Sitesell $50,000 Challenge – week two

October 18, 2011 by JD · 1 Comment
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Events, Site Build It

It’s been over a week since Sitesell, Inc. issued their $50,000 challenge.

Briefly stated, this is the challenge (but see the full challenge and first comment for all the details):

If you can find documented proof that another product, or collection of information and tools (see tools.sitesell.com), delivers everything that SBI! does (or more), at the price of SBI! (or less) AND that product documents success to the depth that SBI! does (see proof.sitesell.com), we will pay you $50,000. See the announcement post here for entry details…

As of a few minutes ago, no challenger has come forth with a better system than SBI.

Click the following link to read the full details of the Sitesell $50,000 challenge.

SBI is not just a webhosting company, although they do that as well as any other hosting service I’ve ever used, and better than most.

SBI is a process that includes all the tools necessary to build a niche-oriented information-rich content site that earns money through a variety of monetization methods.

SBI sites are not cookie-cutter or fill-in-the-blanks sites.

Far from it. We work hard to identify a niche for which we have a passion and then write as much original, quality information as we can about that topic.

People write about things they love, such as cat art, front porches, gardening, cosmetics and skin care, and many thousands of other topics. Some people promote their own offline business and sell products or services, and these include renting villas, vacation sites, dentists, real estate agents, book editors, and more.

SBI sites are owned and developed by individuals who bring their own BAM (brains, attitude, and motivation) and who are willing to spend months and years to build a real business of their own.

SBI is not a scam, a get rich quick scheme, nor a multilevel marketing business. Sitesell is in the business of helping as many people as possible to build their own online businesses and to find the success we want. Perhaps you have heard some of these charges or other urban myths about Sitesell and SBI. They are not true.

Some of us would enjoy getting rich and others are happy with earning a few hundred dollars extra every month, and there are people with other goals in between.

Not everyone succeeds.

There is nothing, anywhere that I know of that guarantees that everyone succeeds. Some people work harder than others. Some have more time than others due to jobs or raising families, or caring for parents. Some have more motivation than others. Some have more skill at identifying a good niche and writing great pages about the topic.

However, I believe that SBI offers the best system for learning how to build an online business and prosper from it than anything else that is available. So does Ken Evoy. That’s why he’s offering $50,000 to anyone who can find a better system that meets the challenge. So far, nobody has taken him up on the challenge.

One of the outstanding benefits of subscribing to SBI is getting access to their proprietary Action Guide, which consists of step-by-step instructions on how to choose your niche, use the tools included with SBI, and build a website that attracts lots of readers. The Action Guide is constantly being re-written and updated to keep up with all the improvements to SBI (at no additional cost) and the changing Internet environment.

And, the folks at Sitesell know that different people learn better with different presentations, so the Action Guide is available in written form and as videos.

All of the SBI tools are integrated into a large database so that they work together. This saves time and money, because everything is bundled for only $299 per year, and some of those tools are worth more than that, individually.

Couple that with unlimited pages, unlimited bandwidth, free support, and a members-only forum where you can help and be helped by thousands of others who are using the same tools and systems you are — at no additional cost!

Unlike managing a website or a blog of your own, all the updates and maintenance releases are done by the highly-trained and very skilled technical staff at Sitesell. They are the technogeeks and propeller-heads who keep things running smoothly so you don’t have to waste your time and energy learning to manage all the technical details that keep you distracted from your work.

SBI costs only a dollar a day (not quite) if you pay monthly at just under $30 per month. If you choose to pay annually, however, the cost is only $299 and that’s like buying 10 months and getting two for free.

You may have heard people disparage SBI or call it a scam. Those people are wrong. I’ve been using SBI since shortly after it was introduced and I’m closing my other sites — which never performed as well nor earned as well — so that I can concentrate on my SBI sites in the future.

I tried, sincerely, for over 5 years to find a better system than SBI for building my sites. I used open-source PHP scripts like PHP-Nuke, Mambo, and a couple of others content management systems for building communities. I wasted a lot of time and effort with them. I built several forums using a variety of methods and tools — they failed. I’ve blogged on most blogging platforms and have several WordPress-powered blogs on my own domains (like this one) — and they never provided much revenue. I’d close them, but I like blogging. I’ve used databases to build websites, including one programmable database that I used for over 10 years before moving away from it last year — even though I spent years customizing and tweaking the code so that it would work exactly as I wanted.

I’m a technogeek and I’m fluent in a number of programming languages, including PHP and Perl. I have a working knowledge of javascript.

I know how to use all these things and I’ve tested them and they don’t work for me, even though I’ve done better than most people who use them.

My SBI sites take the least work and earn the most of all the systems I’ve tried.

So, since I can’t find anything better, it makes perfect sense to me to concentrate all my effort in the future on the best system I have found, and that’s SBI.

If I had a better system or knew of one, I’d enter the Sitesell $50,000 Challenge, myself. Not only would I enter the challenge, I’d be using and testing that system, myself.

Believe me, or not. Your choice.

I’m putting my money, effort, and time where my mouth is. I’m fully embracing SBI.

If you come back here a year from now, this blog may be gone and the domain name redirected to one of my SBI sites. There is about a 90% chance that I will do that, even though it is an established blog that quite a few people visit.

Why?

One simple reason: I earn more from my SBI sites.

Other supporting reasons: It’s easier, and takes less time and effort.

If you know another system that can beat SBI, there are less than 3 weeks before the Sitesell $50,000 Challenge expires.

Act on your dream!

PS. I am very proud to have been chosen as the Sitesell Featured Fan this week. I’ve been a very happy customer and affiliate with Sitesell for over a decade and intend to work closely with them for many years more.

This is a real honor for me and I am touched deeply by it. I’m just one of over 42,000 people who have liked Sitesell’s Facebook page and more are joining us every day. You can go there and read what they say about Sitesell and SBI. You can’t fake the reactions and enthusiasm of thousands of people who subscribe to, and use, SBI.

Tags: challenge, Ken Evoy, SBI, Sitesell

SBI helps people build their own businesses without boundaries

August 13, 2011 by JD · Comments Off
Filed under: Act On Your Dream, Business, Promote Your Business, Site Build It

One of the things I love about owning an online marketing business is that I can work from the comfort of my home in the mountains of western North Carolina and can enjoy the beauty of nature that surrounds me. I’m located 100 miles from the nearest city and a dozen miles from the nearest town.

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is about an hour’s drive away, and I’m surrounded by thousands of acres of the Nantahala National Forest. It’s a beautiful, peaceful place to live and I never want to move back to a big city.

I love my little slice of paradise.

I know someone who lives on an island in the pacific northwest who loves living in her small town, too. She is a professional writer and editor and she helps people from all around the world polish their books and other documents. She, too, works in the comfort of her own home. Her name is Audrey and here’s a little glimpse into her life:

We are just two of the tens of thousands of people around the world who are building our own businesses with the help of SBI and all the tools, training, and support that is included.

Want to read more? Here are some case studies of some of SBI’s customers and their stories.

Most of SBI’s customers are people with a dream of earning extra income or of replacing a full-time job, so they can live and work where it pleases them. Many are succeeding.

Congratulations, Audrey. Your hard work is paying off.

Act on your dream!

Tags: Business, case studies, editing, editor, SBI, Site Build It, Sitesell, writer

Is the Web dead? Of course not.

August 19, 2010 by JD · 2 Comments
Filed under: Internet, Musings

Have you read the article in Wired magazine about the Web being dead?

How much hype is that? The Internet (and all it’s protocols) and the World Wide Web are growing at a prodigious rate and Wired has the audacity to say that the Web is dead. I don’t understand it. They’re usually much better at presenting the facts than this suggests.

What am I talking about? Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff wrote this article: The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet

Normally, I really like reading what Anderson has to say, but this time, I think he’s (they’re) missing the point when he tries to make a distinction between using a web browser versus a specialized app to retrieve information. How does having more options for accessing data mean that the Web is dead?

It may be true that the use of a general-purpose web browser — for some people, especially those who use their mobile devices all the time — is declining. For myself, about a tenth of the time when I’m at home and most of the time when I’m out somewhere else, I use apps on my iPod Touch to read and reply on Twitter, Facebook, and other sites. I check the weather forecast and view the local radar on it.

Those are options I use in addition to my normal Web use. If I didn’t have the iPod, or I were stuck in a doctor’s office with no Wi-Fi, I would not be accessing the net during those times, I’d probably have my nose stuck in a book.

At least in my particular case, using apps on my iPod doesn’t mean I’m using the Web less, it simply means that I have an additional option to interact online when I’m away from one of my main computers.

But, what Anderson and Wolff fail to point out is that most of the content they say is leaving the Web and moving onto apps is still being served by the Web. Other protocols may be used by some people to interact with the data, but most of it still lives on the Web. It’s a technical distinction, but it’s an important one.

Even though I can follow Twitter and Facebook on an iPod/iPhone app, I’m still limited in what I can do. If I want to take full advantage of Facebook, for example, then I have to go there using a Web browser. The app just doesn’t offer the full experience, nor full access to the data.

Is FTP part of the web? No. It’s a different protocol, but it does allow us to upload information that can be served on the web.

Is DNS part of the Web? No, but it’s an essential part of the Internet. Without the domain name service protocols, data packets would not go hither and yon over the network using TCP/IP and we would not be able to access data easily. DNS is a protocol for finding servers and IP addresses and is part of the process used to direct info packets. It is absolutely necessary for the World Wide Web, as we know it today, yet it isn’t really part of the Web. It is one of the ancillary, underlying protocols that make the Web work when we click a link, type in a Web address, or call up a bookmark.

Is email part of the web? No, and yes. If you’re using an email application to send and retrieve email using protocols like IMAP and POP3, it’s not being done on the World Wide Web. However, a great deal of people, possibly a majority, use their browser to read and send email, and that’s definitely part of the Web.

(If you’re interested in knowing more about this subject, Wikipedia has an article about Internet Protocol Suite that links to lots of technical data and explanations. It’ll get you started, but you’ll have to learn a whole lot more to understand how the Internet works.)

Now, do we really care if the information we want to access is being served on the World Wide Web or through some other protocol? For most people, the answer, most likely, is “no.”

But don’t we hold technical writers at a technical magazine up to a higher standard? I know that I do. I go to Wired to get straight information about technical subjects and this time, I believe, they let me down.

I’m one of those people who wants technical subjects to be covered accurately (and I sure hope I am doing that properly here — I hate the way my foot tastes when I get caught with it crammed in my mouth!).

All the stats that I’ve seen show that the Internet is growing at a huge rate. And I am assuming that the use of most of the major application protocols (ftp, telnet, IMAP, POP3, http, etc) is growing too. In absolute numbers in terms of bandwidth, I’m sure that’s a true statement.

However, when looked at from a percentage of bandwidth perspective, then protocols that are very low bandwidth, such as http: and DNS surely fade away when compared to video and audio.

I don’t want to put too fine a point on this, because I don’t want to start making distinctions that aren’t important to most people, but even video and audio are accessed via the Web, using http: protocols. The server may hand off the information from Apache (or another web server) to a different server and stream the data using a non-web-based protocol, but without a Web browser being able to access the information being presented by a Web server, there would not be as much of it being served.

(Does that make sense, or should I just go back to sleep?)

I remember when information was much harder to find than it is now. There were no Web browsers and search engines. We used things like the Gopher protocol and applications like Archie to find and retrieve information. Those were not the good old days. Sometimes it would take hours to find information we knew existed, whereas, now, we can find just about anything in a few seconds by searching on Google.

Web browsers (Mosaic, Navigator, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, and all the others) made it so much easier to read (and interact with) information when we found it.

Search engines and directories made it easier to find, but not nearly as easy as it is today. We tend to take Google for granted and not recognize how much easier it is to find and retrieve information than it has ever been before in history. I don’t use Bing on a regular basis, so I’m not qualified to have an opinion on their service.

Does it make a real difference if I’m accessing Facebook through an API with a specialized app on an iPod as compared to accessing it through Safari, my browser of choice for most things?

Anderson and Wolff say it does make a difference. I’m not so sure.

For another take on this article, Ken Evoy wrote about it on the Sitesell blog, Is The Web Really Dead?, and he approaches the deficiencies of the Anderson/Wolff article from their use of statistics and misleading graphics.

If this article was designed to stir up controversy and bring more readers to Wired’s magazine and website, it was a success. But, does that justify being technically inaccurate?

What do you think?

Act on your dream!

Tags: article, blog, Chris Anderson, Internet, Internet protocols, Ken Evoy, Michael Wolff, Sitesell, Web, Wired Magazine

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.

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!

Tags: dream job, Ken Evoy, Site Build It, Sitesell, tweet, Twitter

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?

Tags: action guide, Business, online, SBI, Site Build It, Sitesell, website

The entire Sitesell company is now tweeting

June 6, 2010 by JD · Comments Off
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,

Tags: SBI, Site Build It, Sitesell, Social Networking, Twitter