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[Jessica Maldonado Company: MCA Motor Club of America Contribution Level: 3]

Hi,

I have been looking at different systems to create unlimited subdomains and autoresponders. I have used Marketing Burst in the past, but it wasn't for me (plus it was $50 per month). I was searching the web and found sbi.

If you've used it please let me know what you thought of it and if you would recommend it to me. Thanks.

[David Bouchez Company: Unicity International, Inc. Contribution Level: 2]

Hey Jessica,

I have an SBI site. It's an excellent program, especially if you want to build for the long term. They are experts at doing things in a search engine friendly way, and are constantly keeping up with changes in the online world. Many people have sold their sites for a lot of money after building them up to high traffic status. I think it's a lot better than getting stuck trying to constantly keep up with SEO tactics.

I have a blog for personal branding, and I'm building the SBI site in a generic way so that I can sell it later.
I don't want to take anyone's affiliate commission, but if you didn't come in under another affiliate, please use my link bit.ly/d0LSIt

Regards,

Dave

[Jessica Maldonado Company: MCA Motor Club of America Contribution Level: 3]

Thank you for your feedback. I'd like to see a website that was created with SBI to get an idea of what their sites look like.

[Josh Thomas Contribution Level: 3]

Hi Jessica,
It sounds like a fantastic idea at first. Believe me, I was sold!

So, I purchased SBI about a year ago and was pretty disappointed. In fact, I still can't get Ken Evoy to stop sending me emails to this day. I gave it the old college try and ran into more roadblocks than successes. Eventually, I got a refund and moved on.

Here's the lowdown, SBI costs $300 per year (unless that's changed). That comes out to $25 per month. This isn't a terribly high price to pay, but you can get your own hosting for less than $10 and build a million Wordpress sites that are more functional, more customizeable, and easier to manipulate for that same $10 per month. The only extra cost would be a domain purchase.

Overall, for me, it was entirely too constricting and controlled. Once I found Wordpress, I never looked back. If you are looking for unlimited subdomains, your hosting account can do this easily, or you can install Wordpress MU (for multiple users) for free and use unlimited subdomains which can all have different blogs set up on them if you want.

SBI gives you a compelling success story about a teenage girl who made a hugely popular website about her vacations to Anguilla. This is inspiring indeed, but if you read the fine print, you will discover that she is in fact Ken Evoy's daughter.

To my knowledge, there is no community of web developers focused on supporting and expanding SBI. The probable reason for this is that their system is proprietary. No one has access to it but them. In 2010, this is simply unacceptable.

Here is one exercise that might be worth your time. Take a search around Google to see who's talking about SBI. I'll bet you all the wooden nickels in my pocket right now that 99% of them are affiliates trying to get you to sign up. The payout is pretty big and this is likely why they are so popular.

My advice?

Grab a hosting account at Hostgator for $10, and use the other $290 for education, outsourcing, or cheeseburgers.

[David Bouchez Company: Unicity International, Inc. Contribution Level: 2]

Hi Jessica,
It sounds like a fantastic idea at first. Believe me, I was sold!

So, I purchased SBI about a year ago and was pretty disappointed. In fact, I still can't get Ken Evoy to stop sending me emails to this day. I gave it the old college try and ran into more roadblocks than successes. Eventually, I got a refund and moved on.

Here's the lowdown, SBI costs $300 per year (unless that's changed). That comes out to $25 per month. This isn't a terribly high price to pay, but you can get your own hosting for less than $10 and build a million Wordpress sites that are more functional, more customizeable, and easier to manipulate for that same $10 per month. The only extra cost would be a domain purchase.

Overall, for me, it was entirely too constricting and controlled. Once I found Wordpress, I never looked back. If you are looking for unlimited subdomains, your hosting account can do this easily, or you can install Wordpress MU (for multiple users) for free and use unlimited subdomains which can all have different blogs set up on them if you want.

SBI gives you a compelling success story about a teenage girl who made a hugely popular website about her vacations to Anguilla. This is inspiring indeed, but if you read the fine print, you will discover that she is in fact Ken Evoy's daughter.

To my knowledge, there is no community of web developers focused on supporting and expanding SBI. The probable reason for this is that their system is proprietary. No one has access to it but them. In 2010, this is simply unacceptable.

Here is one exercise that might be worth your time. Take a search around Google to see who's talking about SBI. I'll bet you all the wooden nickels in my pocket right now that 99% of them are affiliates trying to get you to sign up. The payout is pretty big and this is likely why they are so popular.

My advice?

Grab a hosting account at Hostgator for $10, and use the other $290 for education, outsourcing, or cheeseburgers.

Hey Josh,

How are you? I'm curious to know about your roadblocks with SBI and why it didn't work for you.

Regards,

Dave

[David Bouchez Company: Unicity International, Inc. Contribution Level: 2]

Thank you for your feedback. I'd like to see a website that was created with SBI to get an idea of what their sites look like.

Hey Jessica,

Click my first link in my signature line - that's an SBI site. It's by no means a quintessential SBI site. They're working on newer, more modern platforms -I just haven't had a chance to tinker with it lately - been focused on building backlinks with article marketing etc...Much more important to me than the look and feel right now - I'll mess with that later.

If you decide to go with them, pick a narrow, marketable niche that affords keywords you can compete on. I went a little too wide on my site, due to my inexperience at the time. However it's fixable because I'm pretty good at keyword research now and can write pages that use longer tail keywords that I can compete on, and thus get good rankings for the new pages.

Dave

[Greg Martin Contribution Level: 4]

The problem I found with SBI sites is that they look like SBI sites. Ugly.

However they have a great reputation for ranking well, at least they did 8 years ago when I tried them out.

I have been building my own html websites for almost 10 years and hosting my own wordpress blogs for about 5 years.

In my opinion from experience you are much better off learning how to build your own and host your own. I would imagine that you will have to do it someday if you are serious about marketing so you may as well take a few weeks to a month now and learn how to do it upfront before you start relying on other systems.

There are 3 links on my Blog Masters group that will teach you how to register a domain and hosting, install wordpress and install a theme. Here is the link...

http://www.thatsbusiness.net/group/blogmasters

I also teach people how to create their own html websites with over 6 hours of video tutorials on my link below about building your own tribe. Subscribe to that and learn what you can... it's easier than you think.

[Josh Thomas Contribution Level: 3]

The problem I found with SBI sites is that they look like SBI sites. Ugly.

However they have a great reputation for ranking well, at least they did 8 years ago when I tried them out.

This echoes my sentiments. You are pretty limited as far as what the site will look like and that Left justification thing is a real conversion killer. Honestly, they look kind of like those "parked pages" you find when you hit an unused domain.

Along the same lines as Oz, I kind of feel like this was a really cool idea in 2002. But using it now, with all of the other free and cheap and better options available, is the equivalent of buying a walkman for $300 when you can get an iPod for free. Can you still listen to music? Sure, but one is infinitely more functional and user friendly than the other.

Hey Josh,

How are you? I'm curious to know about your roadblocks with SBI and why it didn't work for you.

Regards,

Dave

Hi Dave,
The primary problem as mentioned above is that you have very little control over the structure or appearance of the site. Even a well customized SBI site looks like it's straight out of 1998. They pigeon hole you through content creation and their backend interface can be overwhelmingly cumbersome. In a way, they've tried so hard to make it easy for you that they've....well, made it hard for you.

With all the plugins, developer communities, and dynamic content insertion abilities of Wordpress....and the free price tag....and the coolness, it's pretty tough to justify the expense of SBI in my opinion.....but that's just my opinion.

PM me and I'll be happy to give some personal recommendations for your site.

[Justin jr Contribution Level: 2]

Hi Jessica,

If your just looking for subdomains and autoresponders you can go with a hosting account like hostgator and get an aweber account.

Wordpress is free to use, so I'd recommend that. You can get a nice template from woothemes or some other template for wordpress and use that. You want your site/design to look attractive and site builders normally don't come out looking too good.

I tried to get around learning HTML, but glad I did and use dreamweaver now. Also learned Photoshop too i had so much fun with dreamweaver !

The way I learned HTML is by taking the code from a basic looking site on the web (by going to view: page source at the top of browser) and putting the code into dreamweaver and messing around with the code.
(you can "swipe" other peoples sites this way)

There are free HTML editors like NVU you can practice with. And GIMP is an editor thats a free Image editor (similar to Photoshop, but not nearly as good).

[Billy Alley Contribution Level: 2]

Thank you for your feedback. I'd like to see a website that was created with SBI to get an idea of what their sites look like.

Jessica, hey. After my sponsor established herself online, she went on to create a site that was more about her passions. She used SBI and her site is http://smart-horse-business.com

Then her sponsor also did the same and her site is about homeschooling http://www.homeschooling-freedom.com/

These are a couple examples for you.