I’ll do this example from the SBI’s MKL (Master Keyword List) and how I work in Excel (or Open Office Calc) to organize keywords.

I’ll just show you an example based on one seed word – tennis, but the system is identical if you combine multiple vertical brainstorms from multiple seed words.

So here we go…

Step 1: Do a vertical Brainstorm of main keyword and Export All

Step 2: Import into Excel (Calc) and Save As .xls or .ods

Step 3: Sort by Demand (which is column B). Note – I don’t look at Profitability at all so I delete that column too. Feel free to use it though if it means something to you.

Step 4: Then I insert 3 columns on the left:

Step 5: I go through the list and pick out keywords for T2. I choose those with demand over 1000 and supply less than 1000 – and of course these keywords need to fit my site concept.

Since my tennis site focuses on instruction and mental game, I don’t choose “history of tennis” and similar keywords – but I could of course if I wanted – they are of course all related to tennis since they came from the tennis seed word.

I then Cut / Paste T2 keywords with demand and supply on the left side. See example how I moved “How to play tennis” and “Tennis Video” to the left.

Step 6: I delete the keywords that I surely won’t use and keep looking for suitable T2 keywords to move to the left.

If I see very similar keywords or those with both singular and plural versions I put them together – since the article will be optimized for both and I need to remind myself to include both versions in the title and the text – if possible.

I also try to move suitable T3 keywords to logical “parent” T2 keywords as I go down the list. This is the main work that needs to be done but this system allows you to cut / paste the keyword only once and when you’re done the blueprint will almost be done without any more work.

I’ve done just a few keywords in the above example to show you how the system works but of course you should complete all your T2 and T3 keywords.

One more tip: I usually build all my T2 pages first so that they show the basic site outline to the first visitors and they all serve me as a foundation on which I put more T3 pages.

I also build 3 to 5 T3 pages for EACH T2 before submitting my site to major directories. It gives it better chance of being accepted.

After that just keep adding T3 pages and links – and of course you may later come up with another T2 (or a few of them) and expand your site – which is no problem at all.

Dear Tomaz,

I am going to order SBI  this week-end and as I am a very beginner  in this field of internet business I have no idea how much extra costs will involve this business? Will you be so kind to give me an idea about this topic? Kind regards, V…

—————————————————-

Hi V…,

There are no mandatory extra costs with SBI 2.0. You can purchase the yearly subscription for $299 or monthly for $29.99.

There is only one optional cost and that is ordering extra brainstorming credits. When you buy Site Build It, you get 25 credits for brainstorming.

A brainstorm is a process, where you enter a seed word and the Brainstormer will return up to 800 keywords based on that keyword with their demand (how many people are looking for that keyword) and supply (with how many websites you compete) numbers. (See my Site Build It review for better understanding of brainstorming.)

You can do that 25 times but after that you would need to purchase more. They are very cheap actually: 100 new credits cost $20 and 500 credits cost only $50.

In reality, you probably won’t need more than 10 to 20 credits to complete your brainstorm because you can use the free brainstorming tool at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ to gauge the demand of various seed words and their long tail keywords.

Once you have a better idea which niche has enough demand and good keywords, you can then do a full analysis with SBI Brainstormer which will show you the demand and supply of all those keywords.

So in summary, there are no extra costs with SBI 2.0.

Sitesell.com offers various services like coaching and link building but you don’t need to buy them – they are purely optional and they are actually new additions to the Sitesell.com services.

99% of the SBI-ers have not used those services since they didn’t exist in the past and still built very successful websites.

This review of SBI 2.0 shows the latest improvements and add-ons to the existing product which has been online for many years.

In fact, I suggest that you first check my original Site Build It review and and then return here to see what has been added to the original product.

SBI 2.0 Key Module – The C2

The C2 module has been launched more than a year ago and it was the single biggest improvement Sitesell has made in the 4 years that I have been using it.

The C2 module allows your visitors to create pages for you by sharing their stories, reviews and experiences and it also allows them to comment on the previous submissions.

It’s really up to you to find creative ways of encouraging people to contribute to your site and there are really endless possibilities.

Does C2 work?

Well, let’s talk facts instead of theory.

As you can see, there have been 245 pages built by visitors on my tennis site and here’s a link to one of the pages where you can see how the C2 module works and how the submissions are automatically added to the page.

What’s really cool about the C2 module is that it also automatically creates correct internal links (with the right anchor text) which helps you rank for your chosen long tail keywords.

When you create your SBI 2.0 website, you’ll research keywords and write optimized articles on those topics. But there are literally thousands of long tail keywords which no keyword tool can predict and your visitors will include these long tail keywords in their submissions and comments.

Your long tail traffic eventually starts to grow rapidly.

So what’s all the fuss now about C2 and SBI 2.0?

Well, when the C2 module was first introduced, you had 25 free submissions and after that, you had to pay $99 per year to use the C2 on your site.

Now the C2 is free and is the integral part of the SBI, hence SBI 2.0.

But that’s not all that’s new with Site Build It…

The Clean New Look

There is a new, cleaner and more modern look to the Site Central and other modules of SBI 2.0.

Here’s the “old look”…

… and the new look:

The Improved Brainstormer 3.0 And The MKL

The SBI’s Brainstormer keeps improving all the time. The latest version is extremely fast, it allows you to filter your results in many ways and it offers suggestions (preset filters) for newbies to help them get started faster and with the right keywords.

The New Monthly Payment Option

Site Build It has cost $299 per year for the last few years despite of all the improvements Sitesell has added to the product. The only exception was the C2 module and even this one is now free and automatically added with every SBI subscription.

I let Ken Evoy explain why the $29.99 monthly payment option was introduced now:

Times are tough. Money is tight. So demand for a monthly subscription format for SBI! has been high, according to the good folks who handle questions from the Web site.

I’ve always believed in an annual model, using the $299 as a reasonable way to make sure folks are COMMITTED.

… But the psychological impact of “$299″ and “1 year” sets the correct mindset. Now, though, I believe that we’re in a period where, with unemployment rates so high and cash so tight, more people are simply MOTIVATED. Period.

And more than ever, they want something real. So…

————————————————
Introducing The SBI! Monthly Subscription Option
————————————————

Starting now, your visitors have the option of paying $ 29.99 per MONTH for their SBI! 2.0 subscription instead of the usual $299 yearly price.

Check it out at the Order Page…

http://order.sitesell.com/

This is a limited time “soft” launch, without the usual shout-it-from-the-rafters pomp.

Why?

We’re not sure about the level of commitment. So we’ll observe how they’re doing. Frankly (very frankly), we don’t market SBI! to collect cash like a cable company if people are not serious about really using it to build the kind of business that will change their lives.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be watching the commitment level of these new SBIers with great interest. If the monthly option results in less serious SBIers, the time limitation will expire.

So there you have it. It’s a test period for the monthly payment to see the results of how committed and serious people are when they have to pay “only” $29.99 per month.

If you want to start a successful online business, become financially and personally free and you’re willing to invest time end effort, then now is a perfect time to take advantage of this offer.

Let me conclude this SBI 2.0 review with my experience; I have 4 SBI sites (and one just starting) that cost me 4 x $0.83 = $3.32 per day. These four websites earn me hundreds of times more dollars per day and the number keeps growing.

The C2 submissions keep adding new, fresh and useful content to my websites and all I have to do is to check that they are genuine, useful and approve or delete them.

It definitely takes some time and effort to get to that stage (even Site Build It cannot break the laws of physics and economics ), but once your site starts getting good traffic, it will snowball through C2.

Again, if you’re new to SBI, check my original SBI review to see what this product is all about and feel free to ask questions or share your experiences in the comments below if you’ve been using Site Build It for a while.

You can download my presentation here and here’s what I shared with each slide …

1.    Choosing a niche (Slide 2)
When you’re choosing a niche you need to assess whether there is enough demand for the keywords so that in the long term your site will get lots of traffic. My definition of lots of traffic is over 1000 daily visitors.

Based on my experience, you need at least 3000 total daily searches for top 100 keywords found through the free Wordtracker tool. If you go for too many, you may have too much competition so a good number to aim for is between 3000 and 8000 daily searches.

One of my sites is about vacuum cleaners and if you check the total demand in free WT, it shows just over 6000 daily searches which is perfect.

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/?seed=vacuum+cleaner&suggest=Plugin&adult_filter=remove_offensive

But if for example you try water softener, you’ll see that the demand is just around 3000 which is not bad but I would still look to expand the niche.

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/?seed=water+softener&adult_filter=remove_offensive&suggest=Hit+Me

There are 3 major ways of choosing keywords for your niche and you can check the SBI TNT article which explains that in more detail. (I wrote it by the way. )

2.    How to Brainstorm (Slide 3)
So if we want to expand the water softener niche, we need to find related keywords. The best way to do that is to use the Google Adwords tool, check the »Use Synonyms« box and click on »Get keyword ideas«.

The first section of keywords will contain only keywords which include water softener seed word. But if you scroll down, you’ll find »Additional keywords to consider« which you can also sort by Relevance. They usually are sorted by relevance by default.

So Google clearly suggests which keywords are tightly related to your main keyword and now you can brainstorm them too and get many more keywords in demand.

(Slide 4)
Once you have these keywords, you need to do a vertical brainstorm on them (example: vertical brainstorm on water conditioner) but then you need to delete low demand keywords from your MKL (Master Keyword List) because it allows you to store only 1000 keywords.

So you need to do a vertical brainstorm for each seed word, then delete low demand keywords (for example with less than 200 Value demand) and then do another vertical brainstorm on another seed word and so on.

Once you get all the keywords, organize them into T2 and T3 pages.

(Slide 5)
For T2 pages, choose keywords with at least 1000 Value demand and possibly less than 1000 Real supply. For T3 pages use keywords with at least 500 demand (go lower if you run out of keywords but don’t go below 200 or 150) and less than 500 supply. (lower is even better)

T2 keywords are typically 2 or 3 word keywords and T3 keywords are typically 3 or 4 or 5 word keywords…

3.    Finding even more keywords (Slide 6)
The best way to find more keywords besides the ones you get from the SBI Brainstormer is to use the Google Adwords tool again.

(Slide 7) If for example you search for more keywords based on hepa vacuum keyword, you’ll get only a few suggestions from the Wordtracker or SBI BI (SBI uses Wordtracker as its main database).

(Slide 8 ) But if you look for more keyword ideas based on hepa vacuum in Google Adwords tool, you’ll see that Google gives you back many more keywords.

While they don’t have that much demand, it’s still enough (Choose Exact Match and you’ll see how many times the keywords have been searched in one month). Divide by 30 to get daily searches.)

You may also discover high paying keywords for which you then optimize your articles and get higher paying clicks on your Adsense units.

4.    Optimizing for best rankings (Slide 9)
How to optimize your homepage has been already explained in the post about Understanding Site Concept, Tier 1…

(Slide 10)
You can also optimize your T2 and T3 pages for more than one keyword. The best way to do that is to look for long tail words of your keyword and include them in the title and a few times in the article.

If for example you start typing tennis instruction in Google, you’ll see that Google suggests long tail keywords.

You then need to find a way to include a few of those in the title. So Google suggests online, video, drills, for kids, videos free and other words and I’ve included a few of them in my title which says Tennis Instruction – Videos, Tips and Free Online Tennis Lessons.

You can now try searching for all those keyword combinations (like tennis instruction videos and tennis instruction online etc.) and see where my page ranks. You’ll also see that Google »boldens« those words which means that they are part of the ranking algorithm.

Sometimes you’ll come across different words like water cooler and water dispenser which mean exactly the same. Use both of them in the title and basically optimize the article for both.

5.    Internal linking (Slide 11)
Internal linking is so important that I’ve decided to include it in my presentation. It’s one of the secrets of high rankings.

The key is to use your keywords in the link text of your links. You need to link back from every T2 page to your homepage saying »Back from T2 keyword to homepage keyword«.

You also need to link back from every T3 page to the parent T2 page and also to the homepage using the right keywords.

The link text “TELLS” Google for which keywords it should rank your page – so it’s crucial that you use it correctly in your external and internal links!

Of course, since you optimized your homepage for 3 or more keywords (and also your T2), vary the link text pointing to the homepage and T2 pages. I sometimes link to the homepage with link text vacuum cleaner reviews, sometimes with best vacuum cleaners and sometimes just with vacuum cleaners.

(Slide 12)
I also suggest that you internally link between your T3 pages – of course using the right keywords in the link text.

When you add a new page to your site, try to include 2 or 3 links to your existing pages. But you can also search your existing pages for the keyword which your new article is optimized for and change those words into links.

For example: if I were to write an article about sports psychology (main keyword), I could search like this in Google: “sports psychology” site:www.tennismindgame.com and Google would show me all pages where this keyword has already been used.

Now I could just edit those pages and change a few keywords into links. If you have a blog, do the same search on your blog and you can quickly find a few links that perfectly fit your content – the words were already there.

To see an example of internal linking done to the max, see how most Wikipedia pages look like. And you know that Wikipedia ranks extremely high in Google for thousands of keywords – so they must be doing something right, right?

6.    Recipe for Lots of Traffic (Slide 13)
Choose high demand / low supply keywords (ideal – Value demand over 1000, supply less than 500), build your site to over 100 pages (over 200 even better), properly interlink them like suggested above and get lots of links from different domains using the right anchor text.

If you want to increase your traffic to the level of top SBI sites, you must have the similar amount and quality of pages and links. And these sites get over 4000 incoming links from 200 different domains on average.

Content + links = traffic

If you follow these steps, you’ll reach the final goal – becoming free! It won’t happen in 3 months, but you’ll be well on your way after just 1 year.

(These are my Chitika earnings so far. Have you started using Chitika yet? )

This review will focus mostly on the process and the tools that Sitesell.com offers with their main product. The actual results of using it, however, can be found in my post, My Journey To Freedom and Over $9,000 Per Month.

A Review of the Site Build It Process – The Action Guide

When you purchase your first SBI site, you are not given all the tools at once, and you cannot even register a domain immediately.

Your first tool is the Brainstormer, which allows you to brainstorm your chosen keywords and see what the demand (how many searches) and supply (how many competing websites) are.

The Brainstormer – Finding the Winning Keywords

Your first goal is to find the right niche. This process protects you from 2 major mistakes:

Mistake 1: Building a site around a niche that doesn’t have enough demand.

Mistake 2: Building a site around a niche that is too competitive.

In both cases, you may end up with only 120 visitors per day after a whole year of hard work, and this traffic might only earn you $5 per day.

To appreciate this Site Build It review, you need to understand this fundamental point: Just as you need to research markets and market demand in the offline world, you have to do the same for the online market, carefully choosing the right topic and keywords for your website.

These choices make it possible to rank high in major search engines –  which creates enough demand to get you lots of free traffic. And that lets you make real money.

The Brainstomer allows you to research many different topics and check what kind of demand and competition there is for your potential site concept.

Based on Brainstomer content data, you’ll then pick the most profitable and winnable site concept. Then you’ll need to research the keywords related to this site concept and find the best ones.

The Brainstomer will help you here too, by spotting these golden nuggets – keywords with good demand and low competition.

The Site Build It Brainstormer And Your Keyword List

Your goal, then, is to find these keywords and organize them in a somewhat logical, 3-level structure – a homepage (Tier 1), main pages (Tier 2), and related articles (Tier 3). In addition to the homepage, a small site could have 10 Tier 2 pages, and each of those could have 10 Tier 3 pages, which would total 101 pages.

A bigger site could have 20 Tier 2 pages, with 20 Tier 3 pages each. This would make a site of around 401 pages.

Once you have completed your blueprint, you’ll register your chosen domain name to reflect your site concept.

Site Central – Building Your Site

Trust me when I say that you’ve done most of the hard work by now, even though you’re just at the beginning of this Site Build It review.

All you need to do now is to build pages based on the keywords you’ve chosen by using the Brainstormer.

a) Building a site – for beginners

Building pages is a very simple process and doesn’t require any knowledge of HTML, CSS, or other programming skills.

First, you’ll use a block-by-block page builder and fill in the file name, title, description, and keywords fields.

Enter Your Main Page Info With The Block-by-block Builder

Next, you can start writing your text and adding headlines, graphics, links, and so on.

Adding Headlines, Text And Graphics Is Very Simple

Of course, it’s best if you write your articles offline – for example, in Microsoft Word – and then paste them into the right field when you’re done. After that, the Analyzer will check to see if your page is optimized for search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

If there are some things missing or incorrect, the Analyzer will let you know.

Site Build It Analyzer Lets You Know How To Optimize The Page

You’ll then correct the mistakes and run the Analyzer again until it lets you know that everything is OK.

All that’s left to do is to click the Build It button and your page will be built and published on your website. The Site Build It system will automatically ping all major search engines, so that their spiders will visit your website and add your pages to the search engines’ indexes.

ExampIe: I built my first site with this simple process and ended up only having to change the header (another very simple process). Click the URL to check the site and see whether you like the look of it: tennismindgame.com.

It receives over 1000 visitors per day, and I’ve gotten a lot of praise from both visitors and fellow SBI-ers for how clean it looks. There is really no need to complicate the layout in order to succeed online.

This Site Build It review has so far described the main steps for beginners to get going. But what about you experts out there?

b) Building a site – for experts

If you’re familiar with HTML and can build a more complex site, then you don’t have to follow the process of building block-by-block. You can create your HTML site in Dreamweaver – or any other web design software – and upload your own HTML.

Design Your Own Look And Feel Of The Site And Upload HTML

You’ll still use the Analyzer, which will alert you in case your page is not well optimized, and you’ll still have the chance to correct any mistakes before you build the page.

Example: my second site about vacuum cleaners, was first built with a block-by-block system, but I later changed to a 3-column template to which I uploaded my own HTML code.

Let me reiterate one more time – the look of your site has no effect on your rankings in Google or other search engines. Google ranks your site based on its content and the quantity and quality of the incoming links.

You are totally free to choose whether you want to build a simple site or a more complex site. It all depends on your knowledge and your desires.

Site Build It Tools – A Review of Main Tools and Modules

There are many other tools in the Site Central area which will help you get more traffic, make your site more visitor friendly, and allow you to check your progress – you can keep track of the number of daily visitors, the number of incoming links, where the visitors click, and much more.

Here’s a brief overview of the most important tools and modules:

Content 2.0

This module allows you to build invitations, which are special forms that the visitors of your site can use to share their stories. These can be their experiences, reviews, or whatever you invite them to share.

This means that your visitors will now build content for you – for free – and your site’s content will grow without any effort on your part.

Socialize It

The Socialize It module adds social bookmarking buttons to your pages, which allow your visitors to bookmark your pages online at del.icio.us and other sites – yet another way to increase your site’s incoming links and popularity.

Quick Re-Upload It

Site Build It doesn’t use FTP, but the Quick Re-Upload It module works just as fast. If you’ve edited some of the pages and you wish to update them on your site, you’ll simply re-upload them with a few clicks. Your site will immediately show these updated pages.

MailOut Manager

MailOut Manager allows you to store email addresses and send a newsletter. Before I found Site Build It, I built my first website using some company in Slovenia. They charged $300 just for the newsletter module! Here, you get the whole package, with hosting included, for the same price.

RSS/Blog It

RSS/Blog it automatically builds a blog on your website based on the new pages you build. It adds an RSS feed and pings all major RSS/blog readers so that they know your site is updated. This also allows your readers to follow the updates on your site through their favourite RSS reader.

Infin It

Infin It allows you to add functionality to your site by creating a subdomain and then “mapping” it to a third-party provider for blogging, shopping carts, forums, and so forth. If you want to add PHP Web pages to your site, then this is where you can do that. It’s for more experienced users who want more.

Traffic Stats

See how many daily visitors your site receives using Traffic Stats: which pages were viewed the most, where the visitors came from, what they typed in the search engines, and more.

SBI Traffic Stats – Daily Visitors, Pageviews And More

Search Engine HQ

This is a very interesting and useful module which shows you how your pages rank in Google, Yahoo, Live, and Ask.

SBI Search Engine HQ – How Do You Rank?

Search Engine HQ allows you to discover the pages on your site that don’t rank well. Then you can work on optimizing them, additional content and incoming links to improve the rankings of each separate page. You can also check each page for the keywords used to find it, and where the visitors came from.

Value Exchange

Value Exchange lets you search for sites related to your topic and ask for a link exchange. It also shows you the number of incoming links and whether building links should be your main priority or not.

Building links is crucial for your rankings by search engines: it creates additional traffic, and this module definitely makes this part of building a successful site much easier.

There are even more tools, like Click Data, Name Park It, MX It, Special File Manager, and others. It’s up to you whether you want to use them or not. They all add extreme versatility to your website, and it’s hard to imagine that you’d ever want to do something with your site that Site Build It can’t do.

Help and Support

Let’s conclude this Site Build It review with how it helps you have a successful online business.

The Site Build It package first guides you with its Action Guide, which is in written and video format. Then, when you work with any of the tools and modules, you can access very comprehensive Help documentation for each module.

If you get stuck anywhere, you can jump to the SBI Forums, which are really fantastic. You can ask whatever question you want, and more experienced SBI-ers (me included ) are always happy to help.

Site Build It Forums – THE Place To Help And Be Helped

In case something goes wrong, you can count on great support, which will work with you until the problem has been resolved.

And last, if you take up my offer and decide to buy Site Build It through me, then I’ll help you for free – especially in the most important phase: choosing your site concept and the right keywords.

Let me conclude this Site Build It review with this thought: SBI is not a get-rich-quick system, and it does not break the laws of economics and physics. It took me one year to start earning more than $1000 per month, but I kept at it because I saw the light at the end of the tunnel – financial and personal freedom.

I am now my own boss and enjoy my life more than ever: I do what I like, earn great money, and take my holidays whenever I want.

If you would like to check the Site Build It forums and learn more about SBI before you take the plunge, email me at tomaz (at) freedomideas.com and I’ll give you a username and password to log-in.

Update! I’ve added the review of SBI 2.0 which introduces for the first time the monthly payment option of $29.99 and gives you the Content 2.0 module for free.

Of course, please email me if you have any other questions, too.

I also invite anyone else using SBI to post a short Site Build It review here to let others know how SBI has worked for them. Thanks!

Actually before I continue, let me show you a picture:

I saw quite a few times that people actually typed the “Site Build It sucks” phrase in a search engine and somehow found my site.

So I’ve decided to optimize a blog post on this keyword to hopefully get more people here and help them make the right decision.

I’ll try to be objective and approach the “SBI sucks” topic from 2 angles:

1. Why Site Build It Doesn’t Suck

- it’s not a normal web hosting thingy. The SBI Action Guide will teach you how to create a content site relying on free search engine traffic bringing visitors and money day after day without much work

- if you ever get stuck at any part, you can access help for every topic, you can ask a question on the forums and you can even hire an experienced SBI-er to help you out

- I’ve achieved financial freedom with SBI (check my Site Build It Review!) and am earning over $10,000 per month with just a few sites. I did work very hard to get here but thanks to free search engine traffic I don’t have to work so hard any more. I even have time to write posts about whether “Site Build It sucks” or not…

- there are hundreds of Site Build It sites built by ordinary people with no prior knowledge of HTML and SEO. If they can do it, so can you.

2. Why Site Build It Does Suck

Key Evoy (The CEO of Sitesell.com) said this:

The “bad” news? SBI! does not eliminate the common-sense, universal laws of business and economics…

It takes time and work to build a genuine, profitable, long-term business with equity.

It takes a persistent, slow-steady-sure approach, fueled by passion, steadied by patience and reassured by faith in a system that both makes sense and is proven to work.

Bottom line:

If you are looking for a magic pill that will create a site which will earn $100 per day in just a month or two, then yes, Site Build It sucks. It’s not that good.

If on the other hand you want to learn how to build a successful website and want to have all the tools in one place for only 0.82 cents per day, then no, SBI does not suck at all.

In fact, feel free to explore my blog and see how I used SBI to free myself from slavery of a 9-5 job.

Note: There have been some negative reviews of SBI on a couple of blogs saying that it’s a scam. Well, that’s very funny as this “scam” is really working for me and for hundreds of other people.

By the way, here’s what SiteSell has to say about “Site Build It scam reviews“…

And if there’s an SBI-er reading this post I’d appreciate if you share your thoughts on whether Site Build It really sucks or not. Thanks!

If you decide to buy SBI through my affiliate link, I will:

1. Help you out especially in the beginning phase when you have to decide for the right niche and keywords.

I believe I now have enough experience (I’ve made some mistakes and made some things right) to judge with good probability whether your niche will bring you more than 1000 visitors per day.

This of course depends on assessing the competition which is almost impossible to do if you don’t have the experience of building 5 or 6 sites.

2. Answer your questions later if you get stuck somewhere.

Although 90% of your questions can be answered in Sitesell forums and also on this blog, feel free to email me or chat through Skype or Gmail.

I have made a mistake before where I answered lots of questions to someone who eventually did NOT buy SBI through my link.

Altough I like to help people out and do something good for my karma , I do need to protect myself from people who only take and don’t give back.

3. I will link to you.

Once your site has 50 pages, I will put a 1-way in-content link on one of my related websites which will help you a lot with your rankings.

Note that if you have at any point have already been a customer of Sitesell, you cannot sign up under me. You are permanently assigned to your first affiliate.

If you decide to take my offer (and you were never a Sitesell customer), then there’s only one 100% foolproof way to do it: with the Remote Order page where I enter your details when I am logged into my account.

You’ll have to provide me with your credit card details and I’ll complete the whole payment process. This is the only foolproof system that your sale gets credited to me and that now I owe you.

You can of course  clear the cookies from your browser and follow one of the links on this blog (or click on the video) to Sitesell.com and head straight to the order page – BUT it is possible that you have a permanent cookie from another affiliate and that my cookie will not override it.

This happens quite often – you have about 50% chance. I leave it up to you.

Or, if you have some questions, Skype me!

And if you already own a Site Build It site, then I’ll answer your questions in return for a good, related, in-content link.

Tomaz: What do you see as the future of the Internet? What’s the future of SiteSell?

Ken: Some years ago, I wrote that search engines were essential to the Internet and they were like the best bargain in the world. And search engine optimizers got it. But I don’t think the average small business person really got it.

And now, eight or nine years later, people still say that one should not get used to them because they can’t last forever.

There was this ridiculous interview of a Forester researcher were they asked her if Facebook will replace Google. And she actually thought it could. Her reasoning being, “Well, you know if you want to go to Hawaii now, you can just ask a friend on Facebook instead of doing the search in Google.”

Now, how stupid is that? Because thirty years ago you could ask a friend if you’re going to have a vacation in Hawaii without using the Internet.

You know, Facebook is an activity. It’s fun, it’s valuable, it connects people and all that stuff, but its not a gateway to the Internet. The search engines, as far as I can see for the next five, ten years, are still the main highway to the Internet.

And that sounds obvious, but it’s a bold statement to say because to predict anything beyond six months in the Internet is very dangerous. Things change. Gigantic killers come out of nowhere. Major new technologies happen.

But people use the Internet to search for information.

Yes, a lot of things are being predicted. Five or six years I was saying when the first world is on 24/7 high speed, all the rules start to change. Video starts becoming important.

You’re going to start to see major networks becoming huge epicenters as they provide their content through video. If you have to put meta tag information into a video, you’re back to old-fashioned tricks. Because with content, Google has taken it just way off-page.

On-page you should have some keyword so that Google knows it’s a page about Anguilla beaches and not some Chinese restaurant. But after the relevancy is finished, it’s about how good that page is.

So Google’s algorithms follow humans before, during, and after the visit, hundreds of ways beyond Google PR. That’s how Google figures out whether it’s any good or not. So that’s where text search is going. For the average small business person, a lot of traffic is needed until search becomes more sophisticated and is able to deliver smart, contextual, good video.

Yes, it’s going to get more and more important. And what I am saying is happening, but it’s still going to take some more years but video is coming.

Obviously image-based search is something we’ve been talking about for years now in Site Build It. That’s a bigger and bigger part. It’s still bringing more and more traffic, and Google Universal is a sign that other ways of delivering information other than just text are becoming more and more important.

So if you’re doing a search for Anguilla beaches, there is going to be a couple of videos about that. There’s going to be a couple of images about that and there’s still going to be the text and that textual editorial content that is being delivered is still the leading traffic driver from every indicator that we can see.

Web 2.0 has played out in all the major obvious ways. MySpace and Facebook have taken social networking. All the major social media sites—the social bookmarking and networking and sites like that—always has room for great new clever ideas. So far, nobody has brought Web 2.0 to the average small business person.

Obviously everything that can be digitized will be digitized. So the music industry that we talked about or the network marketing is an industry that is causing a lot of controversy right now.

Books may take a generation because books have been with us since Guttenberg; they have been with us longer. Things that have been with us longer take longer to go. We love paper, we love turning pages, but inevitably books are going to be out of topic.

So the whole network marketing industry is one that interests us because we feel that we can digitize that process.

Create a great theme-based site content, and people will find your information and they will like what you are writing about. They become leads and they are presold and you are no longer bothering friends and it’s more noble.

Blogging is hot. Blogging is popular. Blogging is done by people who have the time and inclination and are smart to be clever once a day or many times a day. The media is exactly those types of people. They jump on it, they publicize it, so it’s something that gets an awful lot of noise but below that, that survey is probably grossly optimistic.

And certainly the average business person can’t blog.

I really don’t see a fantastic future for blogging except what it is now. What it is now is pretty much where it’s going to stay, plus or minus other media being thrown in. But I don’t see a huge future beyond what’s happening now with blogging. It’s meant for smart people who’ve never been published.

All the great bloggers like Steve Pavlina of self-improvement have become published authors because they are still great, because they have great content. So that’s what I see for the future.

Blogging is not going to get bigger and bigger. Blogging is a useful adjunct to a website or a useful stand-alone in a certain type of category where people really have something to say and other people want to hear what they have to say and they actually subscribe because that’s the key to blogging.

The key to blogging is subscribing to a blog. Get that feed and you’re good enough that you are worth MySpace as my reader. So that was just quite different than doing organic searches and finding theme-based content sites that have a real momentum to them.

It’s just different approaches for two different types of small business people. One is neither better nor any worse than the other. It’s just that a theme-based content site is a good approach for most small businesses. Blogging is really for a small minority.

Tomaz: I also noticed from my own experience that I read some of the blogs and I also check some of the new guides, the new blogs some people are starting. I can see the archives.

Maybe they started it in August so they’re six months old. And they write really good. I mean, it’s really useful. I can see the effort of an article that took at least five hours to write. But it’s written for the user, and it’s not really optimized for any keyword. So that page is lost in the long term.

Ken: It’s not optimized, it’s not organized, it’s not internally linked. It’s just organized in terms of date and time, and it’s like a form. Wonderful information that is lost.

Tomaz: It’s useful for those few people who read it in that week when it was on the front page. I can see how much effort is put into blogging. I can see so many great blogs in terms of content, and people work really hard and do all that social bookmarking stuff.

But then some of them post the numbers: “My earnings for this month are at $263.”

And I think: “I made this much just today doing nothing since I have a big content site that keeps getting found for the keywords in demand. And all these bloggers have done so much work for their blog since this blogging is so cool and I can earn money with it.”

Ken: I think the reality will start to sink in over the next year or two, and you will be left with a small number of people who are successful bloggers and who should be successful bloggers.

And of course, there are many industries where blogging doesn’t make sense. I keep taking about Anguilla because it’s a site that I play with Site Build It and it’s my daughter’s site and I help her and we work together and it’s been very good working with my daughter and keeping me close to the actual user experience.

You can do Anguilla in fifty different ways. You can do a high net worth Angular dot com, a family Anguilla beaches, and you can do Angular news, blogging oriented.

See what’s happening in Anguilla and put it on RSS feed. But how many people really want the news every time something happens in Anguilla? It becomes a very small population.

But how many people search for information about Anguilla sooner or later when they need a vacation, a school project, for whatever? An awful lot more people.

Tomaz: Great! Those are my questions. Maybe there is something you want to say that I didn’t ask or that maybe you think it would be a good idea to share?

Ken: No, they are good questions. You know the future was a good question because ten months ago I was excited about videos. I was excited about Content 2.0. They were the things in the radar.

There are like major changes, like when AdSense came up, and there are things we jump at right away. Like when AdSense came up to boom, I stopped everything I was doing.

We wrote the AdSense guide and articles on how to make the most of AdSense. This was an important module to just go beyond affiliates when Site Build It was much smaller. Because Site Build It existed before AdSense.

People were already using Site Build It to earn income through the whole concept of CTPM (content traffic presell monetize). What Google suggests now (the webmaster guidelines) is basically what I was writing five or six years ago with CTPM.

If you accept the concept of CTPM, people use the Internet to search for information. Jump to the head of line and give the engines what they want. If you accept that basic premise, it’s like everything else follows on that.

So what happens next?

Clever ways of using Web 2.0 mostly since Web 3.0 is so far away that it’s not even time to start getting excited about that. I think it’s the evolution and the iteration of what is here now, 24/7 broadband, video, Web 2.0, blogging, those are really the fine-tuning of what’s happened.

And then all of a sudden, maybe this year, maybe next year, something big starts happening. Something like Web 3.0. We’re starting to read that but there’s nothing there to even begin to say how this affects my customers.

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I want to thank again to Dr. Ken Evoy for taking the time while being on vacation to answer my questions and allowing me to share this interview with you.

I hope you’ve learned something new that will get you at least one step closer towards financial freedom.

Tomaz: Since my blog is about financial freedom, I want to ask you this question:

What do you think is a typical journey of someone who has achieved financial freedom with SBI? And how much do you think they usually earn per month?

Ken: It varies so much, Tomaz. And some people start part-time because they have a full-time job where they work sixty hours a week.

Some people start full-time like a stay-at-home mom whose children have just gone off school so she has six hours a day to really work. She picks a good niche, starts to see traffic, and starts to make income three to six months, which becomes the main family income in a year or in eighteen months.

Like Elad of Coolest Birthday Parties. He has five to six years into his site, and he’s well into five figures a month. He travels the world.

Other people work part–time. They pick a harder niche and money isn’t even that important and they make even $200, $300 a month. And that’s okay for them because they are only working at it a few hours a week and it’s an outlet.

But what we do know is that the average small business website doesn’t get fifty visitors a day. For us fifty visitors a day is a terrible disappointment. Once you’ve had your site up for a while, you should be really generating high volumes of free organic traffic with Site Builder.

We know that 62 percent of our clients end up in the top 3 percent of all traffic websites. Now, it’s almost a little bit cheating to say that because the average small business site does so badly it’s almost like taking candy from babies.

They buy Google Adwords traffic, but really getting found in organic search engines doesn’t happen. They don’t have a sitemap to XML (extensible markup language). They don’t know how to do content. They don’t know how to format. They don’t know how to do a lot of things properly, with just so many stoppers along the way.

When I broke one of my little ceramic tortoises on my collections I looked for “ceramic repair Montreal.” I couldn’t find a repair guy in Montreal. I had to go four pages deep into Google to find a directory that listed all the ceramic repairs in North America.

There was one in RF City, and this guy has a reputation in Montreal among the collectors that’s huge. He’s written articles in newspapers, and he has a website that has a lot of Flash and graphics and so forth, and he is invincible to Google for a simple thing like “ceramics repair Montreal.” SBI sites should win just for “ceramics” or “ceramics repair.”

So the competition is just so low that we know that the majority of SBI sites build traffic that is just way ahead of the average small business site.

Now, how you turn that into money and how quickly you do it is really up to you and dependent on how much time you have to put in it, what type of niche, what type of business, what type of monetization model, and how clever you are at monetizing.

Google Ads are wonderful. It quickly gives people a very good base. But then people who follow articles and learn how to do joint ventures and do more creative ways of monetizing, e–books, and so forth, can make ten thousand a month. And from there you know you’re on your way.

You know in one year it’s going to be twenty thousands, and it’s going to grow and grow and grow. So it’s all over the map. It’s like we go back to knowledge and brain and attitude and motivation. It’s really completely up to people—what they do with that traffic, their time, their creativity.

Tomaz: Okay. Maybe one question for your best estimate since many bloggers are going to read this interview. I mean, this is a blogger community.

There was a survey in November 2007 by Darren Rowse on how much bloggers earn. So one of the numbers was that 81 percent of bloggers earn less than $1,500 per month. What is your best estimate of how much SBI-ers earn?

Ken: I’d say that well, first of all, that interview is probably skewed. The number is probably much worse than that. When you do a survey like that, I’m assuming people just come in and they fill up a form.

Tomaz: Yes, and that’s basically his readers.

Ken: Yes, and he reaches bloggers, a more sophisticated subset of bloggers in the world to fill in this form. People who aren’t making any money are less likely to fill in the form. So there is double-bias.

Certainly he’s not getting to all the abandoned blogs. He’s not getting to the people who don’t read his thing and if you’re not reading some of the major bloggers, you’re probably not a serious blogger. He’s not reaching these bloggers so there’s this gigantic base I would say that 99.9 percent of blogs don’t make a hundred dollars a month.

Accepting these numbers that 80 percent making a $1,500 is probably not correct. That’s pretty low for professional bloggers who do this for a living; blogging is labor intensive.

Blogging attracts some subset of writers who gives you some short-term kind of traffic that isn’t like a theme-base content site with a real body of content that is organized logically, sort of like Wikipedia. It’s like Wikipedia with a voice, and your one section of Wikipedia, say my daughter’s site, Anguilla Beaches.

And now with Content 2.0, you build a site where people come in, develop user-generated content, and participate in a theme-based community.

I would say that to really do a proper survey the average SBIer would have to phone people, ask them some sensitive questions about how much they make. They would have to make a participation rate that’s at least over 50 percent.

So to do a survey like this, you really need to get the participation of the majority of people who blog to have a reasonable survey. My guess is the average SBIer probably does something on that order of magnitude.

Compared to a professional blogger, our average SBIer doesn’t have that level of sophistication in terms of how they use the Net, understand the Net, and do what they do. And a professional blogger will do better over a long period of time. When his activity level drops, he will still continue to grow.

But if an average blogger stops updating his blog every day or so, the traffic will slowly but surely subside.

Tomaz: Yes, I’ve noticed that actually on my blog because now like I am on holiday. I have made only one post about my view of success. And I was just checking the Google analytics today for my blog, and it’s like going down, down, down.

It’s like slowly going down, while on my SBI site it’s just continuously growing. And I didn’t actually post anything on my SBI site. I just built three pages through Content 2.0 and approved it and on my blog I didn’t do anything.

Ken: Content 2.0 is so powerful because users come in. We’ve had this phenomenal contest where SBI-ers have just incredibly creative ways. They can create mini Yahoo! answers and many total site blogs. Everybody else is a blogger, and you’re just accepting the blogger.

A mini MySpace kind of Web 2.0 you can think of plus many more ways that they are using this thing. Even on my daughter’s site where she basically grafted it on without really being creative or aggressive about it and somebody writes something about their favorite cheap hotel or about a time they were attacked and people comment on that.

Google of course sees that the site is changing because those posts first of all go into the sitemap XML which is automatically created plus it goes to the RSS feeds for Blog It.

So two family spiders are picking this up fast; the blog spiders and the content finders – and Google starts listing all this. So the site is growing without you really putting much effort.

And that’s a very powerful combination of using blog technology plus Web 2.0 on top of the theme-based website where everything is organized properly. That’s a powerful formula for an ever-growing site with a small amount of work.

Next: What Ken sees as the future of the Internet…

Tomaz: What do you think is the biggest obstacle of success for the technical part? And of course what stops people from succeeding (personality traits)?

Ken: The biggest obstacle is lack of knowledge. For a small business person who wants to start his own site, there are just too many barriers in terms of themselves learning HTML and FTP is just a scary concept.

People don’t even understand the concept of a server, how a website works on the Internet. Something as basic as that. So what FTP does and where those pages go sounds so simple to you and me, but it’s fundamental as that. People hear about search engine optimization and their eyes are really getting scared.

So the whole thing starts to look like it’s impenetrable. So what do they do? They hire a webmaster who they think knows these things but most of them really don’t.

Most of them just know how to do what they are good at: put up a website with whatever looks good, looks neat, whatever they do well at, but they don’t solve the client’s problems which is to sell what their clients are looking for—information.

So that’s really the no.1 obstacle: the small business person has no knowledge. It’s like a patient who looks at a doctor. I always laugh when patients say, “Oh, this guy is such a good doctor.” And I know he’s a bad doctor.

What I mean is, he has very nice bedside manners. He’s very nice to me. He has a very good personality. But I know that he’s the last person that you want operating on you or that you’ll want to be in the emergency room when you come in with a heart attack. So it’s just like that.

Small business people have no way of knowing what their webmaster really knows, and very few webmasters really know how to do it very well. So knowledge is probably the single biggest thing that the average small business person doesn’t have.

Tomaz: Okay. The real question now is how does SiteSell solve this problem?

Ken: Well, the Site Sell flagship product is called Site Build It. We started with Make Your Site Sell. We sold over a hundred thousand copies. We sold many other books in that brand, and we started to realize that the average person just can’t do what I was talking about.

Even with knowledge, the average person can’t go out and put all these tools together and really make it all work and develop a successful small business. So every web market guru that you have heard of started or have read Make Your Site Sell at a very early stage.

Many successful small business people who didn’t start by marketing or actually did businesses that were just selling information went on and developed other businesses. But a lot of people simply just had too many barriers. So we decided what we needed to do which was to integrate every tool that was necessary for building the content that builds traffic.

But along those ways, there are all these steps, processes, and other things that you have to do correctly. Just knowing the process is not a magic formula. So the barnstormer trick is to be like the Macintosh of web hosting and make all the technology and let the small business person focus on doing business.

So for the Macintosh of web hosting, the rest of the world is like pre–DOS. It’s not even Windows yet and then DOS has just started. It’s so primitive. They can start from no knowledge.

We say there’s no such thing as a stupid question if it’s really being asked to honestly know the answer. But those questions are very simple. A year later, people were answering questions that they could never ever dream existed.

And they were building sites. They’re getting thirty, fifty visitors, a hundred, a thousand a day, and then they are starting to figure out how to monetize and they are adding affiliates or they are selling their own e-books so they are selling services. So then they’re growing their business bigger and bigger, and that’s the exciting part.

They don’t have to worry about the business of Internet marketing because we read all of these views. We watch our assessment when it first emerges and say, “This is going to be important, and you wait for it.” We determined that blogging and RSS were going to be important so we made a module that works in a certain way that people don’t have to blog continuously. So that’s our job.

Our job is to keep track of all the technology, like write articles to tell people how to take advantage of it and turn it into modules. So let people just focus on their business, not on how fast Internet is changing.

Part III – Are people achieving financial freedom with Site Build It?