John Dilbeck Musings

If you are looking for a great gift for that hard-to-buy-for person on your gift-giving list, you may find just what you want at Cafepress.

With millions of items to select from, you should be able to find something for just about anyone.

And, yes, you can buy t-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies, caps, and other items of apparel, but that’s not all that is available.

The artists who sell through Cafepress offer calendars, posters, journals, clothing, tiles, aprons, clocks, and many other items.

If you want your gifts delivered before Christmas, you should shop early and avoid the rush.

Join hundreds of thousands of other creative people who are selling their designs on CafePress.

Whether you are an artist who creates original paintings and drawings, or you have wonderful photographs, or are talented at finding just the right words to express an opinion, you can sell your creative originals at CafePress.

Perhaps you want to self-publish a book or sell your CD through CafePress.

They make it easy for all of us.

All you have to do is create your design and upload it to their server. Apply your design to dozens of products and let Cafepress handle all the production, shipping, customer service, returns, and website.

You promote your products online and offline and, when a product sells, you earn a commission based on the price you set. Each product has a baseline price and you are free to set your price over that minimum price. You earn the difference between the two prices.

There is much more information at the CafePress site about how to sell through their service.

I’m regularly selling designs I uploaded months ago and I always enjoy depositing the commission checks I receive from CafePress. You can, too.

Start selling today!

Trick or Treat!

You never really know what you’re going to get when you sign up to build a new website at a hosting company you’ve never used.

Will it be a trick…or a treat?

I have never had a problem with my Site Build It! site. In fact, I just renewed my subscription a couple of weeks ago for another year of what I think is the best website brainstorm, research, design, hosting, and promoting system available - for only $300 per year!

I don’t expect you to take my word for it.

Why should you?

Here’s a chance to try it out for yourself, and for only $100 more to get a second site or a site you can give away to someone in your family, friends, or associates.

That’s right. Until midnight, October 31, 2006, you can buy one SBI site for only $300 per year, or get two for only $400.

(When it comes time for renewal next year, each will cost $300 to renew; the special offer does not extend to renewals.)

Get a friend and buy two sites. Give one to your friend and split the cost. Each of you will save $100 on your first year of Site Build It!

Buy a site for yourself and give one to a child who will benefit greatly from learning a skill set that is highly valuable.

Give a site to a retired parent who wants to pursue a passion for a hobby or any topic that really piques their interest.

If I didn’t already have my hands full right now, I’d take advantage of this offer to start two more SBI sites. Maybe I’ll be ready when the next special comes along.

Cobwebs are for Halloween decorations and abandoned homes, not for websites! Follow the Site Build It! process, find your niche, and put the power of SBI to work to help you build a site that will gather lots of new visitors, not cobwebs.

Tomorrow is Halloween. Don’t miss this special.

Do you have any questions about how SBI can work for you? Ask your questions - free and no obligation.

It’s been a long wait, and a lot of work for everyone involved, but it’s done…

Store Build It! (StBI) is now available.

I’ve been telling you for years that Site Build It! is the ultimate web site design, hosting, and promotion system available on the entire planet, and it’s gotten even better this week.

Now, before I tell you about the new Store Build It!, let me say this: Not everyone needs an online store. Even if you do, there are other ways to build a store that are already well-known and widely-used by SBI owners. However, if the lack of a top-quality, best-of-breed store builder and manager has been holding you back from considering SBI, then your wait is over.

Store Build It! is a fully-integrated addition to Site Build It! It’s not a tacked-on addition. Months of effort have gone into making this addition work with all the other features you’ve come to expect from SBI. (More on that in a moment.)

Let’s stop for just a moment to remind you why Site Build It! is such a good deal and why it is doing so well for so many owners — even those with no previous technical knowledge or web building skills.

Over the last several years, it has become obvious that making money on the Internet is a four step process. It was not obvious, though, without lots of experience, analysis, and testing.

What is this four-step process?

C - T - P - M

Read the full description of C - T - P - M before continuing. I’ll wait for you. It’ll only take you a couple of minutes.

People aren’t searching for you.

Let me repeat that.

People ARE NOT searching for YOU.

They’re searching for a solution to a problem, for a particular product, for a particular service, or for more information.

By providing information (C = content), you’ll make it easy for the search engines to rank your site highly and send you visitors (T = traffic). You can build your credibility through your demonstrated knowledge and willingness to help solve their problem or provide what they want (P = Pre-sell). Once they’re comfortable with you and believe you are reliable and worth their business, they’ll buy from you (M = Monetize).

C - T - P - M

Over and over, on many, many sites hosted by Site Build It! this has proven to be true. The results speak for themselves.

Do you want a website that does NOT attract quality visitors who are willing to purchase from you?

Of course not!

Do you want your traffic to DRY UP the minute you stop advertising?

Of course not!

Do you want a site that attracts a constant stream of visitors looking for what you offer?

Do you want a site that establishes you as someone who knows what he is doing? (You don’t have to be the best in the world to be good at what you do.)

Do you want a site that helps your visitors feel good about you and want to get to know you better?

Do you want a site that can provide your visitor with your product or service — just when she’s ready to buy?

Of course you do! That’s the holy grail of online sites that sell and earn a profit. That’s what we all want.

What?

You don’t know how to build a web site or get good placements in the search engines or do all the technical stuff that looks so confusing?

That’s the beauty of Site Build It!

Ken Evoy, president of SiteSell, wrote the book on how to Make Your Site Sell! You can still buy this ebook for about $30 or so and download it immediately. This is still the best book I’ve ever read on how to make a site that people like, come back to, and purchase from. I refer to it over and over.

Site Build It! builds on what is covered in that ebook. Over the years, it has grown from a way to build a one-page sales letter to a full-featured, all-in-one system for designing, building, and promoting your website. With the addition of Store Build It!, you can now have a world-class store and sell hard goods direct from your SBI site.

But, Ken doesn’t want you to fail (or perhaps to fail again), so he won’t sell Store Build It! to just anyone — not at any price.

There are some conditions to getting permission to use Store Build It! with your SBI site.

First of all, you must build a site that has quality content and attracts visitors. You MUST have a minimum of 500 visitors to your site per month before you can add Store Build It — and he recommends that you have at least two to three times that amount, i.e., 1,000 to 1,500 visitors per month. Without that level of traffic (attracted by your quality content), you are in the same situation as if you were to build a store anywhere else using any other store system.

You must have traffic coming to your store before it will succeed reliably.

Once you reach this visitor threshold, then you will be able to add Store Build It! to your account, should you wish to do so. And, the best part is, now that you have a site with a steady stream of visitors, Ken will sell you the additional e-commerce tools at a price that is about half that of others who sell the same system — but those folks don’t have this version that has been developed so that it is seamlessly integrated with your whole site. Not only will Ken sell it to you at about half the suggested price, he’ll host it for you at an ANNUAL fee that compares very favorably with the others’ MONTHLY fee. How’s that for a good deal?

Plus, when you add Store Build It! to your Site Build It! website, you’ll be able to download a free ebook that explains how to build and manage your store, and another ebook that helps you deal with issues that may arise after you make a sale. How many other hosting companies offer that level of training?

On top of that, you’ll receive a free newsletter telling you about how others are successfully growing their sites and offering tips on how you can do more with your site.

I host many sites using several hosting companies. I’m very happy with the companies with which I do business, but that’s after years of hit-and-miss, trial-and-error attempts at building sites at many other places. I now only recommend four web hosting services, and Site Build It! is head and shoulders above the others. In fact, I use many of the tools that come with SBI to help me make my others sites perform better. If I faced a major decision tomorrow and I could only have a single web site, there would be no decision. I’d choose SBI in a heartbeat. Nobody else offers what I get with SBI. Nobody else offers the training and support that I get from SBI. Some come close, and I’m very happy being one of their customers, but Ken Evoy, SiteSell, and Site Build It! stand alone as the best of the best. That’s my personal recommendation to you.

Of course, if you have no need for an online store, you don’t have to add this feature to your SBI site. It’s purely optional for those who have wanted this.

Have you been waiting for a world-class store builder and manager before you considered SBI?

What are you waiting for, now?

Site Build It! — the ultimate web site design, hosting, and promotion system in the world.

I’ve been using Ken’s products and services for years and I highly recommend them to you. Not only that, Ken has demonstrated over and over that he will under-promise and over-deliver. Always.

Try it for yourself right now. Ken offers a 100% satisfaction guarantee.

But, if you want to achieve the success of other SBI owners, take the time to download and read the Getting Started Guide that will take you step-by-step on planning, building, and promoting your very best site. Follow the guide and you may surprise yourself on how well your new site performs.

Only Site Build It! offers all of this.

Don’t bet your business on the web hosting service that offers the lowest price. Failure often comes cheap.

I got side-tracked in May. For several months, I’ve been fighting one or more hackers who have been breaking into my brother’s site at GeorgiaDragRacing.com and installing software that attacked other computers and ran an Internet Relay Chat — both of which are not allowed by our hosting company who have been working with us to put a stop to this.

On May 5, 2004, I received a notice from our SysAdmin that the hackers had installed software once again and he had detected and deleted it. He told me that he’d been patient for a long time, but this was the final notice. One more break-in and our account would be cancelled and we’d have to find another company to host the site. There are over 2,500 pages on that site!

Since I didn’t know how they were breaking in and I’d done everthing I knew, it was time for drastic action. After a long talk with David, my brother, we decided to completely rebuild the site and remove all the scripts that we were using to power the photo album, bookstore, forum, and news updating. It was going to be a big job, but it would be less work than moving everything — including thousands of photos — to another site.

So, I looked for alternate ways to do what we’d been doing with PERL and PHP scripts. We decided to create a blog at blogger.com for the news updates, which can now be found at gdrn.blogspot.com. The photos will be hosted at ImageStation.com until we find another site that is easier to use. The bookstore was completely rebuilt using javascript and direct links to Amazon.com and the forum was deleted in favor of the mailing list hosted by Yahoo groups.

So, I had to completely redesign everything and rebuild all the pages of the site. It took about three weeks of working around the clock to get it finished, but now we’re moving on using the new tools. Most of the functionality was saved, but it was a huge job and it pulled me away from the other tasks I had scheduled for this month.

There are probably quite a few broken links on the site and I’ll have to find and squash those bugs as they come up.

So, why am I telling you about this?

When building a business on the Internet, you may not always have total control over what happens. We had to make a decision and I had to do a lot of work to do our best to keep the site open. Now, we’re running no custom scripts and nobody but me knows the password to the site. Hopefully, that will foil the hackers.

In this case, the bad guys won the battle, but I still intend to win the war.