Make Money Online With Your Knowledge -
SBI Provides All the Tools and Training to Succeed
Because I've been running successful online businesses for many years, people always ask me how they can achieve a similar level of success. How can I build a high-traffic website? How can I make money online? What do I have to do to quit my day job? Will you mentor me?
These questions have always frustrated me.
The problem was that I couldn't readily teach people to do what I do, at least not the way I do it. I'm too old school. I've been using the Internet since 1989, and I built my first income-generating website in 1995. Most of the money I've earned in my life has come from my online businesses. But my approach has been virtually unteachable. Believe me -- I've tried. After delivering a few workshops on blogging, it became obvious to me that I couldn't teach this. I was overwhelming people with more info than they could handle. People got excited by the ideas, but they couldn't implement them. In truth there's just way too much hidden complexity in my approach.
Another frustrating element was watching people who were inspired by my articles "How to Make Money From Your Blog," "How to Build a High-Traffic Website," and "10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job." The first article even clearly states that 99 out of 100 people won't be able to do this, but that didn't stop people from trying to duplicate (or surpass) my results anyway. Nearly all of them gave up within the first six months. We're talking hundreds of people that I know of. Starting a blog is dead simple these days. Creating a highly profitable, high-traffic website from scratch is very, very hard if you've never done it before.
An Unexpected Solution
The reason I'm writing this article is that I finally found a practical solution for people who want to build a successful online business without getting lost in a sea of technical details, using essentially the same business model I used to build StevePavlina.com. I'll explain the details in a moment.
When I started StevePavlina.com, I'd already been running a previous online business full-time for nearly a decade. StevePavlina.com didn't succeed because I was lucky or brilliant. It succeeded because I'd already invested thousands of hours and thousands of dollars in an earlier business. I paid my dues the hard way. The articles I wrote merely scratched the surface of the complex lessons to be learned.
Eventually I gave up trying to teach people how to build an online business. Recently I received two more invitations to do my blogging workshop, and I turned them both down. I'd rather invest my time and energy where I can be more effective.
Late last year I had an interesting phone call with a successful entrepreneur named Ken Evoy. A mutual contact put us in touch, suggesting that we definitely needed to work together. Ken founded an interesting business called
Site Build It!, a fascinating service that helps people build income-generating web sites. They provide complete hosting as well as an extensive suite of tools to help you build traffic and generate meaningful income.
Well... Ken and I had such similar business philosophies that our phone call lasted more than 2-1/2 hours. This guy is really passionate about helping people build businesses online, and he found a way to succeed where I could not. Ken realized just as I did that the technological complexity required to build a successful online business is just way too high for most people.
At first he tried to teach people how to do it -- even writing a book on the subject (it sold over 100,000 copies, so he knew what he was doing) -- but he ran into the same frustrating problems I did. No matter how clearly you explain it, it's just really hard for people to grasp the details, so they always screw it up. But instead of trying to teach people how to handle every little technical detail, Ken decided to build a service that would do it for them, automating as much as of the process as humanly possible. Ten years later Ken's vision is a huge success, with thousands of "raving fan" customers who've built real income-generating websites via Site Build It!
Ken is an incredibly hands-on entrepreneur with a rare level of dedication to his customers. He's extremely active in the Site Build It! members-only forums, with more than 4,700 posts of his own. That's way more than I've made in the StevePavlina.com forums, and I thought I was pretty active. Ken makes a tremendous personal effort to help people succeed, and from talking to him myself, I could tell that his interest in people is authentic. Ken isn't alone though -- there are lots of highly active members in their forums who are passionate about helping each other. This definitely isn't a take-your-money-and-run operation.
How to Build a Profitable Online Business
Site Build It! is designed around a simple formula, which they refer to as CTPM. This stands for Content -> Traffic -> Presell -> Monetize.
You may recognize that this is precisely the model StevePavlina.com uses. When done correctly this "content is king" approach can generate tons of traffic, in my case millions of page views per month. Preselling is the process of building a relationship with visitors, which essentially means treating visitors like human beings instead of sales targets. People visit this site looking for ideas to improve their lives, so that's what I focus on providing. The final monetization step occurs when people click on ads or buy affiliated products that happen to be of interest to them.
The major limiting step in this formula is building traffic. If you can't build decent traffic, you won't succeed. But the overall formula is sound, and it works if you do it correctly. It just happens to be very difficult for human beings to apply it without screwing it up. The advantage of Site Build It! is that it provides technical solutions to help reduce your chances of making mistakes. Where it cannot provide a technical solution, it provides clear instructions and education to help you succeed.
Even with Site Build It!, there's still no guarantee of success. This isn't a get-rich-quick scheme. It will still take commitment and effort to build a successful online business. But this robust suite of tools will definitely put the odds of success in your favor. You don't have to become a technology expert to earn enough to quit your day job.
The key benefit of Site Build It! is that it provides tools, guidance, and coaching to help you stay focused on the correct actions. This begins with providing easy-to-use research tools to help you figure out what kind of site to create in the first place. A lot of people fail because they create sites that were doomed from the very beginning. It really saddens me when a blogger emails me to say that s/he is still getting no traffic even after writing 100+ articles. I don't like telling people that they made their biggest mistake before the site was even launched by choosing a topic with virtually no demand... or one that's oversaturated with entrenched competition. Site Build It! can help you avoid soul-crushing problems like this.
Why Use Site Build It?
If you already run a successful online business that generates thousands of dollars a month in income for you, you don't necessarily need Site Build It! But if that's your situation, I highly recommend you join their affiliate program, which will give you an extra passive income stream. (To learn more about their affiliate program, scroll to the bottom of this page, or visit their
Affiliate Center directly.)
However, if you're new to online business, or if you've tried and failed, or if you're stuck trying to build traffic and generate income, then you should definitely take a look at Site Build It!
With Site Build It! you don't have to build your web pages from scratch using HTML and CSS. They provide point-and-click tools and templates to generate your pages quickly and easily, including images. This allows you to focus on writing your content instead of wrestling with the underlying technology. Of course, if you're already comfortable with tools like Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Flash, knock yourself out. Site Build It! is compatible with other HTML editors, so you're always free to fall back on your own tools if that's your preference. This gives you maximum flexibility to create the look and feel you want.
All the Tools, Training, and Support You Need to Build Your Own Income-Generating Website
Site Build It! includes an extensive suite of tools to help you build a successful online business every step of the way, including:
- domain name registration
- web site hosting
- point-and-click page creation
- content management
- blogging
- market research
- traffic stats
- search engine optimization
- auto-responders
- form builder
- graphic manager
- customizable templates
- sitemaps
- RSS feeds
- web mail
- newsletter management
Seriously, this is only a small fraction of the tools they include. Many functions are completely automated, and some tools work for you in the background even when you aren't aware of them. For example, if you update a page on your website, Site Build It! will automatically regenerate your Google and Yahoo sitemaps. If you don't know what a sitemap is, with Site Build It! you don't even need to worry about it. The technology will handle it for you. This means you can focus on creating content instead of worry about getting all the technical details right. Site Build It! will even suggest new topics you should write about to increase your traffic, based on its analysis of your current search traffic patterns.
Site Build It! provides unlimited customer support as well as private discussion forums where thousands of members share tips and advice. I browsed their forums myself and saw a lot of enthusiastic members helping each other. It's an extremely active community with hundreds of thousands of posts. They also have a team of moderators and in-house editorial staff who glean the best pearls from their forums and turn them into articles -- on everything from brainstorming to monetizing.
Their near weekly newsletter keeps you up to date on the current best practices as well as additions and updates to their "Info HQ" knowledge base. They track what's happening in the world of e-business (over 100 feeds, blogs, e-zines), so you don't have to. This makes it easy for you to focus on your business without worrying that you're missing important opportunities.
Site Build It! is basically an all-in-one solution for building a successful online business. They continue to add new tools and refine their existing tools to keep the service state-of-the-art.
