My Site Build It Review
How I took a year off work - and built a website on energy efficiency
In 2008, my wife and I took a year off work, to travel to Costa Rica.
Our kids settled into school, my wife volunteered in a small town, and I looked for ways to keep busy. I'd heard about people making money online, so I did some research, and discovered a product called Site Build It or SBI, which helps you build a profitable online business from the ground up.
Thousands of people - many without web design or writing experience - have built successful SBI websites, and turned a passion, a hobby, or an idea into an income. SBI sites attract traffic quickly - because SBI helps you build your site from the ground up with traffic building and income generation in mind. With the SBI tools you figure out which pages will draw the most search traffic, and you write those pages first. SBI even helps you find a profitable topic, based on your interests.
It's all about supply and demand
Getting supply and demand right is key to bringing traffic to a new website. If you choose a topic with too many other sites that cover it - too much supply or competition - you get no traffic. You also get no traffic if few people are searching on the topic - too little demand.
SBI helps you identify a website topic whose related search terms have low supply and high demand. The search terms, or keywords, should have lots of searches each month (the demand) and few pages containing the keywords (the supply).
Pages that cover high demand, low supply keywords get almost instantaneous traffic. People are searching on your topic, and it's not well covered elsewhere, so they wind up on your site. Once they arrive, you wow them with outstanding content (the SBI Action Guide teaches you how to do that), and you put them into a ready-to-buy mood, so they're more likely to click on your product links or revenue-generating ads. Either way, it's profit for you!
When I signed up with SBI, I brainstormed a half dozen website topics I was interested in. I used SBI's Brainstormer tool to retrieve hundreds of keywords related to three topics that interested me. Brainstormer rates each keyword on its demand (number of people searching for the keyword), and supply (number of existing pages covering the keyword). The profitability, or ratio of demand to supply, is also provided for each keyword. The more high-demand, low-supply keywords you find for a site topic, the more traffic you can get for the site. Here's a sample of the information Brainstormer provides:
The SBI Master Keyword List - generated with Brainstormer
As you can see, the entry for "quartz space heaters" has reasonably high demand, and almost no supply - and my page on that keyword makes me close to a dollar a day. "Wireless thermostat" has higher demand, but a lot more supply. Its profitability is so low that I haven't even bothered to write a page about it yet!
Choosing your perfect website topic
But traffic isn't the only factor. You also look at income opportunities for each topic, and factors such as your expertise and interest in each topic.
Using Niche Choose It, another part of the SBI package, I narrowed my website topic to energy efficiency, since it had more profitable keywords and more income options - advertising, product sales, referrals to HVAC contractors. I used Brainstormer to find even more energy efficiency keywords, and organized my keywords into a logical structure, or site blueprint. The SBI Action Guide led me through this process. Ten days after signing up, I had my first live pages, built with SBI's easy-to-use BlockBuilder web authoring tool.
By the way, I'm no energy efficiency expert. At least, I wasn't when I started. I just research each topic online, then write a page on it from my own perspective.
Traffic trickled in, 1 or 2 visitors a day in the second week, 4 or 5 by the third. By the end of September I had 30 visitors a day, and in October I put up some pay-per-click ads. Money started flowing immediately. I remember how excited I was on my first day running ads - I made 74 cents! By the end of October I'd made $27, and by the end of 2008 I'd made $300 - more or less what I'd spent on Site Build It!
Yes, SBI costs $299 for a year's service. It sounds like a lot - at least, it did to me at first, considering you can get web hosting for as little as $7 a month. But would you rather spend $84 a year on web hosting for a site that gets no traffic, or $299 for a site whose traffic grows by 25% a month thanks to best-of-breed tools and a clear, step-by-step process that drives that rapid growth? My site had 1400 visitors for the entire month in October 2008, and 1400 visitors a day in October 2009. You can't get that kind of growth if all you pay for is a cheap hosting service. Here's a great comparison of SBI vs cheap web building services.
SBI is much more than web hosting. It includes Niche Choose It and Brainstormer; the Block Builder web authoring tool (or use a tool you already know, such as DreamWeaver or Photoshop); Value Exchange to build connections with other websites and boost your search rankings; Content 2.0 to get your visitors to create free content for you; and much more. All for $299, with outstanding customer support, a 30-day refund guarantee, and no hidden charges.
And if paying $299 up front is hard on your pocket book, SBI currently has a $29.99 per month option. Pay just $30 a month, and cancel any time if it doesn't work out.
Page after page after page
I kept writing pages focused on profitable keywords, 2-5 pages a week. Each extra page boosted traffic and revenue. By the end of June 2009, when we came home to Canada, I had over 200 pages up, and was earning $1,300 a month. Once I went back to my job, I had to scale back to writing just a few pages a month, but the "SBI snowball" had already kicked in, with enough quality content that traffic and income kept building on their own. I made $2,500 in September, and $3,800 in October!
Not everything you write - even on high-profitability keywords - will make you a ton of money. But sometimes you hit a goldmine. One page of mine on a high-demand, low-supply keyword accounts for 15% of my total revenue, and earned $750 in October 2009 alone. That's why it's important to write for high-profitability keywords. But it's also why you need to write page after page after page. Eventually, you hit a goldmine page that sends your earnings soaring. Meanwhile, each other page is still earning pennies or dollars a day, and it all adds up!
Making money with your website
Google ads are my biggest money maker. I stick a code snippet from Google on my pages, allowing Google to display ads related to the page content. When a visitor clicks on an ad, the advertiser pays Google for the referral, and Google pays me. Some clicks might pay a penny or two, others a dollar or two. (Learn why SBI sites and Google Ads work so well together.)
I also sell products from Amazon. When visitors follow a product link from my site to Amazon, I earn a commission on anything they buy there. I sell 50-100 products a month and earn $150 or so in monthly commissions.
Finally, I earn a small amount on referrals, for instance by referring visitors to a service that offers free quotes from qualified contractors, or by selling e-books written by others. Each of these revenue sources is small - Google ads accounts for most of my site income. But each of them helps!
Make your own dream job
I'm back at work now, so I'm not adding much new content. But traffic and revenue are still growing strong. Not bad for something that started out as a hobby. Nothing is certain in life, but I fully expect to hit over $5,000 a month by December 2010. And while I'm not planning to quit my day job anytime soon, many SBIers have switched from a job they didn't care for, to that special prize: running a thriving online business that literally transforms your whole life!
I really encourage you to look into Site Build It - whether you were already thinking of starting a website, or are just intrigued by what SBI has helped me accomplish. The SBI Video Tour gives a great overview, or look at these hundreds of successful SBI sites in every imaginable niche. I promise you, this isn't a Get Rich Quick Scheme. It's an incredibly well thought out process and exceptional tool suite for building a successful online business.
If you're still unsure because of that hefty $299 fee (or $29.99 per month), just think of this. It took me five months to earn back my first year's fee (with no income at all for the first two and a half months). Now I earn back the annual fee in under three days, and I earn the monthly fee back in a matter of hours!
But I really doubt you'll need the SBI guarantee. If you follow their process and use the SBI tools, you'll be laughing all the way to the bank!
My relationship with Site BuildIt
I joined the affiliate program at SiteSell (the company that provides Site BuildIt) within a few months of becoming an SBI user, because I was so impressed with the service they offer and the fact that by using their process and tools I was able to grow my website traffic and revenue so rapidly. I wanted to be able to recommend Site BuildIt to family and friends. My wife now has her own SBI website, my daughter is planning to create one of her own, a friend who lost his job is now building a new business using SBI, and another friend bought her son the SBI e-Learning course (a 12-week online course on how to build your own website, which includes a one-year SBI! license). He took the course, and built his own website, instead of working a summer job. That way he'll be earning money from his website long after he's been back in school!
Because of my own success with SBI, I feel very comfortable recommending SBI to you. It really does work. If you sign up for SBI through the links on this page, you can get going right away on your own online business, and I'll make a modest referral commission that helps me keep this site running. Thank you in advance!
Click here to start your online business - with SBI's Risk Free Trial!
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