Sitesell is making more of their tools private

March 12, 2011 by John Dilbeck · 2 Comments
Filed under: Sitesell and Site Build It 

For years, Sitesell has made quite a bit of the information related to SBI free and available to the public.

Very valuable information is found in the Sitesell Forum and the Action Guide. The tool known as Search It! makes it easy to find information related to building and maintaining an online business.

Sitesell Forum

The Forum has been semi-private. To get full read/write access, you have to be an SBI subscriber. I find the information and support in this forum to be worth the price of an annual SBI subscription.

In the past, there were several ways that a non-subscriber could read the posts in the forum. Members were allowed to invite guests into the forum. These guests could read the forum, but could not post there.

Sitesell affiliates could read the entire forum, but could post to the affiliates sub-forum, only.

Now, however, that is changing. The guest access has been closed (or will be in the very near future). Only current SBI subscribers will have access to the forum once it is closed.

Some of the best forum posts will be available in publicly-accessible format. These will not be made private. They are copies of selected forum posts and are intentionally made public (with the consent of the original poster). Compared to the tens of thousands of threads in the Sitesell Forum, these selected posts show only a tiny glimpse into this outstanding forum. I’ve joined and participated in dozens of online forums over the years, and the Sitesell Forum continues to be the most helpful, friendly, and supportive of all of them.

In the very near future, the Sitesell affiliate forum will be split off from the SBI member forum. Affiliates will no longer have free access to the member forum, but will have a forum of their own.

SBI Action Guide

The Action Guide is one of the most valuable parts of SBI. There are several versions available, including a written version, video version, and condensed version. All of these will be made private, soon.

I’ve often wondered why they were made available to the public in the first place. It takes a lot of time and effort for the folks at Sitesell to continually improve, rewrite, and update the Action Guide. I never understood why it was made freely available.

On the other hand, even with the Action Guide, it would be very difficult to build an online business without all the tools included with SBI. Now, without the Action Guide, it will be even harder.

Even without all the tools that are included with SBI, I would be happy to pay $30 per month to get access to the forum and action guide. It would be a no-brainer for me.

I start every morning at the Sitesell Forum and usually end each day there. It’s the first thing I do (second only to coffee!) in the morning, even before email and Facebook.

Now that I’m recovering from my nearly-fatal bout with cancer last year, I’ll be working through the Action Guide, again, and applying what I re-learn there to my SBI sites. Every time I read the Action Guide or watch the videos, there is something new to learn, because they are continually updated as things change.

(I started not to link to the Action Guide, because it will be made private soon and I don’t know what will show on the page this link goes to. But, I wanted to give you one last chance to see for yourself how valuable this guide to building an online business really is — before it is no longer public. Of course, you can continue having access to it — plus all the other tools — by subscribing to SBI. It’s only $30 per month or $300 per year. That’s a bargain. They should charge a lot more, but I’m happy they don’t.)

Search It!

Search It! is a tool that I have used extensively in the past, but not too much the last two years, while I was unable to work on my sites. I was looking at it a couple of minutes ago and noticed that — like all other SBI tools — it has much more than it did the last time I used it to search for things on the Internet. It keeps getting better.

I’ve used the searches to research site ideas, product ideas, competitors, and legalities; to find people copying my original content; and much more.

I’m very handy when it comes to searching on Google and know how to use many of the optional parameters, but Search It! makes remembering all these things unnecessary — and the searches are revised when necessary.

In the near future, this tool will be made private and will be accessible only from within the SBI Site Central (the “dashboard” for accessing all the SBI tools). Search It! has been accessible there since its introduction, and, soon, that will be the only access.

I’ll be clear about this. Search It! is not a deal breaker for me. I would not purchase SBI just to get access to it, but I’m happy that it’s included at no additional cost.

The Sitesell Forum and/or the Action Guide, however, would be deal breakers. Without either of them, the value of SBI would be greatly diminished. Fortunately, we’re not facing that issue.

Better value for subscribers

I had to think about this for awhile.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that privatizing these resources is a very good thing. It’s in the best interests of Sitesell and its over-40,000 subscribers, one of whom is me.

Anyone who has been getting a free ride using any of these tools and resources will now have to pony up the very small fee (less than a dollar a day!) to have access to them, once they are privatized. If they (you) aren’t willing to do that, you don’t deserve access.

Someone has to keep all these resources current, accurate, and reliable, and that costs money.

I think that the management of Sitesell has made the right decision.

Not all will be private

There are some very useful ebooks that will remain free, and contain valuable information for anyone who is willing to read them and put the information they contain to work.

The following ebooks will remain freely available:

If you truly can’t afford a subscription to SBI, you can still learn a lot about building an online business by downloading and studying one or more of those free ebooks. They were valuable enough that I bought them back when they weren’t free.

These are valuable resources for SBI subscribers, too. There are many threads in the forum related to information in these free ebooks. It’s a great example of members helping and being helped by other members.

Sitesell YouTube Channel

Sitesell has a YouTube channel with useful and educational videos that, of course, are free to watch.

The SBI E-Business Series of videos contains a condensed version of some of the information in the Action Guide.

Free Masters Courses

There are several free masters courses related to building an online business that are available from Sitesell — and you don’t even have to give your email address to download them. You will NOT be put on a mailing list.

Originally, some of these courses were delivered via email over a period of several days. Now, they are PDF ebooks that you can download and study.

Lots of free information is still available

Even with the decision to privatize the forum, action guide, and Search It!, Sitesell still provides lots of free information.

Their free information is better than most of what I have purchased from other sources, and I’ve bought and studied quite a few courses and ebooks over the last decade and a half that I’ve had an online business.

Of course, non of that information is worth anything if you don’t study it — and then put what you’ve learned into practice. Knowledge alone has some value, but it blossoms when put into action.

If you start now, in as little as a year from now you’ll be well on your way to building your own online business based on something in which you have a passionate interest.

I remain thankful for the day I found Ken Evoy, Sitesell, and the original Make Your Site Sell ebook. It changed my life.

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags: , , , , , ,

Where do you promote your blog?

August 22, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 7 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blog Directories, Blogging, Business Networking, Forums, Promote Yourself, RSS Syndication, Social Networking, Squidoo Lenses, Twitter 

You’ve taken the time to research a topic for your new blog and decided there should be enough interest to make it worth the effort.

Then, you created the blog, chose a theme, modified the theme, selected plugins and widgets, and now you are ready to write great articles on all the topics you researched before starting.

Right?

Hopefully, that was your approach.

I think most bloggers throw up a blog and then look for something to write about. I know I did that on some of my first blogs.

I was a lot more focused and took more time to research what I was going to do before I started this blog.

Either way, now you have a blog, you’ve been writing on it for some time, and you want people to find you and read what you have to say.

Ideally, they’ll also post great comments so you and your readers can learn even more about the topic of the article.

So, where do you promote your blog?

There are lots of ways to promote your blog, and I’m sure you know of many that I’ve never used. I hope you’ll share them with us.

Let’s start with some that work well for me.

Create a lens about your blog on Squidoo

My main place to promote my blog is on Squidoo. For instance, I created a lens especially for this blog at 21st Century Affiliate Marketing.

Syndicate your RSS feed on your other blogs

I syndicate the RSS newsfeed from this blog on several other Squidoo lenses and some of my other blogs, such as you’ll see in the sidebar of my Marketing With Squidoo blog.

Create a community for your blog on MyBlogLog.com

I also registered this blog on MyBlogLog.com and created a community for it at 21st Century Affiliate Marketing.

There are several benefits of creating a community for your blog there. First, it syndicates your RSS feed as headlines on the page. Second, it makes it easy to increase your business networking as people join your community. Third, they offer widgets so you can see who has visited you lately. This makes it easy to visit their sites and/or make contact with them on other social networking services.

You can see this in action towards the bottom of the left column of this blog. Look at the Recent Visitors widget. If you hover your mouse over the visitor’s face, you should see a fly-out that lists the blogs and sites for which they have created communities on MyBloglog.com. It also makes it easy to join their communities and increase your business networking.

About half-way down every page on this blog, in the right column, you’ll see a section called “New with John Dilbeck.” In that section is a widget provided by MyBlogLog that shows my latest activities on this blog and other sites and blogs I author. It also shows what I’ve been doing on several networking services such as Twitter, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and others.

It has taken a long time to set all of this up, but now, whenever I do something on one of my blogs, websites, or forums, that action is recorded in the RSS feed and is automatically syndicated on multiple other sites. I get visitors from a wide variety of sites as a result.

You can see another example of this at work on my profile page at the Squidoo Marketing community I created. In the right column of the page (and every other page of the site), you’ll see the Recent Visitors widget for the MyBlogLog community I created for that social networking site. In the center column, you’ll see the wider widget from MyBlogLog that shows my activities on my sites and the social networking services I use regularly.

Syndicate your blog’s RSS feed as widely as you can

Syndicating the RSS feed from your blog on multiple sites is a good way to get your writing noticed by both new readers and the search engines.

Should you tweet your blog on Twitter?

I use a plugin called Twitter Tools to post an announcement about new blog postings to my twitter profile.

At first I was unsure about this and created a Squidoo lens called Should You Tweet Your Blog? to learn what other people think about the idea of automatically tweeting new blog posts. I’d welcome your opinions and feedback either on that lens or by leaving a comment here.

Link to your blog on forums and in comments on other blogs

I’ve talked about my blog on various forums and in comments on others’ blogs.

Be sure to add value when you post to the forums or comment on someone’s blog. As long as you’re adding to the conversation and helping others, the link to your blog will be welcome, or, at least, tolerated.

If you just jump in and write a post or comment about your blog that doesn’t add any value to the discussion, it will probably be deleted. At the very least, you’ll look like a spammer, and I know you don’t want to do that.

One good place to list your blog is in the thread started by Michael Galante on the ConquerYourNiche forum, Share your active blog here. I’ve found several blogs there that I’ll be reading and I’ve subscribed to a couple of their RSS feeds.

Another good place to link to your blog, especially if it is related to Internet marketing, is in the Members, show off your blogs! thread on Lynn Terry’s Self-Starters Weekly Tips forum.

(By the way, I’m one of the moderators of the SMO: Social Marketing & Social Media section of Lynn’s forum, and I invite you to come and share your knowledge and experiences about social networking with us.)

I have links to this blog in my signature file on a number of other forums where I’m active. Each post I make to those forums will link back to this blog.

Make good comments on other blogs

One way you can promote your blog is to make good comments on this one.

WordPress, by default, uses “nofollow” links so the search engines won’t follow links to the site you list when making your comment.

I’ve installed the DoFollow plugin so you’ll get some linklove when you post a good comment here. I also installed CommentLuv, which will try to find the last post you wrote on your blog and will link to it below your comment.

Additionally, SezWho is active on this blog and it will keep track of the comments you make on blogs with SezWho installed. It’s a pretty cool tool and I think we’ll be seeing more blogs using this nice tool as time goes by.

I hope you’ll make use of the rating feature SezWho provides to express your opinion of what I write and the comments others leave. By rating what we say, it will go into the multi-site comment aggregator that SezWho maintains and we can raise (or lower) our reputation based on the quality of our writing.

Now, I welcome substantive comments that are on-topic and I look forward to talking about affiliate marketing with you in any discussions that develop here.

However, I’ll delete your comment if it doesn’t contain anything worthwhile or is off-topic. So, don’t bother leaving a comment that says something like, “you have a good point,” or “that’s great.” I’ll delete ‘em in a heartbeat.

Don’t spam something I write with an off-topic comment full of advertising. Poof! Gone.

But, if you write something about the topic that adds to our understanding of your viewpoint or which offers links to on-topic resources, then I welcome what you have to say.

Do you comment on blogs?

My friend Mitch posted an interesting article called Why Don’t More People Comment On Blogs? on his blog a few days ago.

Do you have any thoughts on that subject?

In Summary

I mainly use Squidoo lenses, Twitter, a community on MyBlogLog, sig files on other forums, and comments on blogs to promote this blog.

How do you promote your blog?

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags: , , , , , ,