Great points, Amy. I think it should definitely be made clear that SBI! provides all the tools in one place, you do the work. It's not like you buy the product and they are in charge of marketing your site. They simply arm you with the knowledge and teach you how to optimize your pages. And you'll also have access to a database chock full of articles (a lot written by SBI! owners themselves) explaining how to make more money and build traffic to your site.
SBI! is certainly not for everyone. If you want to build a database or need to do CHMODs to your files, etc. then you won't have access to those features like you would with a standard host. So if you were trying to build a community based (MySpace-like) site then I certainly wouldn't recommend it for that.
But what a lot of more technically savvy people are finding out is that they can buy SBI! to build a simple content-rich site (or tutorial site) and use that to drive traffic to some of their non SBI! sites.
But the point is, you do the work (except for the SE submissions, monitoring and rank reporting). SBI! simply provides the guides and tools all in one place.
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