Want Affordable E-Commerce? See Site Build It

Looking for affordable E-Commerce? Not sure where to turn? Then check out Site Build It (SBI), an affordable E-Commerce solution for just about anyone. What makes Site Build It different from other software packages I’ve researched is that it is an all-in-one solution, where you are guided from beginning to end in creating a profitable site.

But the fundamental difference is this: Site Build It teaches the user about providing high quality content, rather than a just a straight product site. If you want to succeed in E-Commerce, SBI gives you all the tools you need, but it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme. Time and effort is necessary but if pay close attention to the instructions, you can create a profitable E-Commerce site.

What follows is a paraphrased summary from the SiteSell web site: “The SBI! Process, Content >> Traffic >> PREsell >> Monetize, Is Based Upon The Fundamental Reality Of The Way People Use The Web.”

“Online, people search for information, look for solutions -- they are not looking for you. Give them what they want by converting your knowledge into high-quality, in-demand CONTENT. To do this, you create a theme-based topical content ranks high at the Search Engines, attracting free, targeted TRAFFIC... interested, open-to-you visitors.”

“Once you develop trust and confidence ("PREsell") by OVERdelivering relevant, original, high-value information to these motivated pre-customers, you are ready for the next step, which is to MONETIZE your warm, willing-to-buy visitors in various ways, by selling hard goods, e-goods, your personal or professional services... or all three. Or you can become a "pure infopreneur" and earn a substantial income by using Google Ads, affiliate fees, finder's fees and other techniques.”

According to SBI, presold traffic is the hard part - this is where 98% of small businesses fail. Once you have PREsold traffic, then you blend in monetization options to build a thriving, diversified business.

When you download Site Build It, you have two options for getting started, the Action Guide (601 pages) and the Fast Track Guide (146 pages). Both are available as PDF’s that you can print at home or take to a service bureau. The Action Guide is designed for the novice to the web, one who doesn’t know any HTML. This guide works in conjunction with Site Build It software, which uses a template system to automatically publish pages. However, it also offers the ability to upload your own HTML from programs such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage. If you choose this route, you need to pay attention to the instructions, or you will give SBI fits. For the purposes of this article, I chose to stick largely with the template driven part of the software.

My first step was to print out the Fast Track Guide, then settle down for an evening of intensive reading. The main chapters are:

1. Start to Finish: The Crash Course 2. “PREselling” And Conversion Rates. Day 1 3. Develop Best Site Concept. Day 2 4. Brainstorm Profitable Topics. Day 3 5. Grow, Prune and Group Best Affiliate Programs. Day 4 6. Refine Site Concept and Register Domain Name. Day 5 7. Build a Site That Gets the Click! Day 6 8. Submit… And Build Free SE Traffic. Day 7 9. Build More Traffic. Day 8 10. Build Relationships: Start Your Own E-zine. Day 9 11. Know Your Visitors Day 10

As I read, I discovered that it was necessary to print out portions of the Action Guide, which are different from the Fast Track Guide. These were chapters 5 (Brainstorm Profitable Topics), chapter 7 (Refine Site Concept and Register Domain Name) and chapter 10 (Build Relationships: Start Your Own E-zine).

In Chapter 1, you’re introduced to the process of building a theme-based content site, where each page focuses on a single topic related to that theme. Each page is referred to as a Keyword Focused Content Page (KFCP). The goal of purpose of creating such a web site is to drive targeted traffic to your pages that will generate commissions if you’re an affiliate or work contracts if you sell a product or service.

Chapter 2 introduces you to the SiteSell method of E-Commerce. One of the things that makes SBI unusual is that no HTML, FTP, CGI, graphic or programming skills needed, nor is there any search engine knowledge required. However, SBI is compatible with web editing applications such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage.

In actual practice, I found that HTML skills are valuable, even when working in the template mode. A case in point is if you want to introduce Google ads into your website. While the templates work well if you’re introducing horizontal ads, they don’t work if you want a table to appear on the site of your text, as in this screenshot. Here, you need to know HTML to get that to work. However, SiteSell has forums where you can ask questions and when this issue came up, the appropriate HTML was posted, which could be copied into a template layout.

Develop Best Site Concept

In Chapter 3, you begin the process of developing a workable (and profitable) site concept. Essentially, the process is broken down into the following steps, where you:

1. Create a long list of potential site concepts.
2. Narrow the list to the 3 best concepts.
3. List 5 topics for each concept
4. Open and explore the SBI Manager.
5. Enter your 15 keywords into the Master Keyword List for the temporary.com domain.
6. Use the SBI Manager to find your best site concept.

Note: When creating keywords, use combinations of at least 2 or 3 words. In actual practice, entering one keyword into a search engine is too general. On the other hand, it’s rare for users to enter 4 keywords or more.

When you first open SBI, one of the things you’ll see is the following screen, which asks you to choose which domain you wish to work with. The software comes with two: temporary.com and fashionmodels.com. Here, you see three, one of which is the domain I created a part of this study.

Once you pick a domain and click on ok, you arrive at the next screen, which is the Site Build It Manager. When I first saw it, I was surprised by how little I saw on the screen. But don’t let that dissuade you, because the SBI Manager is an incredibly valuable part of the program. This is where you research keyword concepts for your web site.

Initially, the manual recommends that you start with the fashion models domain and experiment with the various buttons and icons. From there, you click on the domain list button at the top, click on Temporary.com, in the SBI Manager and click on OK.

Now, you’re ready to start researching keywords for your domain concept. In my case, I’m somewhat conservative in my approach (some might use another term…) and I wanted to try out all sorts of concepts. I brainstormed several topics, such as 3D modeling, Photoshop tutorials and computer graphics.

What I settled on is Photoshop tutorials. You can see the results of the keywords in the below screenshot. But in order to understand what you’re seeing here, an explanation is necessary.

When you type your keywords into the Master Keyword List (using the + icon), nothing happens until you click on the $ icon. When you do, the SBI Manager searches the Internet for instances where your keyword combination has been used and creates the list you see above. To the right of the $ icon are the labels: Demand, Supply, Profitability, Supply Site Info, Possible Partners and Ideas for Content. For now, I’ll discuss the first three:

Demand and Supply is where you truly see whether your keywords will work for you – or not. Demand is a relative number of how many times people search for a particular keyword, compared to other words. Demand gives you a good idea of what potential visitors want.

Supply refers to the number of sites that supply that particular keyword and is an indicator of the competition that you face.

Profitability High profitability keywords have a good Demand/Supply ratio (high demand and low supply. They also are a good source of potential partners.

The other labels (Supply Site Info, Possible Partners and Ideas for Content) allow you to do even more research. Clicking on Supply Site Info will bring up information about sites that use the keyword combinations that you’ve researched. As you scroll through the list below, you can click on the Possible Partners or Ideas for Content headings to make notes about potential alliances or to jot down ideas for articles for your site.

Brainstorm Profitable Topics

If you’ve done a keyword search based on the ones in your list and your results are not what you had hoped, you can use the SBI Manager as a serious brainstorming tool, where you can research literally hundreds of keywords at a time. The first thing to do is to make sure you’re under the temporary.com domain name. Once there, click on the Brain button to begin the session. Several screens of instructions appear, welcoming you to the process, and informing you that this tool will save you weeks of intensive searching using other methods. It also tells you that the search will be an intensive process that uses many internet resources. It also warns you not to touch your computer (not even your mouse) during the process as it can easily be derailed.

Once you enter your keywords and click on the Brainstorm and Research (B&R) button, the software goes through four phases of searching for keywords related to your site concept, a process which takes about 20 minutes.

Note: Don’t do a keyword search on general terms such as free or internet. You’re likely to get a wide range of irrelevant results.

It will return a list much like the one below with several screens of information about how some of the keywords will fit your site concept, while others may seem trivial or irrelevant. Note how this page differs from the one above. One of the first things you’ll notice are the yellow checkboxes, which you can uncheck if the keyword isn’t relevant. That keyword will be discarded when you transfer the keywords to your domain.

Also note that while the Demand, Supply and Profitability labels remain, the $ icon has been replaced by a small Brain button. If you find a keyword in your list that is related to your site concept keyword, clicking on the little Brain button allows you to do a supplemental Brainstorm and Research session, giving you the opportunity of adding even more keywords to your site concept.

This could generate some unexpected surprises and might take you in a different direction than you had originally thought. It might even return keywords that are better concept than your initial one. That happened to me when I was researching the keywords “photoshop tutorials.” When the results came back, one combination was “photo shop tutorials,” which had a much higher Profitability. But what really caught my attention was the Demand/Supply ratio, which was 29,709/224. This was a clear indication that using these keywords (in combination with great content) would likely get me a high search engine ranking.

Further Notes on Keyword Searches

Once you have the keyword list in front of you, you need to decide which ones are relevant. To do, click on the Profitability and Demand labels. But be careful here. In my initial research, some of the Profitability numbers were quite high for a given keyword combination and I thought I had a real winner until I checked out the Demand/Supply labels and found that the Supply was more than the Demand, which is the exact opposite of what you want.

If you do all of these brainstorming sessions and you’re still not getting the results that you’re after, clicking on the Start Over button at bottom of the screen erases all the keywords and allows you to start over. Another option is the Continue Later button which you use if you don’t want to do all your brainstorming sessions at one time. You can shut down the SBI Manager at this point and all your work will be saved.

Note: You can do 3 of these mini brainstorming sessions in addition to one “Master” brainstorming session. Once you accept the entire process and transfer the keywords to the temporary domain, the B&R tool shuts down and you will be unable to do an intensive search for another 7 days. However, during one brainstorming session, when I clicked on the Start Over button, a dialog box popped up, telling me that the B&R tool had shut down and I couldn’t do any more brainstorming for another week.

Assuming that the keywords you’ve researched are what you want, click on the Send to my Master Keyword List button, which sends all the checked keywords and their data to your Master Keyword List for temporary.com.

The next task is to check out the Supply Site Info for each keyword in your Master Keyword List as I mentioned earlier.

Note: At some point, you’ll want to print out a copy of the keyword list. To do so, click on the (temporary.com) heading under the Master Keyword List heading. However, if you're brainstorming ideas and you don't want to send them over to your Master Keyword List, you can't print the list. A workaround to this problem is to use a screen capture utility like Snag-It, which works really well.

Grow, Prune and Group Best Affiliate Programs

In Chapter 5, you'll research different affiliate programs. In the Fast Start Guide, you’re advised to spend at least an hour in each of the top 3 affiliate directories, where you grow and prune your list of merchant partners. For the record, the top 3 specialized affiliate directories (as listed by SiteSell) are:

Associate Programs Revenews Refer-It

In actual practice, I got some of my best results from Associate Programs and Refer-It, which is owned by our own JupiterMedia group. I also got some good results by searching through Affiliate Backend Providers such as Commission Junction and the LinkShare Corporation. At this time, two of the more popular backend providers (Commission Junction and BeFree) have merged, so there’s going to be some overlap.

Depending on the affiliate directory, there may be some ranking information (as with Associate Programs and Refer-It, or none at all. You link to affiliate programs that match your site concept. How you’re paid depends on the program. As an example, if you sign up with the Google AdSense program, you’re paid by the click, but with other affiliate programs, payment might only come when sales are made. As for commissions, those can range from 3-15% or more. Also, it’s a good idea to sign up for affiliate programs before you build your site, as some take awhile to approve your application. However, some want to see your site up and running before you’ll be approved and then you have to wait a long while for their approval, a Catch-22 situation.

When you find an affiliate program that matches with your site concept, you need to drill down into their agreements and study them. In the fine print, you’ll discover whether they’re a good fit or not. If they are, sign up with them. Some will give you an automatic approval, while others approve submissions manually. Once your submission has been approved, you can use their affiliate codes on your site.

Refine Site Concept and Register Domain Name

One of the goals of building a theme based content site is to make it niche focused, but not so much so that you won’t be able to expand on the site concept. When you’re working on your site concept, you want to look at the keyword combinations that best describe what your site is about. In the manual, it refers to the Valuable PREselling Proposition (VPP), which is your service’s most powerful benefit, in combination with a strong, unique feature of your business. And if you can fit that into your domain name, so much the better. Here are some examples of that by SBI users:

http://www.best-digital-cameras-reviews.com http://www.cheap-computers-guide.com http://stereo-speaker-buyers-guide.com

In my case, the best keyword combination was "photo shop tutorials." Looking at that combination felt counterintuitive to the way I wanted the name to appear, but I followed the logic of the manual and registered the name as www.photo-shop-tutorials.net.

Note: If you’re wondering about the hyphens between the words, it improves readability.

One other thing to mention here is when you’re brainstorming your domain name, it’s important to make sure that it doesn’t infringe on someone’s trademark. Here’s a couple of resource you can check to make sure your domain of choice is ok:

http://www.nameprotect.com/cgi-bin/FREESearch/search.cgi

Build a Site That Gets the Click

Once you’re registered your domain name, you’re ready build your site. One of the first things you’ll encounter is the following diagram (as seen in the manual) about build Keyword Focused Content Pages (KFCP).

The home page (Tier 1) uses the fundamental keyword of your site and is used to convince the search engines that this page is the most relevant page for your site concept. It links to 5-15 Tier 2 pages, which each focus on one specific keyword. Each of these pages links to 5-15 Tier 3 pages. If you use all of these pages, you’ll wind up with an extensive site, of at least 226 pages (including the home page).

To begin the process of building pages, you need to log onto the 5 Pillars Club of SiteSell, which takes you to Site Central. This is where you build your web pages. You can also choose to upload your own HTML as well. As I’d mentioned earlier, I chose the template design for the most part, because I wanted to see how much was possible without knowing HTML.

Site Central is the where you can upload graphics, track links, build forms, conduct mailouts and much more. At this stage, though, my task was to create a layout for the site. You access this by clicking on the Look and Feel button, which brings up 10 different page layouts to choose from. Among other things, you can choose from several different types of navigation buttons, shapes, rollovers, type and color. Initially, I chose the layout below:

But after considering the look of this template, I decided to build my own. SBI gives you the ability to do that and you can download their files which you can use for reference. The only issue is to make sure that you use the same file names when you reload them back to Site Central.

Here’s the design I’d chosen. Note the buttons that allow you to edit the layout or to build your own.

Here’s the result using the SBI templates for the navigational buttons.

However, after having a closer look at the layout, I felt it didn't showcase Photoshop very well, so I downloaded the templates and built my own layout. However, the navigation buttons were convenient, so I kept that part of the design.

From there, it was time to build the home page, which is essentially all text. However, you’re given some basic HTML tags that you can spice it up with (in my case, I chose to add a photograph). If you have a question about how things work, there are tiny question marks on the interface. Clicking on any of those will bring up a dialog box with more information.

Note: SBI recommends that you write all your content using a plain text editor like Notepad and to save your files as straight ASCII text files. If you use curly quotes or apostrophes in word processing program like Word, you'll get weird symbols.

After creating the home page, you use SiteBuilder to build the different pages for your site.

As you can see in the screenshot, this is a part of page, where you enter your data in blocks. Here, you have the choice of entering Headlines, Text, Text Links, E-Mail Links, Graphics, Dividers, Line Breaks, etc.

It’s here, that you enter the codes you’ve gotten from different affiliates as part of your articles. Depending on the information they provide, you can use banners, pictures and text or just text links. In the manual, SBI advises against using banners, as they can actually turn visitors off. What they recommend instead are in-context text links, which many affiliates provide.

One exception to banner ads is the Google AdSense program. Those come in a variety of formats and are an excellent way to earn income on your site. However, placing them into your site without knowing of HTML can be problematic, especially if you want to use a Google tower ad. If you don’t use HTML tags, it doesn’t work properly. Fortunately, there are forums you can access which give out the necessary information.

Note: I’ve applied Google Adsense ads to two of my other web sites (CosmicStock Photography and Nathan Segal Illustration) and I’m already making money from the clickthroughs.

I ran into another issue when building pages, specifically when I wanted to create multiple pages using the same keyword information. In Dreamweaver, I usually create one page that I want to use and save it, then resave it multiple times using different file names. But that didn’t work in SBI. If I tried to save a new file name, it simply overwrote my first file and I lost all my data. The only solution was to create a new page from scratch, re-enter my keywords, and save it with a new file name.

As you build your pages, you can check to see how your content is working by clicking on the Analyze It! button at the bottom of the SiteBuilder page. Analyze It! checks to see if your page meets over 30 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) rules. This report will tell you exactly what you need to do to get your page scoring as high as possible at the engines. However, each themed site is different, meaning that the rules change. It’s good to use this report as a general guideline and to also experiment beyond the boundaries of the rules.

Once you’ve built your web page, the SBI World Submitter automatically submits it to a variety of search engines.

Conclusion

From here, you use what you’ve learned to build more pages and attract traffic. Some of this will be in the form of Link Exchanges, Pay per Click programs, etc. Over time, you’ll also want to create an ezine and build lists of subscribers.

At point, it’s uncertain as to what my returns will be as my site has yet to be indexed by the search engines. However, one sure fire way to jump start the process is to do link exchanges with other sites. That will begin the process of getting traffic flowing to your site. Another method (mentioned by a SBI user), is to post Google Adsense Ads on your site. In his opinion, that jump started the search engine process.

Over the coming months, I’ll be posting updates to this article, letting you know of the progress once the site has been indexed, what kinds of returns are starting to trickle in and what I’ve done to tweak my pages for better search engine positioning.

Further Notes, Pricing and Availability

Although the software works well overall, there are some bugs (as noted earlier) that need to be addressed. These issues will be resolved with a new release of the Site Build It Manager, which has many improvements. It also comes with a new release of the Action Guide, which has been completely rewritten.

Another new feature is the Multi-page Re-Uploader. It’s in the final testing stage and will allow users to upload 20 pages at a time without having to re-do the entire sequence each time... It’s very close to FTP.

Currently, you can purchase Site Build It using one of two options:

You can purchase it for $495.00 for a full year – this is all inclusive with no additional monthly charges. You can order it today risk free and receive a an immediate $100 rebate and a special bonus of 3 free months... a total of 15 months of SBI! for only $395.00.

With option #2, the fee is $299.00 a half-year of SBI – as above with no additional monthly costs. If you order it today, you receive the same risk-free success guarantee, and receive an immediate $50 rebate and a bonus of 2 months... a total of 8 months of SBI! for only $249.00.