliate links or click the ads.

Some bloggers offer a lot of quality content; some don’t. Most don’t earn much. Most don’t attract many readers and even fewer buyers.

So, they become enamored with the process and the technology and don’t invest the time, energy, and money to build systems to corral and nurture a herd of their own.

In fact, I know a few bloggers (myself included for a few years) who actively avoid building a herd and nurturing them, even if we know better. It’s a trap that is easy to fall into.

What do you sell? To whom do you sell it?

If you have a traditional business, you have regular customers and clients.

If you own a restaurant, you have regular customers who enjoy your food and they tell their friends. They eat there off and on. If you do a good job of marketing, you can get them to eat more often and to bring their friends along, too. This increases the number of purchases and also increases the amount of the transactions, and that means more income. If your marketing costs less than the increase in revenue, it means that you have higher profits — and that’s the goal. (At least, it’s one of the goals.)

When I was a computer consultant, it was easy to focus on my business. I wanted people to find me, hire me, pay me, and call me back the next time they needed my services. This was before the Internet, so most of my marketing consisted of giving free presentations to groups of potential clients and publishing a newsletter every month.

(I wish I had one of those old newsletters to look at. They were produced with a typewriter and were cut and pasted with real scissors and glue, before cutting and pasting meant clicking a button.)

They weren’t nearly as pretty as the newsletters I’ll create this year, but they were effective.

When I was a blacksmith, the Internet was just starting to flourish, and I used one tiny section of one website and was able to sell all the steel roses I was able to forge.

But, when I closed my blacksmithing business and started caring for Mom, I lost my direction. My main interest was caring for her and my secondary interest was earning enough money to continue caring for her at home. Affiliate marketing served that purpose, well.

So, during the time I cared for her and then fought my own battle with cancer, it means that I’ve spent almost exactly a decade of selling to random people who were attracted to my various websites.

Since I had no clear target markets and no clear business goals, I drifted and experimented with the technology. I was fascinated and I enjoyed it and I learned a lot.

But, now, for the first time in a decade, I’m able to work full-time at what I enjoy doing and I have a couple of products of my own that I can sell.

That makes it much easier to define the target market and to create ways to communicate with those people. As time goes by, I’ll attract them into my pasture, feed and nourish them, and tell them, over and over, how I can help them get what they want.

Since I have some highly-developed skills in this area and enough experience to know what to do and what not to do, I can sell my services in several ways. Each of those will have its own herd and I will nurture and care for them month after month after month, until I can do it no longer.

That makes it much, much easier to focus.

It’s also why it has become so obvious to me that I need to decrease my blogging activities and focus on other means of marketing and attracting clients and customers.

Yes, I still enjoy blogging, or I would not take the time to write this post.

I don’t know if you enjoy reading it. That’s for you to decide.

Affiliate marketing will always be a part of my business, but it has moved into second place this year. It will move into third place in 2013.

Even so, I intend to earn more from affiliate marketing in the coming years than I ever did in the past, because I’ve stopped promoting anything that doesn’t work very well. I’ve narrowed my focus on tools I use and I’m promoting only the best of breed in each category.

I’ve taken that philosophy and adapted it to one of my service businesses, and I’ll only work with one person in each category — and that person will be the best I can find. Life is too short to waste it on working with people who aren’t focused on doing the best they can.

Why build a website instead of a blog?

This brings us back to the original topic: WordPress and SBI, revisited.

Here’s an interesting page you may want to read:

I think the conclusions that are drawn are valid — but it is a limited data set.

I suspect, but have no proof, that the majority of self-hosted WordPress blogs attract many more readers than the average number reported by WordPress blogs that are hosted by WordPress.com.

I have a blog there that I rarely write to, and I doubt it gets any visitors.

I post a lot more frequently to this blog and put a lot more work into each post.

So, I believe that the actual average number of viewers for WordPress-powered blogs is higher than shown, but there’s no way to know for sure.

The numbers for SBI sites, however, are valid and true. SBI keeps these stats for all sites hosted on their system, so we can be sure that they are accurate.

And, as with any “average” number of anything, there will be sites with far fewer visitors and a few sites with many, many more.

I believe one of the key differences is that SBI has a process that includes an education and set of steps that we follow to make our sites as good as they can be — if we take the time to follow those steps properly.

I admit that I have not done a good job of that, so I’m basically starting over with both my sites and will systematically rebuild them using the plan I created over the last few months.

Even though I’ve mostly ignored my two SBI sites for the last couple of years, they still outperform my blogs — including this one.

Now, will that be true for you? Honestly, I don’t know, but I think the odds are in your favor.

I also want to quibble with one point on that page. It says, “The more traffic you receive, the more income you earn, whether you’re selling ads or aardvarks.”

All things being equal, that may be true. It probably is.

However, I don’t think things are equal between blogs and websites. I think people have a different mindset when they visit a blog and bounce back out than when they visit a website and read several pages before leaving.

I think that gives a well-organized website that is full of high-quality information a real edge over most blogs.

I’m not positive about it, but I think it’s true

Building an online business is not for everyone. It requires a number of skills, and two that are very important are being able to research a topic and then write what you know about it. I don’t mean paraphrasing someone else’s work, I mean truly original writing. That takes work and talent.

Not everyone can or will do that.

It’s a little easier if you have your own business with your own products and services and you want to promote them online. A well-planned and organized website will outperform a blog.

While I can’t conclusively prove that statement, I think it is accurate.

Do you have to use SBI to build such a website?

Of course not.

There are many ways to build a website and there is a lot of information scattered all over the Web on how to do it. Without any doubt, that is true.

But, none of those includes all you need to know to build your online business in the way that SBI does, all in one place.

Will SBI work well for every site? No. SBI does not offer things like PHP scripting and database access. If you need those features, or even if you just want them, SBI is not for you.

However, for the majority of people who don’t want or need such things, SBI puts the technology in the background and lets you focus more of your attention on attracting and nurturing your herd.

No matter what system you use, however, if you’re new to building websites, there is a LOT to learn. But, with SBI, you don’t have to figure it all out, all you have to do is follow the time-proven method to identify, research, and build your site. That makes it a lot easier.

Especially if you’re a busy business owner who isn’t interested in learning a lot of technobabble.

You want to tend your herd and have them buy from you again and again. That’s the goal. SBI makes it easier. Not easy, but definitely easier.

What kinds of businesses are people building with SBI? Find your business.

If you’re not sure if SBI is right for you, you can ask your questions for free. No obligation.

When you’re ready to start, SBI offers a 90-day full-money-back guarantee, if you decide it isn’t what you need.

Why am I so insistent?

Is it because I earn a commission if you subscribe to SBI through one of my links?

Yes, that’s partly true.

However, I’m also an affiliate for HostGator, 1&1, and others, and you don’t see me promoting them. I’m also an affiliate for several domain registrars and I’ve stopped promoting them.

I like, use, and recommend Weebly to some people for building some kinds of websites, but not if your primary method of attracting prospects is via your website. For that purpose, I recommend SBI.

Weebly does make it easy, however, if you want to build a website and blog that provides some information about your existing business and you promote it mainly by links from other places, rather than relying on attracting lots of visitors through the search engines. You can do it and it works well for some people, but it is not my top recommendation.

By the same token, I could join the affiliate programs to recommend premium WordPress blog themes and even promote WordPress consultants and specialists.

You don’t see me doing that, either. (Although I’m sure I could earn a lot of money, if I did.)

Why?

Because, for most business owners, and people who want to own their own business, SBI is the right choice.

Act on your dream!

JD

I think we can all relate to that, at some point and on some level.

So, out of curiosity, I went and looked at his website (a blog, in this case) and wasn’t surprised that he was getting no results.

The blog had only 19 posts over a bit less than two months and there was no theme or niche orientation that I could see.

I don’t see any point in mentioning this man’s name or the URL of his blog. I’m sure I could do a little research and come up with dozens of similar examples.

In his complaining forum post, he said that he had been working very hard on his online business and wanted to quit his job and do this full-time. He was behind his planned schedule.

What?

Does anyone really believe they can start a website or blog or anything else and make enough profit in two months to replace a full-time job? If so, they need to face some facts.

If you want immediate income, sell something you already own or get a job (if you can).

If you want to build a business and live off the profits, it’s going to take time, a plan, lots of energy and creativity, and the investment of money to succeed.

Yes, it costs less to start a website, but you’re completely invisible until the search engines start referring visitors and you won’t get a lot of that without writing pages with quality information and building links to your site so the search engines will find and index those pages. This takes time, and I don’t mean two months.

(I’m assuming that you are not buying ads on other sites, using Google Adwords or Facebook ads or anything similar. That can drive immediate traffic, but it adds to your expenses, too. If you can make a profit, it can be a good way to get visitors to your site.)

If you want to build an offline business, it takes tens of thousands of dollars and more time. Most new businesses should expect to have losses every month for at least the first couple of years and often for longer than that.

Business isn’t a game of days or weeks of work before earning a profit, it is often a game of years of work before you realize an income from all the work you’ve done during that time.

People with get rich schemes tell you that you can earn tens of thousands of dollars (or pounds or Euros or whatever) in a few days or weeks. They are lying to you to get you to buy their products.

If you’d like to prove me wrong on that point, I’m listening.

Just today, I did not approve comments from two people who were linking to the same get rich quick scheme from their comment. No thank you. Life is too short and there are too many other real opportunities to build a business for me to be a part of promoting such wastes of time and money, even from the link from a comment.

How long does it take to build a business?

That’s kind of like asking, “How long is a piece of string?”

The answer, of course, is, “It depends.”

It depends on a lot things. What are you selling? How big is the target market? How well can you reach them? Can you overcome their objections? What else can they buy with the same amount of money?

Those aren’t the best questions, but they are apropos to the point I’m trying to make.

It takes time and work to build a business.

Do you think large businesses like Sears, J. C. Penney’s, and Walmart were built overnight? No, they weren’t. Each of them started from humble beginnings and the owners invested years and most of their revenue into growing the businesses.

(I’m just using those three as examples, because they were the first that came to mind, since I already knew some of the history of their businesses and how they built them. There are thousands of other examples that could be chosen.)

Except for a few exceptions, most large businesses started very small and grew over time.

Richard Sears got into the retail business when he purchased a shipment of watches that a local jeweler didn’t want. He was a train station agent and he sold these watches to other station agents for a tidy profit.

The first Sears catalog was published in 1888. They didn’t open their first retail store until 1925, nearly 40 years after he started selling those watches.

James Cash Penney opened a small dry goods store in 1902. Over the years, the company grew and opened more retail stores. They published their first catalog in 1963 and what was the forerunner of their current website started selling on the online in 1994. It took them over 60 years to start their catalog and over 90 years to enter online commerce.

In the 1940s, Sam Walton began his retail career when he worked for J. C. Penney. In 1950, he opened Walton’s 5 & 10 store. In 1962, they invested most of the company capital to open the first Walmart store. In 1968, after opening several stores in Arkansas, they opened their first store in a different state. They opened their first Wal-Mart Supercenter in 1988.

The point I’m trying to make is that these retail pioneers started small and invested a lot of time, energy, and money into building their business. They reinvested their profits and grew. (Of course, unlike most small businesses and almost all micro businesses, they also received capital from investors who bought their stock and that gave them more resources to continue growing.)

None of them had a successful business with less than twenty pages of questionable content on the Internet. None of them had a profitable business in less than two months. All of them invested lots of money (for their time) in opening their stores and purchasing inventory.

Now, the pace of change has quickened. It’s not unusual to hear that someone started an online company and became millionaires or billionaires after a decade or less. Those are the exceptions. They are not the norm.

People, maybe you, have acquired unrealistic expectations on how long it takes to succeed with an online business. They have unrealistic expectations about how much money they’ll make.

Unless you are very lucky, or very talented, or both, you will not become the next uberbillionaire. If you were working on that project you would not have time to read my quaint little blog.

Even a company that I respect and admire — Sitesell — makes the mistake of using terms that lead to an unrealistic expectation for how long it will take to build an online business.

They use a 10-Day process for analyzing and building a new niche-oriented business.

While they make it very clear in their documentation, Action Guide, and most of their online marketing, that a “Day” in this process does not equal a 24-hour day in the real world, I think it is misleading to folks who try to rush through the process without slowing down, reading the documentation, watching the videos, and proceeding at a more reasonable pace.

It’s true that some of those “Days” tasks can be completed in two or three days in real time, but some of them will take months to complete, or represent ongoing activities that may be performed for years as part of building and promoting an online business.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Sitesell used to have the entire Action Guide online, but it has been privatized for the benefit of their customers, only. However, they do have a series of videos about the process they teach for building an online business and those videos are available free on YouTube. They are an abridged version of the videos that are part of the Video Action Guide that comes with a subscription to SBI.

Nowhere, though, do they say that it will be easy and free and your inbox will overflow with people rushing to send you money with no work on your part.

Others, however, say exactly that. They try to sell you software and systems that they claim will make you rich in a few weeks.

Who are you going to believe?

Think it through for yourself. If someone has an automatic system for making huge amounts of money online with no effort nor experience, why would they sell it? Wouldn’t they use it themselves and reap the benefits?

If you had one, would you sell a goose that laid golden eggs?

Of course not.

It is possible to build a business that makes a good profit. It can be done offline in a brick and mortar business or it can be done online with a website that does the selling.

In neither case is it easy nor guaranteed. Some of us succeed. Some of us don’t. Then, we try again.

I love working on my sites from the comfort of my home in the mountains. I don’t just like it, I love it.

I’m not rich and I’m not even doing as well as I was a few years ago before I got so sick. Now that I’m much better, it’s time to get back to work and equal or exceed the success I enjoyed few years ago.

I’m using a combination of affiliate marketing on some sites and promoting locally owned brick and mortar businesses on other sites. There are countless niches in which a profitable online business can be built.

It can be done.

Can you do it?

I don’t know.

Act on your dream!

JD

Think a moment. Where do you search for things you want?

That’s right. Facebook and Google.

Sitesell will help your business get found on these two sites.

Sitesell has tens of thousands of customers around the world who use their tools and strategies to build websites that get found. They’ve been doing this for over 10 years — and that’s how long I’ve been one of their very satisfied customers.

I personally recommend Sitesell. I’m a satisfied long-term customer and a happy affiliate.

Their new service is targeted to people who own traditional offline brick and mortar businesses and want to be found in their local area.

I think it could be useful to some online-only businesses, if you want to target a local area, instead of globally.

If you own a business and want to promote your products and services locally…

Sitesell has introduced a new service to help you market your business on Google and Facebook.

Facebook has become the most popular way to promote your business by engaging with your customers and prospects using a Facebook page for your business. There are a few things you need to know in order to use Facebook effectively for this type of marketing, and there is a bit of a learning curve.

Sitesell offers two levels of service. One helps you get started. Or, if you prefer, someone at Sitesell who already knows how to do all this will work with you to target your market and offer and then do the tech work for you.

I think it’s priced very reasonably. If I were doing this type of service, I’d charge more than they do.

The more I know about building an online business, and promoting offline businesses online, the more I value what I’ve learned from the talented folks at Sitesell.

It’s also why I use their tools to promote the businesses that are owned by my clients. For example, Murphy Gold is powered by SBI, one of the services offered by Sitesell.

You already know how important it is for your business to be found on Google when someone is searching for the products and services you offer. Right?

Now that Facebook has exploded onto the scene, it’s time to promote your business where people are flocking.

Look over the offer. If you have questions, call the number listed on that page. They will answer your questions for free. Really.

No obligation. Really.

They WILL NOT stick you on a mailing list and bombard you with offer after offer, never-ending upsells, and breathless hype about new product launches, as we see so many other companies doing.

These folks are the real deal. They specialize in helping people build online businesses and now they’re extending that service to helping you promote your business on two of the most popular sites in the world: Facebook and Google.

Right now, before you forget or get distracted by all the other things you have to do, go and check out their offer.

Is this something that will help you promote your business better?

You’re a responsible business owner. Due diligence is important, and I always recommend researching a company before doing business with them. You can learn more about Sitesell on their Facebook page.

See why thousands of people “Like” Sitesell on Facebook and read what they are saying about the company and the services they provide.

If you have specific questions about Sitesell and their services, their Facebook page is a good place to ask. (It also lets you experience how a company can engage with prospects on a Facebook page.)

If you are an affiliate marketer and want to earn commissions while helping local business owners…

You can earn a commission by becoming a Sitesell affiliate and promoting their services and products to people you know in your local area who want to use Google and Facebook better.

Most small business owners do not have the technical skill and knowledge that’s needed in order to get the most out of Facebook. Some do very well on their own, and others do not.

It’s that second group that you can help the most by letting them know how Sitesell can help them.

I use Sitesell’s tools every day to promote my business and those of my clients, and I’ve been considering helping them do a better job with their Google and Facebook presence. Now, I don’t have to do it. I can just explain how it will help them and then refer them to Sitesell Services.

It’s a win-win-win situation.

I was reading Ken Evoy’s thoughts on his blog about SBI Owners Think and Do “Business” and had a few thoughts of my own to share.

(Ken mentions the Action Guide in his blog post. SBI subscribers have access to the Action Guide, in written and video form, and a lot more. If you’re not an SBI subscriber, you can click the link and learn from what I consider to be the best and most comprehensive guide to building an online business. You won’t have access to all the tools that SBI offers, but you can still learn a lot by following the Action Guide and using it to help you build your own business plan.)

(By the way, Sitesell keeps adding more and better tools to the mix and the price has not gone up. It remains at $299 per year and continually improves.)

When I started affiliate marketing over a decade ago, it was with the thought to make money online. I had another source of income, at the time, and I was looking to supplement it. Affiliate marketing looked like the perfect way for me to do that. And it was, for about ten years, most of which I earned 100% of my income from affiliate marketing.

I’ve tested lots of things. Blogging, article directories, building tier-structured websites, and more. I’ve tested affiliate marketing, MLM, money making systems, and others.

What works, for me — at least, is building sites with information about a particular topic and monetizing it via affiliate links and Google Adsense.

For the last two years, I’ve managed to survive, but not thrive, as my illness impeded my ability to think clearly, make plans, and follow through on my decisions. I’m hoping that this trend will start to reverse itself now that I’m off the chemo drugs and the cancer is no longer poisoning my body.

Today, I’m starting down a new path and I’ll be concentrating on rebuilding my marketing business and finding new ways to offer valuable information and reap the rewards in commissions and advertising income.

It’s time for Dilbeck Marketing to rise from the ashes — metaphorically speaking.

This time, it’s going to be different. I already know how to make money online. Now, I’m going to focus on building a business. One that earns more, and builds equity for the future.

I have a long way to go before I recover, so I’ll be taking baby steps until I’m strong enough to stand tall and walk on my own. Nobody said it would be easy. It’s going to take time and effort to regain my strength.

It’s going to take planning and execution in order to rebuild my business. It’s not going to be easy, but I’ve never asked for easy — just an opportunity to do my best.

As I played with the shiny red balls that bounced across my path, I’ve taken some wrong turns in the journey to building my business, even if they resulted in earning a little money. They were not part of my long-term strategy, and they distracted me from my plan. I’m going to remain focused on my goals and ignore these distractions, in the future.

What are your goals?

Do you want to make money online, or are you interested in building a business that will help supply your needs for the long term? Or, do you have something else in mind?

I’m interested in hearing your thoughts.

Act on your dream!

JD

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.

One of the main ways I promote books and other products from Amazon these days is through my John Dilbeck’s Amazon Store.

Today, I added about a dozen books to the Blogging and Internet Marketing Books section of the store. You can see this section by clicking on the link under the Browse By Category menu in the right column of the store.

How do I select new books for the store?

I only add specific books to the store if…

• I have read them and would recommend them highly, even if I weren’t paid to do it
• The book has been recommended to me by someone I have come to trust and I plan to purchase it, read it, and put into action what it recommends
• The majority of ratings for the book on Amazon are either 5 or 4 stars.

I spend quite a bit of time looking at new books, but the great majority of them will never make it into my bookstore. As I’ve said elsewhere, “if it’s not good enough for me, it’s not good enough for you.”

I try to put the best books on page one of my bookstore, but there is only enough room for nine books, so some really good books slide to page two and subsequent pages. I added several books to page one, today.

You’ll also find newly-added books on the last page of the main section.

My philosophy on buying business books is this…

If I can earn back at least twice what I paid for the book in additional revenues, then it was well worth the money and time reading it. If I can earn back twice the price I paid, then, with more work, I can earn back several or many times the cost of the book, by putting into practice what I learned from it and by adding it to my bookstore so you can buy it, too.

I looked at about 40 books today and added a little over a dozen new books to the store.

I’m looking forward to reading them as soon as I can make the time.

Come on in and browse

I hope you’ll consider the books I recommend in my bookstore.

Act on you dream!

JD

Not only can SiteSell show hundreds of successful websites, they’re actually finding it more difficult to revise the page.

Why? Because there aren’t enough successful sites?

Hardly!

It’s because there are so many successful sites that they are finding it difficult to pick only the best for the results page.

A few years ago, when there were only about 60,000,000 active websites, an SBI webmaster could make the results page even if their site was only in the top 3% of all sites on the Internet.

Now, with the number of active websites somewhere between 100,000,000 and 160,000,000, you have to rank in the top 1% of all those sites to be listed on the Site Build It! results page.

What other webhosting company do you know of that shows hundreds of websites that rank in the Top 1% of all sites on the entire Internet? The really important thing is that the vast majority of those sites were created by normal, non-technical people who wanted to build a successful online business, and, in many cases, the sites they built are outperforming websites created by experts.

These are normal people, some of them probably a lot like you, who have followed the Site Build It! Action Guide and have built high-traffic websites in only a year or two that have risen to the top of the heap. Most of them knew little or nothing about building an online business before they subscribed to Site Build It.

If they can do it, why can’t you?

Seriously.

Act on your dream!

JD

Of the dozen or more I joined, each has it’s good and bad points, but most of them don’t work the way I do and I’ve had a hard time finding one with the members I want to meet and interact with.

Over the Labor Day weekend, I took some time to really look into APsense and liked what I saw.

So, I’ve decided that the majority of my business-related social networking will be done on APsense and I invite you to join me there – it’s free.

One of the things I like about APsense is that you get a profile page (as every other site offers) and a business center where you can promote business opportunities, advertise your products and services, collect testimonials, list resources you recommend, promote your business, and do other valuable promotional things.

When I got there, I searched the groups and found that several niches in which I’m active were not represented, so I created five new groups:

• Site Build It!
• Zlio Shops
• CafePress Shops
• Businesses in Western North Carolina
• Act On Your Dream!

I’ve joined several other existing groups and started meeting interesting people.

If you want to try out APsense, come check it out for yourself.

Act on your dream!

JD