About me - Robin Green

How and why I built my energy efficiency website

Robin Green

Hi - I'm Robin Green, and you might think my last name is no coincidence. I've been an avid recycler, bicycler, and renewable energy geek since I was 15, when I collected old newspapers to drop off at the fire station, biked an hour to school, and built my own wind generator. (It worked for three days, until the blade flew down onto a neighbor's garage!)

Reinsulating our bedroom

My first energy efficiency projects after I got married were pretty tame - there's only so much you can do in a rental house. But I discovered plastic window insulation, built my own on-demand water heating system, and was an early adopter of compact fluorescent bulbs. In 1997 my wife and I bought a house in Toronto, and over the years I've gutted and reinsulated most of the rooms, put in new windows, replaced the furnace. We pay half as much on our utility bills as our neighbors.

Energy efficiency has always interested me for two reasons - because I'm cheap, and hate spending money on energy if I don't have to - and because I worry that our love affair with fossil fuels is ruining the planet, and I want to make a difference.

Cheap doesn't mean I buy the cheapest model of something. For example, the furnace we bought in 1998 cost a small fortune. But it was also 92% efficient. Cheap means I go for what costs the least money and effort in the long run.

As for wanting to make a difference: in spite of decades of warnings from scientists about the dangers of climate change, most people are either doing nothing, or even increasing their use of fossil fuels. By getting my own household's energy usage down to a modest level, at least I can make a small difference.

Where this website came from

These two motives - being cheap, and making a difference - underpin my passion for energy efficiency. But that passion is only half the story behind this website. The other half is the trip I took with my family to Central America in 2008.

My wife had earned a sabbatical year from her teaching job, starting in July 2008, so I took an unpaid leave from my job. The plan was to move with our two kids to Costa Rica, within a month. A week after my leave started - we were still busy packing and such - it dawned on me: how am I going to keep myself busy in Costa Rica? The kids would be in school, and my wife foresaw a year of lounging about, reading, sunbathing, hiking in the rainforest, and a little volunteering on the side. But I'm not the lounging type. I needed something to keep me busy.

I thought, why not write about my favorite subject? I started surfing the Internet looking for information on how to get published online. I wasn't after a way to make money - just a way to share my knowledge and passion - to make a difference.

I found several websites where you could write articles on spec. Other websites might choose to publish the articles, and pay you a little royalty; at the very least you'd have the privilege of seeing your name in 'print' on someone else's website.

But I thought to myself: if others are willing to pay me a little money to put my writing on their websites, that's probably because they can make more money off the writing than they're paying me. Why not put the writing on my own website?

I didn't know the first thing about starting a website, but I found an article on a service called Site Build It! or SBI, which provided a set of tools not just for building and hosting a website, but for creating a successful online business. SBI seemed to have a well thought out process that covered everything from choosing the right website concept, to identifying page topics that people were actually searching for, to building traffic and turning that traffic into income.

I signed up a week after we arrived in Costa Rica. We were staying with a host family in the town of Turrialba. My wife and I took private Spanish classes in the morning, while the kids went to a Spanish primary school. We all went touring in the afternoons. In the evenings I used SBI to brainstorm page topics relating to energy efficiency, to design my site's look and feel, and to put up my first pages.

The first few weeks

I don't remember what I thought would come of this, but I was pretty excited when the first visitors started trickling in just two weeks after I started - 2 or 3 a day, then 4 to 5, then 10 a day in September. I followed SBI's advice on building strong content and on legitimate ways to draw free search engine traffic to my site. I hit 40 visitors a day in October. Things were heating up!

In October I also put some ads on my pages. I pasted in snippets of code provided by Google, and ads would appear on my pages, tailored to the page topic or the keywords a visitor had been searching for. Within a week I'd made $14 off the ads; by the end of November I averaged $65 a week.

We eventually settled in a town on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, and enrolled the kids in a local school. I kept writing - 3-4 pages a week, between hikes to rainforest waterfalls, evening get-togethers with the friendly neighbors, trips to the beach on weekends. My traffic continued to climb, and my income along with it. By the end of our year abroad, I'd earned $3,400 - not exactly a living wage, but a nice little bonus.

Coming home

More importantly, I'd set a snowball in motion, and while I cut back my work on the site after getting back to my day job, traffic and income kept growing. I made $1800 in July, $2500 in each of August and September, and $3800 in October.

Since coming home I've updated my website sporadically - a page or two a week, later a page a month; sometimes months go by when I have no time to write. Yet the visitors keep coming - 2,000+ a day on average, with over $100 in income a day. Not bad for something I started as a way to keep busy during a year off work!

I'm pretty sure that anyone with a hobby, a pet peeve, or something they're an expert in (or just want to be an expert in) can create their own website. But while free services like Blogger or Wordpress make it easy to get started, they don't generally lead to financial success.

As I said before, I'm cheap. My first instinct was to try a free service and figure things out for myself. I dithered over SBI for two weeks because the price, $299 a year, seemed steep. But two things convinced me it was worth the investment.

First, they offer a 90-day money back guarantee, so I knew that if I lost interest, or didn't see results, I could get a refund. And second, I read enough success stories from Site Build It users, both on the SiteSell website itself and on the SBIers' own websites, that I knew the investment paid off for at least some people.

My investment certainly paid off! I earned back my yearly fee less than 5 months after I started. Now I earn it back every three days! It's just like that 92% efficient furnace - it cost more up front than my neighbors' mid-efficiency furnaces, and SBI costs more than a free blog or a cheap hosting service. But my energy bills are half my neighbors', and my income from this website would put most bloggers to shame!

I provide a more detailed outline of the SBI process, and of the success I've achieved on this site thanks to SBI, in my Site Build It review. Feel free to read that if you want more of the 'how' behind the 'what' I've touched on here.