John Dilbeck Musings

Yesterday, in the 5 Pillar #291 newsletter, Ken Evoy announced the introduction of Snippet Build It! This is a tool that can be used by 5 Pillar affiliates to build links to over 60 landing pages for promoting Site Build It!

Many years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the rocks weren’t quite hardened, Sitesell was selling some of the best ebooks ever published. Make Your Site Sell! was the Bible of online marketing that helped me start building my marketing business. Now, it’s a free download and there is a lot of very valuable information in the 1,500 or so pages of this ebook. I still refer to it now and then.

In addition to outstanding ebooks, Ken wrote a number of courses that were delivered via email. I remember taking all of those courses as they were introduced and updated. I still have several of them in a 3-ring binder, and they are covered with notes and bright yellow highlights. Now, these courses are available as free downloadable PDF files. I still highly recommend my favorite, the Affiliate Masters Course, because it offers as much as some courses that cost around $100 and you can download it free. It was always free and still remains free.

Over time, to make it easier for Sitesell’s 5 Pillar Affiliates to market these products, Ken introduced Page Build It! - a tool for building customized gateway pages. Around the same time, give or take, the Build It! tool was introduced to make it easier for affiliates to build web pages (or just snippets of code) that combined text and graphics. This was a cutting-edge marketing tool when it was introduced.

Now, I hope you’ll excuse my memory, but a lot of water has gone under the bridge since these tools were first introduced, so I may not have all of this exactly right, but I believe the gist of it is accurate.

These tools for building pages and code snippets eventually lead to the first, less-than-impressive versions of Site Build It! But, Ken and the folks associated with Sitesell were not content with what SBI was and continued to improve it and add new features.

Now, several years later - a very long time in the online marketing world - Site Build It has become an incredibly effective tool for building online businesses. More tools are added all the time and older features are updated continually.

So, as I said, Ken announced yesterday that Snippet Build It! was available and I just now spent about a half-hour playing with it.

I am impressed!

What used to be the Build It! tool has been streamlined and greatly improved. Now, 5 Pillar affiliates can easily and quickly create links to over 60 different landing pages that tell the story of SBI and why it makes sense to use it rather than traditional webhosting.

It’s easy to go to the page, select either text or image, select the desired landing page, and build a link.

If you select text, and a landing page, you can type the text you want in the link and see the link created as you type. It makes it simple to try several phrases to see which one you like, and then simply copy and paste the HTML code to your websites, blogs, and other places on the web. The text links in this article were created using Snippet Build It! as a test of using the system and it is easier than hand coding the links as I normally do.

Not only is it easier, the landing pages are grouped by their order in the buying cycle, and this is explained in an excellent article that was also released yesterday.

Why is that important?

I’ve gotten into a rut of referring prospects to just a handful of the many pages that are available. Now, by using Snippet Build It!, it will be much easier to choose just the right page to link to, depending upon the point I want to make in an article or advertisement.

This combination of being easy to use and providing a full list of the available landing pages (and this number is growing all the time) helps me provide the information you may need in order to make your final decision to buy, or not to buy, a subscription to the Site Build It! system - or to become one of our affiliates and make money promoting the best way to build an online business.

In addition to text links, Snippet Build It! makes it easy to build graphics links using some new banners, buttons, and logos.

For example, the following is a link to the Site Build It! main page, and was created in less than five seconds:

The new graphics use less text and more people. They use more right-brained emotion and less left-brained logic.

Now, I’m a left-brained logic kind of guy. I rarely make my decisions based on emotion. I spend a long time learning about something before I buy.

Most people, perhaps you, make more decisions based on emotion and then later justify it with logic.

Site Build It! is great for right-brained people. It is an exciting system that has helped many of its subscribers build successful online businesses, and quite a few have left the corporate world and are now living their dreams and working from home. Of course, not everyone is this successful, but SBI offers the tools and training to make it much more likely to succeed.

Many people have said they were exposed to SBI and didn’t believe that it was as good as many of us believe it to be. So, they moved on and built websites using other services. After a year or two of butting their heads against the technical hurdles, they remembered Site Build It! With more experience, they were better able to judge the benefits SBI offered and some bought on the spur of the moment.

Rather than regretting the purchase, most of them regretted wasting a year or two trying to build their online businesses the hard way.

Yes, some people do not do well with SBI, and some people don’t like what they can’t do with SBI - so Sitesell offers a money-back guarantee. You can’t lose by trying it.

Oops, I’m getting off track. Back to Snippet Build It!

The new graphic images are more colorful and appeal more to right-brained people, in my opinion. I think they will be a welcome addition to the marketing tools offered to 5 Pillar affiliates.

But, nothing is perfect.

A few minutes ago, I offered my opinion about the new marketing tool on the members-only SBI forum.

I think it is a huge improvement over the older tools and I welcome the ease-of-use and organized listing of the more than 60 landing pages we can promote.

On the other hand, I believe we need a wider variety of graphics that are specifically targeted to each landing page.

But, you know what? I don’t doubt that Snippet Build It! will be improved over time and that we’ll see more and better-targeted graphics to go with all the other marketing tools that Sitesell provides its 5 Pillar affiliates.

It’s easy to recommend something when I know from first-hand experience how much it has helped me build my online marketing business. I’m working from home 100 miles from the nearest traffic jam and loving it.

I don’t believe I would be where I am today if it weren’t for what I’ve learned from Ken Evoy and all the many Site Build It! webmasters who help each other on the free, members-only SBI forums.

I’m a very satisfied SBI customer and have many plans for expanding my Act On Your Dream! website.

You know what?

At first I balked a bit at spending $300 a year to build a website, but after building dozens of sites and blogs over the last few years, and wasting more than what I would have spent to build several more SBI sites, the only one that has never given me any trouble at all is the one I am building using Site Build It! Over time, that becomes more and more important, because I’m getting tired of wasting my time and efforts on sites that don’t work or get destroyed by hackers.

I’m one of those hard-headed people that just has to do it my way and I don’t regret all the testing I’ve done. I’ve learned and I’ll be turning more to SBI in the future, except for some of my sites that require perl and php programming to make them work.

I just renewed my subscription to SBI for another year, and a long time before my subscription expires I will have earned back my $300 investment several times over. It’s not an expense, it’s an investment.

Just as Site Build It! is the best tool I know of for building a successful online business, the marketing tools that Sitesell offers its 5 Pillar affiliates continue to get better over time, too.

I am very happy that I found Ken Evoy and Sitesell those many years ago. I hope you’ll find it worth the investment of your time and money, too.

Act on your dream!

JD

Brainstorm It! is a powerful niche brainstorming and keyword analyzer module that is only one of the tools included in your Site Build It! annual subscription.

Here is some information from a recent announcement from Ken Evoy (Who is Ken Evoy?):

“Yes. Brainstorm It! *V2* is now live!

Both vertical and lateral brainstorming have been greatly improved. Important new concepts like VALUE Demand and Real Supply provide stronger guidance for content development. “Pink messaging” helps get niche selection “just right.”

And there are a whole bunch of other improvements. It all adds up to the best keyword brainstorming and research tool in the world…

We did a ton of research before launching V2. It’s fair to say that it’s the best keyword tool in the world. And it’s included in the $299 price of SBI!, which, of course, delivers many more tools than Brainstorm It!…”

Site Build It! is a powerful system of integrated tools that help you find a niche, identify key concepts and keywords for writing about your chosen niche, build your website and promote it to the world, and interact efficiently with your visitors and customers.

Brainstorm It! is one of the tools that is used extensively in the step by step process for building your online business when you first start using Site Build It!. Later when you have established your online business, you can continue to use Brainstorm It! to help you find subjects you can write about to extend the valuable content you offer on your site.

I’ve used the new version over the last few days and have found lots of new ideas for topics to write about on my SBI site.

The fact that you can pay much more than the cost of an annual Site Build It! subscription just for a keyword analysis and brainstorming tool that doesn’t work as well is just one more reason for using Site Build It! to build your online business.

I am a happy and very satisfied SBI customer and I welcome these improvements to the tools I use to continue to build my business.

Act on your dream!

JD

Sitesell, Inc. recently updated the results page for websites built by their customers using Site Build It!

From a recent announcement by Ken Evoy:

“Results.sitesell.com is becoming a mini-directory of some of the most well-done, informative sites in the world. But it sure is getting harder and harder to to update it.

Picking the top SBI! sites for results.sitesell.com can be a real challenge…

It’s become so much work that we seem to have subconsciously put off an update for over a year! SBIers keep doing better and better. More and more of them are entering the Top 1% of all sites in the world.

So this year(!), we shook it up (requiring higher traffic numbers to “make the cut.”) There are a lot of new faces, but some old ones still in the lineup, too!…

We eliminate sites that don’t have the “real” traffic to justify their Alexa scores. We chop sites that are in categories that are overcrowded. We regretfully drop sites that have been in results.sitesell.com “long enough” (and bring in new ones). And we cut so many others for a variety of reasons. So what you see is just the tip of the top.

One way or another, all selected sites must be in the top 1% of all sites on the Internet. And you can imagine that’s a very nice place to be…

Each time we do this, the new sites stagger me. There is no limit to the niches you can conquer.

I think the most important point, though, is that most of these people are non-techs, just “ordinary” people who have been empowered to do EXTRAordinary things online.

They get the kind of numbers that any professional webmaster would drool over. And the more congested the Web gets, the STRONGER SBIers become. “Regular people” are leaving professional non-SBI! Webmasters and SEOers in their dust.

That’s the power of the Site Build It! process… ANYone can find real, verifiable, online success.

For YOU, our partner-in-sales, this is BIG NEWS!

Why!

Because this is all the proof you need to convince your visitors that SBI! is for real. Real traffic! Real success!”

A while back Ken Evoy gave us a challenge to find any other webhosting company (and SBI is much more than that) that can provide better results for their customers. I spent some time searching and never found a site that even came marginally close.

See for yourself, these are the results SBI webmasters are getting by building their online businesses using Site Build It!

Why waste your time and money using anything else?

Act on your dream!

JD

Ken Evoy and Sitesell recently announced the release of Content 2.0, an optional add-on module for Site Build It!

Here is a copy of their press release:

Montreal, Quebec, Canada (PRWEB) August 30 2007 — Sitesell.com, the originator of Site Build It! and champion of using quality content to drive small business sites, today takes Web 2.0 to new heights. For the first time, small businesses can make it easy for their visitors to craft original Web pages including photos and captions. Other visitors comment upon and rate those Web pages. The process is optimized for search engine results driving long tail keyword traffic and viral spread.

Content 2.0 is available at SiteSell.com for the annual subscription price of $99 as an add-on module to Site Build It! (SBI!), SiteSell’s flagship business-building product.

(End of the press release)

Not every website that is built using SBI will need or be able to use Content 2.0 effectively, but many sites are already using it with success.

If you would like more information on Sitesell and SBI!, please visit Sitesell.com.

Act on your dream!

JD

Until midnight on Valentines Day, Ken Evoy is offering Site Build It for a special price. Buy one domain for $300 or two for $400.

Have you been thinking about trying Site Build It?

If you have, Ken is offering his annual holiday special. Until midnight, December 25, 2006, you can buy one and get one free.

That is a real bargain.

You have several options.

You can buy one for yourself and get a second one free. If you choose to do this, you can start building one and wait up to nine months to start the second site.

Or…

Buy one for yourself and give the second one to your husband, wife, son, daughter, mom, dad, friend, business associate, or anyone else to whom you want to offer the gift of learning how to build a part-time (or full-time) online business using the proven tools and techniques that Ken will teach you and your friend.

Or, team up with someone else and buy two sites. Split the cost and Sitesell Support will help you transfer the second site to whomever it should belong.

You don’t have to take advantage of the special pricing, but now is the time to do it if you want to save money. You could even buy now, and find someone next week or next month to sell the second site to.

Just don’t miss this special if you have been on the fence about getting Site Build It for yourself.

I can tell you that finding Ken Evoy a few years ago has made a big difference in my life.

I have been Mom’s full-time caretaker for about five and a half years now. When I decided to bring her back home instead of putting her in a nursing home, I knew I would have to find a way to work inside the house near her and still earn a living. I closed my metalsmithing business and concentrated on helping her.

After I’d quickly blown through my savings, I had to get serious about earning an income while still working at home.

Luckily, amongst all the Internet marketing hype that was calculated to relieve me of my hard-earned money, I found Ken Evoy.

I learned how to start earning money from affiliate marketing by reading his Affiliate Masters Course, and started making sales and earning commission checks when I put what I learned to work on some of my web sites.

Later, I purchased his Make Your Site Sell! ebook. That was the best $30 I ever spent and now I earn it back many times over every month.

I took what I learned and re-built all my sites (and this took about six months). In a matter of weeks, my sites were being found and people started buying what I recommended. It was the real turning point in my home business.

This fall, Ken decided to give away Make Your Site Sell! as a free download. Even though I still believe it is worth much more than the previous price, it is now free. If you have a website and you want to earn more from it, download this book and read it. Then put to work what you learn from it.

Ken explains on the site why he decided to give away Make Your Site Sell! and concentrate on making Site Build It even better.

Eventually, I was able to scrape up enough to purchase my own Site Build It subscription.

For just $300 a year, I got not only a website, but an ever-growing collection of integrated tools (meaning I never have to install and manage scripts), a members-only community of thousands of helpful SBI site owners, regular newsletters with information to help me improve my sites and earn more, and the benefit of Ken Evoy’s wisdom and experience.

In a sea of Internet marketing hype, Ken presents the voice of experience, calm, and making slow progress towards building our businesses.

Ken is not one of the “gurus” who cleverly craft a marketing business to drain us of the money that remains in our wallets and bank accounts. If you go to Ken’s Blog and read his article on “Mooch Marketing,” you’ll know what I’m talking about.

I have never lost money when I follow Ken’s advice. More often than not, I increase the size of my commission checks, and for that I remain grateful to Ken.

I don’t want to mislead you. I am not getting rich and I don’t think I will, but that’s not my goal.

Right now, my main goal is to do what I love doing, and earn enough from it so I can continue to care for Mom and let her live in the house she has lived in for over 30 years.

I have worked hard at this, but I have to share part of the credit with Ken Evoy for being able to make this work.

You will note, I hope, that I don’t mention anyone else when sharing the credit for building my home business. I have learned from others. I have lost hard-earned money to others. Ken helps me keep on course and continue to build my business.

I do maintain quite a few other sites that are not powered by Site Build It, but I’m re-evaluating that decision. I have had problems with hackers destroying several of my sites. I’ve had problems with updating and maintaining scripts on them.

I am seriously considering closing most of my non-SBI sites and putting my efforts into doing more with Site Build It rather than continually bashing my head against the wall with the other sites.

I have learned a lot, and if I had to drop all my sites but one, it would be powered by Site Build It.

I hope you enjoy your holiday season and have a happy, prosperous, and healthy new year!

John L. Dilbeck

AYearFromNow.com - Act On Your Dream!

My primary blog: John Dilbeck And Friends

Several years ago, I needed a way to earn a living while staying home and being a full-time caretaker for my Mom.

I tried several things before I decided that affiliate marketing was for me.

There were many reasons for this decision. There was a low cost to entry since I didn’t have to buy merchandise, pay for inventory or interest, hire staff, set up an online order entry system, manage customer service, deal with shipping and returns, and do many of the other things that are necessary when you are selling products or services to the general public.

As an affiliate marketer, basically I work in advertising and marketing, and someone else handles all the rest of the necessary activities.

The downside to affiliate marketing is that there is a lot to learn, there is cut-throat competition, what works for me may not work for you and vice versa, and the Internet and online marketing is changing all the time.

At first, I knew a lot about the technical aspects of building websites, but I did not know nearly enough to be effective as an affiliate.

Fortunately for me, I found Ken Evoy and I have been successfully following his advice for several years. My affiliate marketing business is growing and I’m earning more as time goes by.

Ken provided a couple of things that made a huge difference in my affiliate marketing success. I appreciate his down-to-earth, practical advice and the products he has created to help me become a more-effective affiliate marketer.

The first was a free email course he called the Affiliate Masters Course. It was a five part course sent via email. Later, it was redone as an ebook in PDF format. Earlier this month, he released the November, 2006 updated edition of the Affiliate Masters course. I just finished reading it and the updated edition offers lots of information that was not included in the previous version. I recommend this book to you.

The cost? It’s free.

Download your copy of the Affiliate Masters course now. You’ll find about 160 pages of outstanding information. Others sell ebooks with much less information for $50 or $100 or more. Get this one and read it. Learn what you need to know and put it to work. I believe your affiliate marketing efforts will be more successful if you implement what Ken tells you.

Along the same lines, Ken wrote an ebook called “Make Your Site Sell!” a few years ago. The original version sold for under $20 and the updated 2002 version sold for about $30.

A couple of months ago, Ken decided to offer Make Your Site Sell! 2002 as a free download.

This multi-volume ebook contains over 1,500 pages of outstanding information and has been worth thousands of dollars to me in revenue I may not have earned if I hadn’t followed Ken’s advice.

While some of the information is a bit dated, the core information remains very valuable and you will find much information of use to you in this PDF format ebook. I regularly refer to it and continually discover useful tips and techniques to improve my marketing efforts.

If you want to build an online business, you need to read this ebook. Download it today.

These two ebooks made a great impact on the effectiveness of my online marketing and my affiliate marketing business continues to grow today based on what I learned from them.

Of course, reading and learning isn’t going to build a business. You have to take what you learn, plan how it will help your business grow, and then put it into action.

Act on your dreams!

Only one week after deciding to stop charging $30 for Make Your Site Sell! and to give it away for free, Ken Evoy decided to give another of his products away as a free download.

Now, Make Your Content PREsell!, which sold for $10, is free and you can download it without even giving your email address.

This ebook, in .PDF format, can be read in a relatively short time span.

If you are attempting to earn all or part of your income through online marketing, you should read this book at least once. There is absolutely no risk. It’s free.

Dr. Evoy, through the information released in Make Your Site Sell! and all the integrated tools and webhosting incorporated into Site Build It! in the years since MYSS was released, has proven that his C-T-P-M model of online marketing works successfully.

What does “PREsell” mean?

It is the job of a merchant to do the selling.

It is the job of an affiliate to offer information of value that will help the reader get into a more receptive frame of mind and then link to the merchant.

This process of passing along valuable information and linking to a merchant is called PREselling.

It is not our job to sell, just to get the reader interested enough to click on the link and see what the merchant offers.

You can learn more by downloading Make Your Content PREsell!, reading it, and learning how to more effectively communicate with the people who visit your websites and blogs.

Don’t miss this free offer.

I don’t usually use three exclamation marks in a headline. That’s just not my style.

But, in this case, I’m going to make an exception and try to pass along my excitement about the announcement I just read.

I’m a few days behind on my email and I just now read an email Ken Evoy sent me last Saturday.

Among other interesting announcements, he told us that Make Your Site Sell! 2002 is now available as a free download. You don’t even have to give your email address. Just go to the link and get your free copy of what I think is the best information about earning an income with a website that is available at any price.

I bought the original version for $17 and was surprised with how much information was in this exceptional ebook.

Not only was there more information than I expected, the very format of the ebook was an example of how information should be presented in PDF format.

Make Your Site Sell! was updated in 2002 to a seven volume ebook with over 1,500 pages of outstanding information about building a successful website. The name was changed to Make Your Site Sell! 2002 in order to reflect this additional information. The price was raised from $17 to $30.

Now, I’ve seen ebooks selling for nearly $100 (usually $97) that only had a tiny fraction of what Ken offered for less than $30. Ken’s motto has always been to UNDERprice and OVERdeliver and this was certainly appropriate for Make Your Site Sell! 2002.

Go to the page and read what is in the ebook. Then, don’t waste any more time, download the ebook and start putting it to work for you.

Don’t add this to your collection of un-read ebooks. If you want to build a site that is successful, read this information, study it and put it to work for you.

Of course, a lot has changed in four years and parts of MYSS is starting to show its age, but I still refer to this information several times a month. I always find something I never knew or things I forgot in the interim.

So, why hasn’t this book been updated and why is it being given away now for free?

Over the last several years, Ken and the folks at Sitesell have been focusing their efforts into making Site Build It! into the the best set of tools for identifying your niche, designing a website, researching and creating the content, hosting it, and promoting it to the world.

The concepts that were presented in MYSS live on in Site Build It, so there really is no reason to update the ebook when Site Build It! puts those concepts into action.

I just renewed my subscription to Site Build It! a couple of weeks ago and it never even crossed my mind not to do so. I have dozens of websites and SBI offers me more value than all the others put together in terms of helping me do my best on the net.

But, you don’t have to spend $300 to get a Site Build It subscription to learn much about the concepts that lead to this outstanding tool.

You don’t have to spend a penny.

Just go download Make Your Site Sell! 2002 and put what you learn to work for you.

Yes, there will be some things that are no longer up-to-date in the ebook, but don’t let that distract you from all the good information and advice you will find.

I can truthfully tell you that I’ve wasted a good bit of money buying ebooks and following their advice.

But, that does not apply to Ken Evoy, Make Your Site Sell, and Site Build It. Everytime I follow Ken’s advice, I make more money. When I stray to other paths to test the waters, sometimes I make money, but much of the time I just lose my investment. That has never been the case with anything I’ve purchased from Sitesell.

My best advice is to tell you to subscribe to Site Build It! and give yourself the best advantage and the best tools to build a profitable online business.

But, if you can’t afford the $300 or if you just aren’t convinced, then put your credit card back in your pocket and download Make Your Site Sell! 2002.

See what created all the fuss a few years ago when MYSS was called “The Bible of Selling On the Internet.”

It helped me.

If you read it and put it to work, it can help you, too.

On Saturday, September 9, 2006, I posted a note about Ken Evoy’s interview with Chris Anderson about his long tail marketing concept and book.

You can find the previous article here: Chris Anderson - Long Tail Marketing for Small Business.

I posted, “Ken Evoy, President of Sitesell, Inc., recently interviewed Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, at Long Tail Marketing For Small Business.”

I was going to suggest that Ken include a transcript of the interview, but, before I could do so, I learned that it is already there. The link is at Long Tail Marketing For Small Business, right below the link to the audio interview.

Thanks!