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's leave from work, and moved to rural Costa Rica for a life adventure.
Our kids settled into school, my wife took a volunteer position, 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 more quickly than other sites, and many reach the top 1% of all websites in terms of traffic. SBI sites are designed 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 engine traffic, and you focus on writing those pages. 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 generating the traffic you need to succeed with an online business. If you choose a topic with too many other sites that cover it - too much supply - you get no traffic because the competition is stiff. And if there are few searches on the topic - too little demand - even a unique website topic gets no visitors.
With SBI, you look for 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).
The result is that the pages you write get almost instantaneous traffic. People are searching on your high-demand 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 has tips on 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 (actual search terms people have entered in search engines) related to the three topics that interested me most. Brainstormer rates each keyword on demand (number of searches per month), 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 about a dollar a day ($249.77 in the 238 days since I wrote it, as of 2/5/2010). The keyword "wireless thermostat" has higher demand - but also a lot more supply, so a much lower profitability of only 12,000. I haven't even bothered to write a page about that 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 SBI tool, I narrowed my choice down to energy efficiency, since it had more profitable keywords and had more income options - advertising, product sales, referrals to energy auditors and HVAC contractors, etc. I used Brainstormer again to find more keywords related to energy efficiency, and organized the keywords into a logical structure, my site blueprint. The SBI Action Guide led me through this process. Ten days after signing up, I was writing my first real pages, using SBI's easy-to-use BlockBuilder web page building 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? 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.
SBI is much more than web hosting. It includes Niche Choose It and Brainstormer; the Block Builder web authoring tool for beginners (seasoned users can use their favorite tool, such as DreamWeaver or Photoshop); Value Exchange to build connections with other websites and boost your search rankings; a Mailout Manager for e-Zines to keep your visitors coming back again and again; Content 2.0 to get your visitors to create free content for you; and plenty more. All that for $299, with outstanding customer support, a 30-day, no-questions-asked, full refund guarantee, and no hidden charges.
And if paying $299 up front is hard on your pocket book, for a limited time SBI is offering a $29.99 monthly payment option. Pay under $30 per month, and cancel at any time if you decide it's not working for you.
Page after page after page
I kept writing pages focused on profitable keywords, two to five 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 150 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'll hit a goldmine page that sends your earnings soaring. Meanwhile, each of those other pages is still earning a few 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 furnace quotes from qualified contractors, or by selling e-books written by others. Each of these revenue sources is very small - my Google ad revenue accounts for over 90% 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 at over 20% per month! 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 in spring 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, as his summer job, so that his summer efforts could yield income for him long after he went back to high 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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