It is so exciting to see that you get so much replies for just a nonsense keyword that I typed into the search engine.

Well, I do have experienced with HTML, PHP, WordPress, (well, not Joomla!) and I have to admit that I have all of them failed.

Then finally I arrived at SBI. But the fact is, SBI actually do incurred a lot more cost than any of the traditional ways. I start playing with free web-hosting, then be serious a bit with paid hosting, but SBI is somehow… terribly expensive!

Yet I have to admit that, Sitesell really good at is Content-Traffic-Presell system. It is the only one company that finally decide to buy it after detailed reading about those testimonial and example. It doesn’t do like what other companies do, direct me to a price comparison page, <– I am quite bored of these kind of price comparison.

And I do have the feeling that SBI is really the suitable product, at least suitable for me because of its resources. But here the problem comes…

$ 29.90 per month, is really not cheap in my country, $ 1 can be used to buy a very good lunch instead! (my country is Malaysia, $1 = RM 3.2+) I have put on so much consideration to finally push myself into trying this product. But what I get now is, I spent 4 days hang on Day 2, 2 days for Day 3, and for Day 4 it ask me to go back to Day 2 and roll over again!

And after Day 2 now I have got only 5 word tracker credit left, which definitely not enough, and that means I need to have buy 100 more trackers for $ 20, which is definitely pushing me over budget!! $30 per month is what I sincerely, the most I can afford to pay, and that also have been a burden to me.

The worse thing is, I can only register the domain name on Day 5, which I understand exactly I really have the need to find a suitable niche to get start with.

Well, so at least as a university student from a poorer country, I wish to sound my feeling, I feel like I have pay for a wordtracker system with that I still need to pay $20 more in order to buy the trackers, and as long as I haven't found the suitable niche I will pay $30 without having any of the functionality! I do have confident that SBI is really a good tools, but just if Sitesell can share with me the content from Day 2 and Day 4 before I buy, I would have actually stop, planning it detail enough, then only I will buy it.

You know, I am now really trap in the situation that I nearly wish to contact sitesell and tell them "I want a refund because I don't think I am ready for this product yet, I will come back later.". I haven't done that, but I think if I am not able to find that extra $20 I am forced to do that, and I don't even know by doing so, will they penalize me that I can't buy this service from them in the future?

Well, just to strengthen my idea, if Sitesell will tell me to have much more "preparation" for this product, I won't have been trapped into this kind of situation. Not able to spend even $20 more might sounds a joke to you, but I hope you will believe it though.

I wanted to mention, because you talk about those scam reviews – there’s a new website about it too. It’s called the Site Build It scam site and it explains everything in detail in case anybody’s interested.

But seriously, Site Build It is a wonderful product, run by wonderful people. The forums are the best I’ve ever been on, too. Doing the tortoise thing, one step at a time, is mandatory! You definitely get your money’s worth there.

Despite being an ECommerce professional (Project Management not a Techie!), I signed up for SBI and have spent 1.5 years developing http://www.My-Project-Management-Expert.com

As someone who has recently looked closely into both WordPress and SBI my views are:

1. If you are the type who is a blend of techie, content writer and marketeer you will make good money no matter what system you use.

2. SBI is “expensive” and it certainly isn’t perfect but nothing is simple. Even putting up a bog standard HTML site at Hostgator is proving really timeconsuming. It took me just 1 hour at SBI.

3. Every system has a huge learning curve. It took me ages to learn how to set anything up in SBI let alone how to Upload HTML. But looking into WordPress it isn’t a shorter learning curve at all, and a huge amount of hacks have to be done by someone techie you trust to get any long lasting SEO benefits.

Most importantly though, this whole discussion is a complete red herring. You know why? Because the people making the money are those who actually get off their backsides, and get on with it. Yes the SBI templates look terrible, but so do loads of WordPress sites. Most importantly though, I have seen numerous non SBI and WordPress sites which look terrible, but which make big money because they have compelling content.

So yes the SBI route does make you want to scream and it does take alot of time and persistence to make it work, but isn’t that true of any business? And when you look at the percentage of the 40,000 SBI owners making good money from their sites compared to the rest of the web, well $299 seems like a small amount of money to me. After all if I’m going to devote the time required to this, then I want to make sure I have the greatest chance of success.

Lastly for those still in the “look is everything camp”, I have a competitor who has the best looking WordPress blog I have ever seen. He has spent huge amounts of time making it look fantastic and he put up new content everyday. However he hasn’t written anything in a month and his traffic has fallen out of bed. Meanwhile I didn’t touch my website for 6 months this year and guess what? My traffic grew and I’m getting about 600 uniques per day mainly from Google.

From my perspective I know SBI and how it works now. As such I’ll stick with it. The key thing is my site makes money and will make alot more when I properly monetise it. The best thing though, is that I know if I want another 6 months off, the site will keep getting visitors and making me money. That is why, for me at least, having a “boring” HTML site with good content is definitely the way to go.

PS Tomaz would you mind terribly much if I Skyped you as I want to start another SBI site and wanted to pick your brains if that would be possible?

Cheers

Susan

I earned my first dollars about 4 months after I started the site but I decided to create my own products so it took me a while to write my first ebook.

You need to know that Google will not let a newly created site rank well no matter what. (Unless you get links from massive authority sites.)

What I see (I don’t have scientific proof but this is my experience) is that after 6 months Google releases the brakes a little and after1 year it releases the brakes completely.

That’s why it takes long time to get lots of traffic. Also, you need lots of content – I’d say at least 100 pages to get some decent traffic (over 500 visitors per day) so this is really up to you.

Will you write 100 pages of content in 6 months? 1 high quality long article every 2 days? If yes, then you will do well. If not, don’t blame SBI since SBI has nothing to do with it.

The results will be the same for any type of hosting. SBI gives you all the knowledge and tools to start in the right direction. Once you’re site is up and running, it is treated by Google as any other site.

Tomaz, how long was it before you started to make any money from your first SBI site? I have heard you shouldn’t expect anything before 3 months and not much until 6 months. Do you agree?

Once you see the power in what it can do for your life, you will never be satisifed with slave wages from a corporate company again.

I LOVE my SBI life!!!

And Tomaz,

This post was written a long time ago BUT I hope you have learned not to waste so much time typing post to the naysayers especially that guy. His site has a low PR and gets no traffic. Those results speak for themseleves.

Take my advice with a grain of salt (whatever the heck that means) as I do the same thing. But after reading your exchange with scott I realize spending that time on my business is much more productive.

We live and learn…

The SBI Brainstormer returns up to 800 keywords based on a seed word and it gives you demand and supply. Theoretically, you can do a similar thing with Google Adwords and then check EACH keyword with the allintitle: operator.

Good luck doing that 800 times for one single brainstorm! What if you want to brainstorm more niches?

So your answer and are your tool are useless in this case.

The point that you have not used SBI means everything since you do not have realistic info – just opinions.

And since you’ve probably made up your mind some time ago and created a belief that SBI sucks, you have been looking for opinions that support your belief and have been ignoring and trying to discredit those that support SBI.

Good luck doing that with me! From my standpoint you definitely don’t know what you’re talking about.

You have also been obviously misled from the WP and SEO community since we are talking here about building a successful online business and your keep talking about templates (and plugins).

How are templates and plugins going to make your site succeed?

These have NOTHING to do with creating a high traffic website.

Google has nothing in their algorithm that would rank sites with nicer templates or with cooler plugins higher.

The real question is: does one KNOW what has to be done when it comes to keyword research, site structure, internal linking, getting external links and tons of other stuff that ARE a part of Google’s algorithm and that WILL help you get more traffic.

This is where SBI is unmatched. The Action Guide teaches you everything and it’s all tied together with the multitude of tools that help build a site that works.

Just check the success stories from SBI-ers here and then compare that with guys who started their Internet marketing journey with blogging.

How many daily visitors do those bloggers (using nice looking templates and plugins) get after 1 year?

Check my previous post about Why Blogging for Money Sucks and see what Problogger’s poll showed up…

Yeah, very funny, right?

If one does KNOW all that SBI teaches and what I mentioned above, sure you can use WordPress as a Content Publishing System but then you won’t be blogging but you’ll be building a website. That can work.

You can also build a simple HTML template and just FTP pages up. If one KNOWS EXACTLY what has to be done, then sure, you don’t need SBI for a simple Adsense site.

As for the idea that SBI is for newbies you have to ask yourself two things:

1. Is there something with your EGO that stops you from checking out a tool that can teach a newbie how to create a successful (see link above) high traffic site in less than a year?

Because logic suggests that this system must be incredibly effective (and correct) to do that.

If you’re making over 10k per month and can easily create sites in less than a year that get between 500 and 1000 daily unique visitors, then you’re one of the few people who really won’t benefit from getting an SBI subscription.

(The question is then what are you doing here reading this blog instead of working on your sites with all the knowledge you have and why are you not starting your own blog sharing your tips?)

But IF you’re NOT kicking butt online and you cannot easily create a site that gets high traffic in less than a year, then again simple logic would suggest that you should check what all these people with SBI have learned AND created in such a short period of time.

2. If SBI is just for newbies, then why is this guy at http://www.updatexp.com (who is obviously not a newbie) using SBI for that and his other websites? (He uses a blog to support his main business sites!)

So if SBI is used by newbies AND experts (Am I an expert too? Is an expert someone who makes more than 10k per month? I think so.) and they both succeed, what logical reason can you find NOT to check the system if you’re not at the same level of traffic and income?

What else are you going to do?

Check Digital Point forums for more expert knowledge? Read hundreds of blogs all with conflicting suggestions?

How will you decide then what works and what not? How much time will you keep wasting testing hundreds of crappy ideas to find out what works and what not?

As for agreeing to disagree – we can’t do that. If you disagree that SBI works, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

I am not against WordPress as a CMS but one needs to KNOW a LOT to tie all that together into a WP with plugins and make it work.

But the indisputable fact is this: WP doesn’t teach you how to create a successful online business and SBI does.

I always appreciate the debate, and we can agree to disagree.

For keyword research, the google AdWords Keyword Tool works great:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

And all you need to do is type in allintitle: to measure up the competition for a given phrase.

The fact that I have never used Site Build It means absolutely nothing. I have researched it, know what it is about, have talked to people that have used it, and I am not an affiliate, so my opinion is actually more objective than yours IMO = )

The fact that WordPress is free, has thousands of free and custom themes available, and a vibrant community of developers writing new plugins all the time makes it FAR superior to SiteBuildIt from a content management standpoint.

Sure there are other benefits of SBI, especially for the newbie, but since I don’t need them and have multiple websites, it is WordPress all the way.

Scott

Second, you definitely do NOT see blogs in MOST CASES when you Google something – so you’re simply being in denial and trying to prove your point without facts – again.

The only time when blogs are better ranked is if you are looking for news (and a few specialized topics like SEO, gadgets and so on) – since that’s what blogs are for and Google pushes them higher in the rankings for a SHORT time for that certain event that happened. After a day or two, their rankings plummet again.

If you search for INFORMATION, product reviews and facts, you will see the first blog on page 3 or so…

There are many more regular people looking for information, reviews and facts than there are Internet marketers looking for the latest SEO trick. (in which case blogs do rank well)

As for design – SBI starts at the exact same point as the WordPress does – the default WordPress design is boring and hideous too.

But 99% of the blogs you see online have CUSTOM made templates – so how is Wordspress better than SBI – (as you can have a custom template with SBI too)?

You need to wake up to reality and not cling to some mistaken beliefs about SBI which are not true at all.

And one more thing: since you’ve never used SBI, your claims about it of course have no credibility.

I am actually approving your comments here for the future visitors because many of them may have the exact same mistaken beliefs about the product and some of them might actually wake up and push their ego aside to start their journey to freedom with a proven system.

Blogging will certainly NOT get you there.

When I google something, I see blogs mostly, what do you see? SBI fills a niche for beginners I guess, and clues them in to a lot of important factors so it is worth the $300 or so dollars, but I wouldn’t waste my time with SBI and sacrifice a hideous looking 1996 design for free keyword tools…