I'm leaving SBI....

[feo1966]

First of all. I so so glad to have found websitebabble. Finding this forum has made my decision final.

The tone of this forum is as good or better than the SBI forums. I like the fact that you don't need to show your site URL. There is a lot of concern on the SBI forums about the inability to hide your URL.

I do find the SBI forums useful. But after looking around websitebabble for a couple of days, I'm comfortable I can get great, friendly help here.

I've been with SBI for about two years. The way they have bundled it all together is fantastic. However, once you learn the basics, I think $300 per year is too much.

They really should reduce the cost after a couple of years. Someone who has been with SBI for several years probably doesn't use the action guide too much, and they should pay a less.

That is sort of where I am at....I am not a pro, but I'm no longer a newbie. I'm ready to move on.

The other thing I like about this forum better than SBI.....you can speak your mind about anything.

If you ever question SBI on those forums, people are all over you. It is kind of odd how people fail to see that SBI is a multi-million dollar business and many of their decisions are based on protecting their cash flow.

So I won't miss the Koolaid drinkers....and the constant reminding of how "lucky" we are to be with SBI.

[k2zs]

Welcome to the forum feo,

Never having used SBI! I'm curious...

I can see not wanting to spend that much yearly but have to ask:

• In those years did your site become successful in any way?
• Did you go from zero (no web skills/experience) to successful?
• Do you feel now that you can continue being successful without their tools?

I have a family member who uses SBI! and I never could understand him paying so much for something I had for many years at a fraction of the cost.

I have been building websites as a hobby since the mid 90's and never gave "earning" a thought. When I saw him go from no web experience at all to earning money every month in as little as a year I started wondering if I shouldn't try it myself.

Just curious...

[feo1966]

I have not been successful yet, but only because I did not follow their advice.

I made a key mistake of going too broad in my niche. Just hard to rank well when you go too wide. So I am restarting very very narrow, with every article only focused on supporting my site concept.

I had made the mistake of chasing high demand and low supply keywords, that were somewhat, but not exactly related to my site. Again....not doing this is in their Action Guide, I just chose not to believe them.

But they really lay the whole process out for you. They have considered all aspects of making money online.

Also, with all of the Google algo changes, there are a lot of SBI users losing hope. Many have experienced large traffic drops. There are a lot of people quitting or selling their site.

There are still a few people posting about good success. That is actually one of the problems with their refusal to let people hide their URL. Many of the most successful SBI users no longer participate in the forums.

They don't don't want to post "My site had this much traffic", and then have someone in the same niche go check out their site for ideas. There was a large argument last week where one user posted how successful her site was (a while ago), and someone completely copied the site layout, keywords, etc.

So many of the most successful people no longer post and help others.

The other thing that has shaken up SBI is there was a heavy focus on lots of content and throw up some adsense ads to make money. This does not seem to be working so well anymore. It is hard to know what Googles motives are. Possible they want to rank site higher that are actually selling something, since those types of site can afford ads.

However, SBI seems to be focusing more on other methods of monitization.

All in all, if you want training on how to use the internet to make money, they have the best training tools.

But the site I am working on now is slightly more than a hobby site, so I cannot justify the $300 per year.

so my intent is to continue my training, getting more and more experienced as I play with my hobby site and at the same time work on designing products for my next site.

[Rhys]

Alot of what you said about the SBI! community is pretty subjective, because I have found proof to the contrary. It isn't half as bad as you portray it to be.

But yes $300 a year is expensive.

[jdenver]

I too was a SBI user and had complained that for the money I expect professional help and not simply be sent to the forum to ask for help. I used to get answers like "I think", "you might" etc.. what I wanted was clear answers from pros and not other members suggesting methods - and for $300 a year thats a lot of money!

[Mateo3847]

First of all. I so so glad to have found websitebabble. Finding this forum has made my decision final.

The tone of this forum is as good or better than the SBI forums. I like the fact that you don't need to show your site URL. There is a lot of concern on the SBI forums about the inability to hide your URL.

I do find the SBI forums useful. But after looking around websitebabble for a couple of days, I'm comfortable I can get great, friendly help here.

I've been with SBI for about two years. The way they have bundled it all together is fantastic. However, once you learn the basics, I think $300 per year is too much.

They really should reduce the cost after a couple of years. Someone who has been with SBI for several years probably doesn't use the action guide too much, and they should pay a less.

That is sort of where I am at....I am not a pro, but I'm no longer a newbie. I'm ready to move on.

The other thing I like about this forum better than SBI.....you can speak your mind about anything.

If you ever question SBI on those forums, people are all over you. It is kind of odd how people fail to see that SBI is a multi-million dollar business and many of their decisions are based on protecting their cash flow.

So I won't miss the Koolaid drinkers....and the constant reminding of how "lucky" we are to be with SBI.

do you actually know what SBI does for you "behind the scenes" of getting you indexed? That's what you're really paying for....all that tedious work of submitting sitemaps to every single search engine...every single time....for every single update...even that random typo you had to go back and re-do. Checking stats, brainstorming, organizing everything, THE FORUMS THAT ARE VERY ACTIVE...i think 300 is a price i'm willing to pay for ALL THAT.

[daveM]

My experience with SBI has been fine, I have just been with them for 3.5 months. Lots of resources and I have not incorporated all. I am not too sure that I am ready to try to use WP at this stage, I have a lot to learn.

I find that the blogging with SBI is a bit awkward, as of yet I am not skilled enough to be without the SBI tools.

As far as the money, I just assume the cost will cover most of what I need, one stop shopping.

I am not enthused about the forums as I have asked questions that are unanswered.

The resources, help pages.... I would not know what resources I need so I read them a lot and learn.

Support department treats me well.

So I am pleased with it.

I started a blogger blog so I can experiment with some more informal articles. I am not sure whether to try to attach a WP blog to my site.

In any event, for a person with my nooobee qualifications, SBI is doing ok for me.

[joejitzu]

I've considered leaving SBI because of the price, but must admit most of what I learned about website building, marketing, etc. I learned from SBI - the action guide, all the manuals, TnT headquarters articles, and some from the forums. I'm making some AdSense money, but it ain't a lot, but that's mostly my fault 'cause I haven't put in the time and effort to really build my site out (it's in the travel niche).

Since my main business has tanked due to the economy, I'm thinking about transferring my SBI site over to WP to save that $299/yr. fee. I have another site on WP so I know a little about it. It's built on the Genesis Lifestyle theme, which is pretty flexible.

[daveM]

At this stage of my career, I think I have too much to learn to consider a switch. I am reading the blogs and sites of some successful marketers and recognize that my skills have a longgggg way to go.

I got a planning software and started to make a plan for a couple areas of my site, what content to add on a regular basis, what videos to add on a weekly basis, I want to make sure that I am learning some skills and measure the results with some numbers.

When I get a good grasp on building traffic and learn how to build a list, hmmm maybe I will have no incentive to switch.

[WorkitSmart]

As a recovering SBIer, the #1 thing I learned was to be a Ninja SEO expert.. but in today's world, SEO is just good business, with many other factors equally or more important.

One of the reasons I left SBI was because they always seemed behind the trends in the industry. For example, I realized social media was big about a year before SBI even talked about it. Crazy. And it took them forever to finally admit that YES, their sites looked amateurish and needed updating.

darlene

[Beverley]

Many years ago I was with SBI in the gardening niche. I didn't make enough to cover my costs so left after two years. It was my first venture into Internet Marketing - I sold an ebook - so I feel that I did learn quite a bit. However, there are certainly cheaper ways to go about it.

[WorkitSmart]

Many years ago I was with SBI in the gardening niche. However, there are certainly cheaper ways to go about it.

I am for WP 100% but must interject about the price/expensive comments.

If you have multiple sites, Wordpress is much cheaper.. but if you only have one site, ya'll do realize SBI is cheaper, right?

SBI - approx $300. yr

WP - prices approx in annual figures
$120 hosting
$240 email (yes, you can get free but not if you're seriously building a biz)

Not to mention paying extra for Keyword tool helper, SEO helper, Premium theme, etc.

So, I'm assuming when pp say SBI is expensive, they are talking about having multiple sites?

darlene

[feo1966]

Regarding Automatic Submission of sitemaps to search engines, I get the same thing for a ONE TIME payment of $25 from xml-sitemaps.com.


A little better bargain than $300 per year...

Yes the forums are active at SBI. But most of the good information comes from people like Charles from MLM, who have ventured outside SBI to learn other ways to make money.

Charles uses CPC to generate traffic (the horror!), collects email addresses and then uses aggressive email marketing (the horror!), with non-SBI email management systems.

Charles has stated that he no longer plans on writing massive amount of content since his new method works better (at least for his niche)

The whole notion of Free Traffic is silly. When you look at how much time people spend churning out a high volume of articles, doing Panda and Penguin audits, etc....there is absolutely nothing free about it, unless you value your time at $0/hr

[jaimashi]

I am so confused. I have an SBI site that is about five years old; and despite the fact that the look & feel is horrible, I built it poorly (didn't follow the Tier2, Tier3 structure) and the fact that I got annihilated by Penguin, I still made $47,000 last year and $38,000 the year before that (all money is from my own products, only $100/month from Adsense and no affiliate products). I know that's not the millions that some of the gurus say they make, but it was enough to quit my job and if I can get another site making that amount, I'll be doing just fine.

So I am about to start a new (totally separate) site, and am considering using Wordpress. I hate the SBI templates (even the new & improved ones still look SBI-ish and outdated). I use a membership site and videos, and that is cumbersome with SBI since we don't have cPanel and FTP access. I also use Aweber since SBI's mail system is horrible.

However, it's difficult to leave something that has proven to work. The few people I've read who moved from SBI to Wordpress and are happy weren't making a lot with SBI to start with. I haven't found many cases where someone moved from SBI to WP and kept their traffic or increased it, and made more money....of course that doesn't mean they don't exist, but I just would feel better if I could read a few stories.

I'm also worried about having to learn everything all over again; coding and plug-ins and all that. For example, Mateo3847 pointed out above that SBI automatically "pings" your site map to the search engines, but WP doesn't. And then I saw feo1966's solution; but how do you learn that? That's the part that worries me about WP; you have to figure it all out and put it all together yourself, where SBI guides you. That's comforting for people like me, who know just enough to succeed on the internet but never could have done it without SBI.

And yet....ugh. I'm so, so tired of the limited templates and the other limitations with SBI (mainly membership and video integration).

What I would do for a magic crystal ball....

[Septimus]

I really do agree with the idea of SBI reducing the cost after a year or two, things were going well for my site at the start of 2012 until penguin hit, I will probably start backing up my pages soon ready to transfer it over to a word press or html site using a cheaper host.

My two year old SBI site only gets slightly more traffic than a younger site I have which is hosted on a free webhost.