At Sitesell, all employees tweet to the corporate Twitter account

August 18, 2010 by JD · 4 Comments
Filed under: Dilbeck Marketing, Musings, Site Build It, Twitter 

If you’ve read anything I’ve written over the last decade or so, you’ll most likely already know that I’m a huge fan of Ken Evoy, Sitesell, and their products and services — especially Site Build It.

By learning from, and following, the advice Ken wrote in his Make Your Site Sell! ebook, I was able to build an affiliate marketing business and earn 100% of my income working in the comfort of my home in the mountains of western North Carolina. I love living here. I love setting my own schedule. This is my dream job.

Apparently, being a Sitesell employee is also a dream job. There are about 300 of them and they’re located all around the world. The great majority work from home and have no daily commute to work, other than getting a refreshing beverage and turning on their computers.

This year, Sitesell became the first corporation to empower all their employees to tweet to the corporate Twitter account: Sitesell on Twitter.

They tweet about both business and personal topics. Each employee is identified with a hashtag that includes their name and department in which they work.

Ken Evoy is #KenFounder, and other employees work in departments such as Education, Training, Support, Mgmt, Content, Mod (forum moderator), QA, Mktg, Coach, Tech, AffMgr, and others.

Before they started tweeting regularly to this Twitter account, I knew only a handful of them by name and had rare contact with them, and I’ve been a happy customer for over 10 years and have bought quite a few products from them.

(I’ve also been a very happy affiliate for the company over the years. It has been a profitable relationship for me. I’ve earned commissions when people buy Sitesell’s products through my links, I’ve found quality businesses to associate with and earned commissions from them, and I’ve enjoyed all the tools that SBI offers to build my own sites — and there’s more to come in the future.)

Still, with all my experience as a customer and affiliate, I only knew a handful of Sitesell employees by name.

Now, I’m getting to know them better.

During the last year while I’m working mainly to get through this health crisis, I haven’t been doing much with Twitter, and I used to spend an hour or more per day there. There are a handful of Twitter accounts I read on a regular basis and Sitesell’s is one of them.

I think it’s a really cool deal that one of my favorite companies was the first to enable all their employees to tweet (or not to tweet) to the corporate account. Just one more example of all the innovation we’ve come to expect from them and their flagship product, Site Build It.

See their latest Twitter tweets. Click the image below.

SBI! Case Studies

If you’re looking for some good, free advice that can help you with building and promoting your business online, I’d like to recommend Sitesell’s Blog to you. I’ve always found the advice to be helpful, free of hype, and based on real experience.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Another reason for simple two-column websites

July 20, 2010 by JD · 1 Comment
Filed under: Blogging, Internet Marketing, Musings, Site Build It 

I spent the night in the hospital following a procedure that is helping me kick this cancer’s butt and did not bring my MacBook Pro with me. I’ve been on Facebook and browsing the web using Safari on my iPod Touch.

I’m able to view most sites (except those that rely on Flash) on my iPod, and I assume that they are viewable on other mobile devices, too.

One thing I really noticed was that sites with three or more columns are significantly harder to read on my iPod than simpler two-column sites.

Most of my sites have been simple two-column sites with the navigation in the left column (and maybe some money-making links) and the main content in the wider right column.

Most of my income is generated by in-context text links in the content column.

A lot of people think those sites are old-fashioned and, as one critic said, “so 20th century.”

It’s true that sites like MurphyGold.com and AYearFromNow.com are plain and look like they are wasting real estate on large monitors. I have been encouraged, repeatedly, to make them wider and add another column.

I don’t intend to do either.

Why?

It’s true that I prefer three columns for my blogs, but that isn’t for your benefit, dear reader. It’s for the search engines and me. By visiting one of my blogs, I can scan the various RSS feeds in the left and right columns and see if I need to visit another site and do something there.

There is some evidence in my site stats that those links bring in more readers through the search engines.

However, my three column sites are not moneymakers. It doesn’t work for me, even though others have reported good results.

When I have tested moving Google Adsense ads from the content column into a third column on the right, income has always dropped dramatically. The same is true for both text- and graphic-links. Both perform better in the content column in a two-column format.

I don’t know if that’s because most people ignore the right-most column or if they have more ad blindness in a column that normally contains mostly ads.

My best sites for generating income have always been rather plain sites that are easy to navigate and have few, if any, distractions. They don’t have the eye candy that lots of people like, but those aren’t the people who click my links and help me pay the bills.

(Thank you to those of you who do!)

For many sites, perhaps the bells and whistles, multiple images and photos, and a plethora of ads do generate more income for them. I assume that some of them have tested the results they get from the changes they make.

For me and the products I recommend, simpler is demonstrably better. I have proof based on research into visitor numbers, bounce rates, conversion rates, and income to back this up.

So, returning to my initial idea, I think the simple sites will do better for me for people who visit my sites using cellphones and other mobile devices, and will continue to perform well for people browsing on their larger computers. I’ll be tracking this as well as I can in the next few months.

Anecdotally, I know that there are sites to which I won’t return when I’m using my iPod, because they are simply too hard to navigate.

Perhaps some of those sites have mobile feeds, but, unless they make it immediately obvious early in their navigation menu, I won’t go digging for it. I’ll just go to a different site that presents comparable information in a way I want to see it.

I’m perfectly willing for people who don’t like my old-fashioned, two-column, plain sites to do the same. Thanks for dropping in. Not for you? Okay, see ya.

I might change my mind if more eye candy ever starts generating more income. (Yes, I’ll probably test it again one of these days.)

For now, however, simpler performs better for me.

I run a business. Performance doesn’t mean more visitors, more comments, or longer conversations. It means more money in my bank account.

I greatly enjoy the social interactions on my blogs, online communities, and Facebook. Making money on those sites is not their primary purpose, but they have to at least break even and pay their own costs, excluding Facebook, which is free.

You may have different purposes, definitions, and priorities for your sites.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Do you want to start an online business?

June 29, 2010 by JD · 6 Comments
Filed under: Business, Musings, Personal, Site Build It, Success and Failure 

I haven’t been posting to this blog nearly as much as I would like, and you may already know the reason. If you don’t, the short story is that I’m battling cancer and lots of days I don’t feel like doing much of anything. However, the good news is that I’m stronger than I was for the last six months and I believe I’m making progress every day. Hopefully, in the near future, I’ll be able to resume blogging on a regular basis.

I was thinking about the topic of having an online business earlier this morning.

For the last year, I haven’t really been able to do much work, but I continue to get enough income through past efforts to keep my various websites and communities moving along while I concentrate mostly on kicking this cancer’s butt. It really is true that I earn money in my sleep and on days when all I feel like doing is sitting on the porch and listening to the birds and watching the wind rustle the leaves on all the trees that surround my home.

Over the last ten years, I’ve earned a living through my marketing business, even though there have been lots of ups and downs.

It allowed me to work from home and care for my elderly mother for about seven years, and it has kept me afloat for the last couple of years as my health problems took over the majority of my attention.

On Thursday, July 1, I’ll turn 58 years old and I always contemplate what I want to do differently during the next year of my life as my birthday approaches.

Interestingly enough, I find that there isn’t much I want to change other than getting healthy, again. As soon as I’m strong enough and able to think straight, again, I want to resume my marketing business, doing pretty much what I’ve done for the last decade.

That’s pretty remarkable for me. I rarely go that long without becoming disinterested in what I’ve been doing and wanting to try something new.

I love living here in the mountains and working from home. I love it that hundreds of people view my websites every day and enough of them purchase from my recommendations that I still generate some income, even when I’m unable to work.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not generating a lot of income and the last few months I’ve been mostly breaking even, but that still keeps all my websites alive and prevents the loss of all the hard work I put in the last few years.

If I were able to really work on the sites as I did a few years ago, my income would be rising every month and I look forward to doing that again within the next year or so.

If I had been working on a job the last few years and got this sick, I think I would be quite a bit worse off than I am now.

I love being self-employed and I love earning revenue for work I did months or years ago.

What about you?

If something unexpected happened in your life, would you have anything helping you economically? Even if things are going great (and I hope they continue that way!), do you ever wonder what it would be like to work from home and do something you love every day?

I know hundreds of people who are doing just that. Most of them are doing a few similar things in terms of promoting their businesses, but almost all of them are doing something that is interesting to each of them. In other words, they’re not a bunch of lemmings trying to follow the herd and eek out a few dollars here and there. They’ve identified something about which they’re very interested, even passionate, and they’re working to build an online business around that topic (or those topics).

Some are approaching their online business from one direction and others are coming from a different direction, but they all share some common traits: intelligence, a vision of where they want to go, a plan on how to get there, motivation to accomplish what is important to them, the willingness to study and learn what they need to know, and an unflagging belief that they will succeed in reaching their goal, eventually.

That belief is very important.

Life almost never goes in straight lines. We have a series of highs and lows and often have to retrace our steps to find a new path to take us where we want to go when we encounter the detours that life throws at us.

Many years ago, Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich said, “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”

That has been my motto for almost 40 years, since I first read that book in my late teens.

I’ve proven to myself over and over that I can achieve what I want as long as I can clearly see it in my imagination, can develop a plan to achieve it, and then take action to accomplish each step in that plan.

In fact, I’m dealing with my cancer in the same way. I intend to kick this cancer’s butt and regain my health within the next year. I intend to resume working in my marketing business and doing the things I love.

What do you want to accomplish during the next year of your life?

Another of my mottoes is, “A year from now, I will be better than I am today.”

Sometimes I don’t achieve that goal, but, so far, I’ve always bounced back when life knocks me down a peg or two.

You can do the same thing.

I hear many of my friends and people with whom I come into contact say that they want their own business so they don’t have to commute to work and be subject to someone else’s dictates.

Yet, over and over, year in and year out, relatively few of them ever take the steps to achieve that goal. They don’t analyze what they want to do or make a plan on how to get there. They don’t identify the milestones and take the steps every day to reach those goals.

The next year, they are no closer to their goal than they were the last.

Does that describe you?

What steps have you taken in the last year to get you closer to what you want out of life?

Have you done all that you could to get there?

Why not?

What is stopping you from making your dream a reality?

Is it lack of money? That’s just an excuse. Lots of people with no money have worked hard and made their dreams real.

Is it lack of knowledge? That’s also an excuse. The entire world’s knowledge is available to you through your computer.

The same is true for just about any excuse you can throw up to explain why you are no closer to your goal than you were a year ago.

Do you really want to do what you think you do?

It’s a hard question to face. Perhaps you’re more interested in the fantasy than the reality.

Maybe you think that owning your own business and working from home is like living in paradise.

Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t.

When you own your own business, you, alone, are responsible for everything that gets done and everything that doesn’t. The hours can be longer than working a job, especially in the first few years of starting it. The pay can be less than working a job, but sometimes the lack of commuting, buying business clothing, eating lunch in a restaurant, and all the other expenses related to working for someone else can be reduced when you work at home so the resulting net loss may not be as much as you might think.

I’ve worked many long hours planning and building my online business and I’ve had successes and failures along the way.

Most of my income came through affiliate marketing and that was drastically reduced when North Carolina’s legislature passed new tax laws and some of the major businesses with which I was affiliated canceled my relationship to them. For example, for years I received income from Amazon.com for recommending products that I knew to be useful and a good value. When people would click on the link to the product and purchase it, I would earn a small commission.

When the tax law was passed, Amazon and others canceled these affiliate relations with me (and all their other affiliates in NC) and *poof* there went one of my major sources of income.

Did I quit?

No.

Did I wallow in self-pity?

Yes, I did, but only for a few days.

Then I turned my attention to developing a new plan for earning an income and it was working well until I became too sick to continue with it. But, I haven’t thrown out this plan, it’s still in place and I’ll pick it back up as soon as I can.

That’s one of the major reasons that I need to keep my existing websites online until the day I can resume marketing them.

I know people who are blind or deaf or handicapped in other ways who are still able to build a business and work at home. Some are making ends meet, others are supplementing their other incomes, and a few are doing very well and earning more than they ever earned working for someone else.

On the other hand, some people I know learned that being self-employed really wasn’t what they wanted to do. They found that they liked working at a job, despite some of the things they didn’t like about it. This helped them to understand what they really wanted from their lives and now they don’t waste as much time daydreaming about the “grass is greener” aspects of being self-employed.

Before I ramble on much longer, I want to come to the point of all this.

Having your own online business may be a very good thing for you, or it may be a disaster in the making. It all depends upon you. Can you identify what you want to do? Can you develop a plan to achieve it? Can you learn all the technical things you need to know to make it work? Can you avoid the distractions that abound when you look for ways to make money online? Are you self-directed and motivated to achieve something, even if the rewards may follow only after two or three years of hard work?

Can you work to build something for the future, or do you want your rewards right now?

It all depends upon you, and I can’t offer you any advice if you really don’t want to do what’s necessary to build your business. I don’t know any shortcuts that work, and the whole idea that it’s easy to make a fortune on the Internet is just a big lie some people tell you to get your money.

Ten years ago, I didn’t know who to listen to and who to avoid. I didn’t know what advice was sound and what was just thrown out there to separate me from my hard-earned money. I didn’t know who genuinely cared whether I did well and how to tell them apart from the sharks that are always circling the online marketing newbie.

So, I tested the teachings of lots of people. I spent money and time learning their techniques and following their advice. Most of those experiments were big fat flops. Only a few really proved to be worthwhile and one stood out head and shoulders above all the rest.

You’ve heard me say this many times before, but I’m going to say it again, Ken Evoy, founder of Sitesell, is the real deal. He cares for his customers and works very hard to help each of us build our individual businesses online.

He wrote best selling ebooks to help us build our online businesses and now he gives them away for free. For example, here’s where you can get a free copy of his best-selling ebook, Make Your Site Sell!

(If you collect ebooks and never read them or put into practice what you learn, then don’t bother downloading Make Your Site Sell!, because having it on your harddrive and not doing anything with it is a waste of your time.)

For the last few years, he’s concentrated on making Site Build It! the best system for building online businesses and tens of thousands of real people are following his guidelines and most of them are building successful businesses in niches they love.

Does everyone succeed with SBI? No. I don’t believe everyone succeeds using any set of tools, but more people do well when they follow his advice than they do following anyone else I know and I’ve been researching this topic for over ten years.

Of course, I don’t know everything, so there may be others out there, too, but I don’t know who they are.

So, as my next birthday quickly approaches, I’m happy to see that I don’t intend to do much differently in my business other than dropping a number of experiments that did not succeed (and which were not recommended by Ken Evoy, by the way).

I’m going to concentrate more on my SBI sites and much less on the others, including my blogs, like this one.

What am I going to do for my birthday?

I’m going to stay home and celebrate it in peace and quiet, and then the next day, I’m going 100 miles to have a liver biopsy and radio frequency ablation performed on the spot in my liver that may be a result of my colon cancer, and may not be.

I’m taking the next step in the process to regain my health, and that’s at the top of my to-do list this year. I intend to get healthier and stronger so I can continue to work from home.

What am I going to do for YOU for my birthday?

I’m going to tell you how you can download Ken’s ebooks for free (you don’t even have to give your email address). Yes, those books are a few years old, but the information and advice in them is still valuable.

Even better, I’m going to give you access to the SBI Action Guide.

This is the same guide we follow when we subscribe to SBI 2.0, and you can learn the same things we do. However, unless you subscribe to SBI 2.0, you don’t get all the tools, support, articles, tips, and help from the members-only forum.

You do get a step-by-step guide in what to do to identify your niche, compare it to others, choose the one that’s right for you, and information on how to research and build your business.

You don’t get access to the keyword brainstorming tool, the keyword database functions, nor the sitebuilding tools.

For one or two percent of the people reading this, the information you’ll get from reading the Action Guide and watching the video version of it will be enough for you to use any tools you want to build a successful business.

For a few more percent, you’ll be able to adapt what you learn and use something like WordPress to build a site. Before you invest the time and effort in doing this, have you read Sitesell’s page comparing blogging versus building a hierarchically-organized website?

The rest of you would be better off, deciding if this is something you really want to do, and if it is, then purchase an annual subscription to SBI and give yourself one year to start building the online business you dream of owning. Work on it some every day and you may be amazed at what you can accomplish in as little as a year from now.

Is it free?

Of course not.

Is it affordable?

Absolutely. An annual subscription to SBI costs $300 and that’s less than a dollar a day. Most of you waste more than that and don’t get any nearer your dream.

Is it the only way to succeed.

Of course, it is not.

Is it the way for you?

I don’t know. You’ll have to decide that for yourself.

I know that I’m a satisfied customer and host two sites using SBI. In a few minutes, after I publish this post, I’m going to renew my annual subscription to Murphy Gold so it will be ready for me to continue promoting select small businesses in Murphy, NC, a place I love living, as soon as I’m strong enough to do it.

I started Murphy Gold last year on my birthday after identifying a new direction I wanted to take following being canceled as an affiliate for Amazon and others.

If this cancer hadn’t interfered, I be much further along with the site, but I’ll get back to it as soon as we finish kicking this cancer’s butt to the curb.

It was my birthday gift to myself last year and will be my birthday gift to myself, again, this year.

As I said before, my birthday gift to you is access to the SBI Action Guide.

If you really want to do it yourself, and not make use of the tools that SBI offers, at least give yourself the advantage of the free Sitesell ebook downloads. Learn what you need to do, before you go searching for the tools to do it yourself.

I know I’d like to have back all those months I wasted trying other ways to build successful websites. My SBI sites may not be the prettiest, nor the flashiest, nor have the latest three-column designs, but they work. They attract thousands of visitors and they are easy to navigate. The only thing they lack is all the extra pages I have in my head and don’t have the energy to create right now, but that will be coming in the next few months as I continue to get stronger.

Now, it’s up to you.

Do you want to start an online business?

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The entire Sitesell company is now tweeting

June 6, 2010 by JD · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Promote Your Business, Site Build It, Social Networking, Twitter 

Sitesell, the company behind Site Build It!, took an interesting step forward in social networking this weekend. The entire company will be tweeting using the Sitesell account and individuals will be identified by a hashtag at the end of their tweet.

Here’s a link to the Sitesell Twitter feed.

This is a really cool idea, and I like how they’ve implemented it.

For example, Ken Evoy, the founder of Sitesell, is identified by #Kenfounder, the unidentified technogeek known as Help Elf is known as #Helpelf, and so on.

There are 130 people working for Sitesell and they are located all over the world, each working from home. Now, we’ll get a chance to learn more about the different people and what they’re doing, both personally and as employees of Sitesell.

Individuals in support, coaching, education, management, programming, and other departments will now offer their tidbits, insights, and updates about what they’re doing to make SBI continue to be the best way to build a small business online. We’re used to Ken having an RSS feed of his forum posts, and Erin, the affiliate program manager, also has an RSS feed.

Now, everyone in the company effectively has an RSS feed of their tweets by searching on their hashtag.

The one problem I see is that on the Internet, people being what they are, others will attempt to confuse the issue and co-opt the goodwill that Sitesell has earned over the last decade by using the hashtags that individuals there use. The difference is that Sitesell employees will be tweeting from the @Sitesell account and identifying themselves with their hashtag. If you see those hashtags used on a different account, don’t let it fool you.

As far as I know, this is the only company that is approaching Twitter in this fashion.

How can you adapt this approach for your business? Set up a Twitter account for your business and let your employees post to it, identifying themselves with their own personal hashtag.

This is going to be an interesting experiment in company-wide tweeting and I’m looking forward to seeing how it evolves over the coming months.

Want to follow Sitesell: Sitesell Twitter feed.

All the best,

JD

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Think and Grow Rich test: Who is the most inspiring person you know?

October 5, 2009 by JD · 1 Comment
Filed under: Books, Self-Improvement, Site Build It, Success and Failure 

My answers to the Think and Grow Rich Self-Assessment Test

Recently, I was reminded of the self-assessment test in Napoleon Hill’s best-selling book, Think and Grow Rich.

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

I’ve started the series of posts with:

Think and Grow Rich self-assessment test

Question Number 14. Who is the most inspiring person you know?

This is an interesting question, and I had to stop and think about it a few minutes before answering.

To answer this, I have to preface it by saying that I don’t personally know any of the people I’ve considered, but I do know them from their writings and some limited correspondence with a couple of them.

I thought hard about whether any of the people I know in “real life” would qualify for this, but, sadly, the answer is no.

So, I started thinking about authors who have influenced my life.

Certainly Napoleon Hill would count and he’d be in the top two or three.

I’ve gotten a lot of inspiration from Zig Ziglar and Og Mandino.

I’ve read a variety of other books by authors who are very inspiring, but the more I think about it, the more one name rises to the top of the list.

For the last few years, the most inspiring person I know has to be Ken Evoy, founder of Sitesell.

(Full disclosure: The links to Sitesell are affiliate links and I can earn a commission if you purchase from them. That’s how I earn my living. However, that’s not enough reason to choose Ken Evoy over the others I’ve considered. He just naturally rose to the top of the list the more I thought about the question.)

Ken has inspired me on numerous occasions and I look forward to his newsletters and his postings on the members-only forum that Sitesell hosts.

Ken was largely responsible for teaching me about affiliate marketing and that made a huge difference in my life over the last decade.

I’ve also watched him inspire many others along the way.

Ken is no Pollyanna, however. He won’t tell you everything is going to be great if he disagrees with your approach.

One of the main things I’ve learned from him and which I try to keep at the top of my mind, especially when I’m looking at new strategies for getting visitors to my websites, is his mantra of “Keep it real.”

That is a very grounding influence and has helped me avoid some things that look good at first glance, but don’t have the required reality when you look beyond the surface.

I recently wrote about a couple of Ken’s ebooks on my affiliate marketing blog: Getting back to the basics of affiliate marketing

I’m not the only person Ken has inspired.

Many thousands of websites have been built and hosted using Ken’s Site Build It service. Most of them were built by individuals and owners of very small businesses. They are learning how to be successful on the web by following the advice and the system that Ken founded. This is having a real, direct influence on their lives – for the better.

Did everyone who used Site Build It! succeed? Obviously, the answer is no. However, I believe they had a better chance at building an online business by following the SBI approach.

A good number of them are active on the Sitesell forums and I’ve watched Ken, over the years, offer helpful advice and inspirational support to a great number of them.

I have thought about other business, political, and religious leaders and I just don’t find them as inspiring as Ken Evoy has been to me personally.

I would have to include President Obama in the short list of inspiring people, but he hasn’t had as direct an influence on my life as some of the others.

Even after thinking about this for awhile, I’m sure I’ll kick myself when I remember others who have been inspirational after I publish this answer.

I’m sure you’ll have other choices and I look forward to hearing who they are.

What about you?

Who is the most inspiring person you know?

All the best,

JD

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Working like crazy behind the scenes

July 13, 2009 by JD · 8 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Dilbeck Marketing, Internet Marketing, Murphy NC 28906, Murphy North Carolina, Products at Amazon, Site Build It 

If you look at the home page of this blog or read the RSS feed, it looks like I’ve been a lazy boy for the last month or so.

Nothing could be further from the truth!

I’ve been working behind the scenes to fix a major problem, update a large site, and bring a new site online.

My goal of bringing the new site online by July 1 was delayed about a week, but I’m making progress with it, again.

Dumped by Amazon

In the last week of June 2009, I received a notice from Amazon.com that they were terminating my affiliation with their associates program.

To say that I was surprised would be a huge understatement.

To top it off, it had nothing to do with me. I was dumped because I live in North Carolina and Amazon.com dumped all their associates in the entire state in one fell swoop.

This was done in anticipation of changes in the NC tax laws that had not been passed nor gone into effect!

I’ve been a proud associate of Amazon.com for about 13 years, but, after this, I’ll never recommend them to anyone and I won’t buy from them. I’m done with Amazon.com.

Rebuilding a large site

As a result of being dumped by Amazon.com, I have started to remove all links to their site. This is going to take me months to accomplish. I have links to their products on just about every page of most of my sites, and some of them have over 1,000 pages.

It’s a second-level priority, right behind building a new site, because I don’t want to send them any customers with no possibility of receiving a commission for my work.

I’ve removed links from most of my blogs, but modifying my static sites will take much longer.

Over the last couple of weeks, I completely rebuilt JohnDilbeck.com. This is one of my oldest and largest sites. In the process, I deleted several hundred pages that were out of date or no longer relevant.

Rebuilding the site was something that I’ve planned to do for a while, but being dumped by Amazon.com was the catalyst that motivated me to take action as quickly as I could.

My affiliate marketing business has taken a hit

After the world economic downturn last September, my marketing business has been hit hard by a big reduction in income.

This was not entirely unexpected, but the suddenness came as a surprise.

Since December, I’ve been making new plans to shift a part of my marketing efforts from affiliate marketing to helping locally-owned small businesses in Murphy, NC attract new customers and enticing existing customers to come back, again.

Murphy Gold is live

To do this, I worked for six months to plan how to accomplish these goals and started planning a new site.

Although there is still construction debris all around and parts of it still need a fresh coat of paint, Murphy Gold is now live.

I still have a lot to do on that site, but I’ve been working at it diligently. I’ve researched over 2,000 keyword phrase combinations and have been doing the initial traffic building work.

I’m not ready for a grand opening announcement, but I’m hoping that one will be forthcoming in a couple of weeks.

Back to my cave…

In the meantime, I’m going back to my cave in the mountains of western North Carolina and I’ll be working all hours of the day and night to get everything on my to-do list done as soon as possible.

One of these days, I’ll be able to write on this blog more frequently than I’ve been doing over the last several months.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Have you considered Site Build It?

December 16, 2006 by JD · Comments Off
Filed under: Site Build It 

Have you been thinking about trying Site Build It?

If you have, Ken is offering his annual holiday special. Until midnight, December 25, 2006, you can buy one and get one free.

That is a real bargain.

You have several options.

You can buy one for yourself and get a second one free. If you choose to do this, you can start building one and wait up to nine months to start the second site.

Or…

Buy one for yourself and give the second one to your husband, wife, son, daughter, mom, dad, friend, business associate, or anyone else to whom you want to offer the gift of learning how to build a part-time (or full-time) online business using the proven tools and techniques that Ken will teach you and your friend.

Or, team up with someone else and buy two sites. Split the cost and Sitesell Support will help you transfer the second site to whomever it should belong.

You don’t have to take advantage of the special pricing, but now is the time to do it if you want to save money. You could even buy now, and find someone next week or next month to sell the second site to.

Just don’t miss this special if you have been on the fence about getting Site Build It for yourself.

I can tell you that finding Ken Evoy a few years ago has made a big difference in my life.

I have been Mom’s full-time caretaker for about five and a half years now. When I decided to bring her back home instead of putting her in a nursing home, I knew I would have to find a way to work inside the house near her and still earn a living. I closed my metalsmithing business and concentrated on helping her.

After I’d quickly blown through my savings, I had to get serious about earning an income while still working at home.

Luckily, amongst all the Internet marketing hype that was calculated to relieve me of my hard-earned money, I found Ken Evoy.

I learned how to start earning money from affiliate marketing by reading his Affiliate Masters Course, and started making sales and earning commission checks when I put what I learned to work on some of my web sites.

Later, I purchased his Make Your Site Sell! ebook. That was the best $30 I ever spent and now I earn it back many times over every month.

I took what I learned and re-built all my sites (and this took about six months). In a matter of weeks, my sites were being found and people started buying what I recommended. It was the real turning point in my home business.

This fall, Ken decided to give away Make Your Site Sell! as a free download. Even though I still believe it is worth much more than the previous price, it is now free. If you have a website and you want to earn more from it, download this book and read it. Then put to work what you learn from it.

Ken explains on the site why he decided to give away Make Your Site Sell! and concentrate on making Site Build It even better.

Eventually, I was able to scrape up enough to purchase my own Site Build It subscription.

For just $300 a year, I got not only a website, but an ever-growing collection of integrated tools (meaning I never have to install and manage scripts), a members-only community of thousands of helpful SBI site owners, regular newsletters with information to help me improve my sites and earn more, and the benefit of Ken Evoy‘s wisdom and experience.

In a sea of Internet marketing hype, Ken presents the voice of experience, calm, and making slow progress towards building our businesses.

Ken is not one of the “gurus” who cleverly craft a marketing business to drain us of the money that remains in our wallets and bank accounts. If you go to Ken’s Blog and read his article on “Mooch Marketing,” you’ll know what I’m talking about.

I have never lost money when I follow Ken’s advice. More often than not, I increase the size of my commission checks, and for that I remain grateful to Ken.

I don’t want to mislead you. I am not getting rich and I don’t think I will, but that’s not my goal.

Right now, my main goal is to do what I love doing, and earn enough from it so I can continue to care for Mom and let her live in the house she has lived in for over 30 years.

I have worked hard at this, but I have to share part of the credit with Ken Evoy for being able to make this work.

You will note, I hope, that I don’t mention anyone else when sharing the credit for building my home business. I have learned from others. I have lost hard-earned money to others. Ken helps me keep on course and continue to build my business.

I do maintain quite a few other sites that are not powered by Site Build It, but I’m re-evaluating that decision. I have had problems with hackers destroying several of my sites. I’ve had problems with updating and maintaining scripts on them.

I am seriously considering closing most of my non-SBI sites and putting my efforts into doing more with Site Build It rather than continually bashing my head against the wall with the other sites.

I have learned a lot, and if I had to drop all my sites but one, it would be powered by Site Build It.

I hope you enjoy your holiday season and have a happy, prosperous, and healthy new year!

John L. Dilbeck

AYearFromNow.com – Act On Your Dream!

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Make Your Content PREsell! is now free. Download it today.

October 16, 2006 by JD · Comments Off
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Musings, Site Build It 

Only one week after deciding to stop charging $30 for Make Your Site Sell! and to give it away for free, Ken Evoy decided to give another of his products away as a free download.

Now, Make Your Content PREsell!, which sold for $10, is free and you can download it without even giving your email address.

This ebook, in .PDF format, can be read in a relatively short time span.

If you are attempting to earn all or part of your income through online marketing, you should read this book at least once. There is absolutely no risk. It’s free.

Dr. Evoy, through the information released in Make Your Site Sell! and all the integrated tools and webhosting incorporated into Site Build It! in the years since MYSS was released, has proven that his C-T-P-M model of online marketing works successfully.

What does “PREsell” mean?

It is the job of a merchant to do the selling.

It is the job of an affiliate to offer information of value that will help the reader get into a more receptive frame of mind and then link to the merchant.

This process of passing along valuable information and linking to a merchant is called PREselling.

It is not our job to sell, just to get the reader interested enough to click on the link and see what the merchant offers.

You can learn more by downloading Make Your Content PREsell!, reading it, and learning how to more effectively communicate with the people who visit your websites and blogs.

Don’t miss this free offer.

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New Site Build It! Webmasters Group on Squidoo

October 11, 2006 by JD · Comments Off
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Musings, Site Build It, Squidoo 

I just created a new Site Build It Webmasters group on Squidoo.com.

If you are a Site Build It! webmaster, you are invited to create a new lens about your SBI site and how you use Site Build It to create your online business.

If you create a lens using the above link, you will be submitted for membership to the Site Build It Webmasters group on Squidoo.com.

As long as your new lens is about SBI and/or your SBI website, I’ll be happy to admit you to the group.

(Site Build It! websites, only, please.)

This is a great way to get one-way links to your site and the pages within it.

Squidoo lenses are powerful ways to build one page websites that link outward to other resources. You can even make money while you promote your site.

Do you have a CafePress store related to your SBI website? Add a CafePress module to your lens and sell your wares.

Do you sell products from Amazon.com on your SBI site? Add the top sellers to your Squidoo lens, too.

Feel free to put your 5 Pillar affiliate links on your lens(es).

Let’s all help each other succeed.

Act On Your Dream!

JD

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I Can’t Believe It! Make Your Site Sell! 2002 is now FREE!

October 4, 2006 by JD · Comments Off
Filed under: Internet, Musings, Site Build It 

I don’t usually use three exclamation marks in a headline. That’s just not my style.

But, in this case, I’m going to make an exception and try to pass along my excitement about the announcement I just read.

I’m a few days behind on my email and I just now read an email Ken Evoy sent me last Saturday.

Among other interesting announcements, he told us that Make Your Site Sell! 2002 is now available as a free download. You don’t even have to give your email address. Just go to the link and get your free copy of what I think is the best information about earning an income with a website that is available at any price.

I bought the original version for $17 and was surprised with how much information was in this exceptional ebook.

Not only was there more information than I expected, the very format of the ebook was an example of how information should be presented in PDF format.

Make Your Site Sell! was updated in 2002 to a seven volume ebook with over 1,500 pages of outstanding information about building a successful website. The name was changed to Make Your Site Sell! 2002 in order to reflect this additional information. The price was raised from $17 to $30.

Now, I’ve seen ebooks selling for nearly $100 (usually $97) that only had a tiny fraction of what Ken offered for less than $30. Ken’s motto has always been to UNDERprice and OVERdeliver and this was certainly appropriate for Make Your Site Sell! 2002.

Go to the page and read what is in the ebook. Then, don’t waste any more time, download the ebook and start putting it to work for you.

Don’t add this to your collection of un-read ebooks. If you want to build a site that is successful, read this information, study it and put it to work for you.

Of course, a lot has changed in four years and parts of MYSS is starting to show its age, but I still refer to this information several times a month. I always find something I never knew or things I forgot in the interim.

So, why hasn’t this book been updated and why is it being given away now for free?

Over the last several years, Ken and the folks at Sitesell have been focusing their efforts into making Site Build It! into the the best set of tools for identifying your niche, designing a website, researching and creating the content, hosting it, and promoting it to the world.

The concepts that were presented in MYSS live on in Site Build It, so there really is no reason to update the ebook when Site Build It! puts those concepts into action.

I just renewed my subscription to Site Build It! a couple of weeks ago and it never even crossed my mind not to do so. I have dozens of websites and SBI offers me more value than all the others put together in terms of helping me do my best on the net.

But, you don’t have to spend $300 to get a Site Build It subscription to learn much about the concepts that lead to this outstanding tool.

You don’t have to spend a penny.

Just go download Make Your Site Sell! 2002 and put what you learn to work for you.

Yes, there will be some things that are no longer up-to-date in the ebook, but don’t let that distract you from all the good information and advice you will find.

I can truthfully tell you that I’ve wasted a good bit of money buying ebooks and following their advice.

But, that does not apply to Ken Evoy, Make Your Site Sell, and Site Build It. Everytime I follow Ken’s advice, I make more money. When I stray to other paths to test the waters, sometimes I make money, but much of the time I just lose my investment. That has never been the case with anything I’ve purchased from Sitesell.

My best advice is to tell you to subscribe to Site Build It! and give yourself the best advantage and the best tools to build a profitable online business.

But, if you can’t afford the $300 or if you just aren’t convinced, then put your credit card back in your pocket and download Make Your Site Sell! 2002.

See what created all the fuss a few years ago when MYSS was called “The Bible of Selling On the Internet.”

It helped me.

If you read it and put it to work, it can help you, too.

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