I’m an SBIer of many years, and my SBI site makes decent money despite being in a very competitive niche and only using Adsense.

However Google and Facebook have changed the paradigm completely. Alot of SBI sites, the one’s which have been set up by by the real SBI fanatics have seen their traffic and Adsense revenue slashed by Panda. Why? Because Ken Evoy decided to be too clever for Google. He promoted something called C2. This was SBI’s attempt to allow website users to post comments on content pages, much as blogs allow. However instead of those posts being added into each page as on a blog, Ken decided that each comment should instead become a new page. So sites started ending up with huge numbers of low quality pages of maybe 100 words, all targetting the same keywords. Google originally used to think sites with loads of pages were great, but as a result of Panda they now view sites with lots of poor quality pages targetting a few keyword phrases as highly suspect. As such on the SBI forums you’re seeing more and more cries about reduced traffic and Adsense revenue. In fact one very high profile SBIer found Google had dropped every page of all his 4 sites completely. Ken’s response is always the same: write more content, build more links!

As you rightly point out, I believe too that most of the SBI elite make their money from selling SBI subscriptions, and also providing added on services to SBIers. Few sites make much real money and if they do, it’s purely by luck. It is worth mentioning that SBI survives purely on a few brainwashed individuals having 5-30 SBI sites. Yes really. I hear from a very reliable source that only 1% of those who join for a year, renew. Oh yes and those low Alexa rankings they always crow on about? All SBIers are told to get an Alexa tool bar, and then if you post a couple of times a day in the SBI forums you are guaranteed at least 5-10 SBIers a day. That is why there are posts from people saying, “I must be doing really well because even though I only have 80 visitors a day, my Alexa rank is 97,000!”. As a result all the case studies are from people with low site Alexa ranks but who can never demonstrate how they make any money.

So I’m getting the hell out of SBI. $299 is too much to pay for a platform which provides little and is gradually getting worse and worse. People think SBI can never fail. What they fail to realise is that it can and should that happen, they are completely stuck. You see, as you rightly point out, if you use SBI’s CMS there is no way to move especially as many SBI sites have 500-3000 pages. It would take 6 months full time work to go into each page and change the links, code etc. That is of course assuming that you can get access to it.

I’m just glad I’ve always done things my way (even with SBI) and have not been brainwashed sufficiently to remain a sheep to the cult of SBI and Ken!

In the process of our research for setting up his own site, I found a website that is doing something similar to what he wants to do, but not doing it very well in my opinion. Also, it was a website that I found once (and I don’t remember what keywords that I used to find it). I forgot to bookmark it, and then had a dickens of a time trying to refind it.

There was an affiliate link to SBI on his website, but I didn’t pay much attention to it.

Today, my friend emailed me and asked if I would take a look at the half hour introduction video for SBI. I did. He called me to get my reactions to it. My gut reaction was to tell him that while SBI seemed to be promising the world, I reminded him how impossible it was to find this guy’s site the second time we tried looking for it – if SBI is that good, why wasn’t it actually optimizing his pages in the search engines?

As I continued to do research, I did a google search and came upon this blog. And after reading through all of the comments (yes… I read them… all… this was actually fascinating), I basically have come to this conclusion:

$300/year is not a lot of money to spend on developing a website. However, I can take that $300 and throw it at someone to do all of the work for me. Or I can take that money, invest in a regular internet provider for half of that cost, put wordpress on the site for no extra charge from the provider, have full control over my site, go and do some research on how to do effective SEO and keywording on my own, and in the end, instead of having a day’s worth of fish that someone has given to me, I can have learned how to fish so I never have to pay to rely on someone else again.

Thanks for posting this.

1. SBI is an expensive and “old school” product. You can do what SBI does and a whole lot more by using the free software WordPress (for beginner tips check out my new site http://netmarketingtoday.com )

2. What is really disturbing about this post is not the fact that my original post wasn’t a polished piece of prose – its the religious furore with which the SBI supporters club (called the active response team and yes they do exist). descended on this post when it was first published – I was a no one – with a blog not ranking for anything – but I was threatened with legal action, distruction of myself and family and wished dead (by cancer) – if you think this is a sane response to something which is JUST A BUSINESS then you probably deserve SBI. An that was why when I wrote this post there was NO even slightly negative critiscism of Site Build It! on the web – nothing – a product that had been around for years not one word of this works but… or this is not a good investment because … They had been bullied into submisssion – I hate bullies.

3. Although I hadn’t used SBI myself plenty of people appeared to have and many of them didn’t have a good experience see here or here

4. My friends hate bullies – and they and I now (thanks to this furore) know a lot more about SEO than most of the SBIers. SEO is why this post is #1 in Google if you search “site build it scam” #2 for “SBI scam” and #10 for “site build it review” (all without quotes) – in fact that’s how you found this post in the first place. There are quite a number of other critical posts all of which are a response to the bullying behavour of the SBI attack dogs here. Grizzly explains what happened here

5. There are no short-cuts to making money online – there is no one system. But there is one thing for sure – you have to learn to make your own decisions – something that SBI most certainly does NOT teach. The Internet is a fast changing place – eBay substantially changed the method of paying affiliates in October – it destroyed some people’s businesses, others saw jumps in their income – the fallout continues. This month (Dec09) Adsense CPC seems well down – probably because of the dire state of the US economy. No rigid “business in a box” model will teach you how to deal with that.

If you are a beginner looking to make money online then here is the bad news:

1. Its hard work
2. It will take several years to learn enough to make a significant amount of income online
3. Its a business – not a job – you can never guraantee the income you will recieve

The good news its that entirely possible to make money online and there is a vast number of different ways to do it. You also need little capital to start – if you fact you can start for free. If zero is your budget head over to Grizz’s blog and read it – it will make this page look short the information is all there. If you have some money then consider signing up for the The Keyword Academy which will cost you $1 for the first month and around $30/month ongoing – its no hype, no bullshite, how to chose the right keywords and rank in the search engines for them. Once you can do that – you can build all sorts of different types of business.

If you are flat broke and worried about the bills/mortgage etc You don’t need a busiiness – you need a job. If you have a skill such as design/ writing/ coding – then get on the freelance boards – be prepared to work long hours for little pay – in the beginning – but there is really no reason why you can’t make a few hundred US$ in the next few weeks if you work your arse off. Many business owners on the Internet are constantly looking for people to write articles, submit links and do all the other boring day-to-day stuff. Its not fun or sexy – but it will get you paid. Oh and it may be too late to say it but – stop spending. Sell stuff you don’t need, move to a cheaper house, a cheaper town, a cheaper country. Stop subsidising the kids who don’t need it -stop pretending to family and friends that you can still afford the lifestyle you had when you had a job. Stop worrying about what others think – thats the single biggest reason why people get into debt and fail financially.

Reduce your lifestyle costs, develop your online skills and you will never be without a way to make enough money to cover you living costs – and that folks is true freedom! And as Yoda so famously said: Do or do not, there is no try!

I took the SBI plunge and was very excited to get going. It is hard to convince someone that a business model does not work when you are in that state with the blinders on. I probably wasted about 2 years following the action guide, putting up more content, and more content, up to 100 pages, and making anywhere from $2 to $10 a day. My traffic has doubled to average about 400 unique users a day. Everyone keeps talking about traffic, and more traffic on SBI, but I agree with these posts that traffic does not mean much if you are not making any money. SBI is similar to MLM in that everyone is excited about this or that, but when you ask them how much money they are making, crickets, and then – build more content!

I very recently realized that the business model was not working. I lost sleep over it, because I knew I had spent two years of very rigorous, hard work earning just about zilch. Visitors were simply getting a lot of good free information, and then leaving. I should have just followed 4HWW, tested the market, put up a page with Dreamweaver (which would have looked much better than my clunky SBI site), and then start selling the winners and dropping the losers for high gross margins.

It was very humbling and somewhat disheartening when I realized I had taken a wrong turn, and spent a lot of money in the process. It was a hard lesson, I was a “Fing noobie” just trying to find my way in the midst of all the advice and confusion. I do not have the knowledge many of you do, but that is the path to knowledge, isn’t it? I decided to learn Dreamweaver, subscribe to Lynda.com to learn CSS and other stuff, and start testing the market properly.

Vic, calm down dude! You have a lot of good information to share, but your anger is distracting me. A lot of these guys are in the same boat I am. I tried it, and realized later is was not working. Everyone is looking for something to work, and a lot of these guys like Matt put a TON of work into building a website. If SBI is one thing, it is very very very hard work. Unfortunately, most people will not get paid very much for it. It is really not there fault that SBI can potentially steer people in the wrong direction (just follow the action guide and build more free content!) instead of looking critically at the business plan. Have some compassion. Maybe you have info to share that could help people who are just trying to figure it all out like me.

These posts are great in that everyone has a lot of knowledge to share, and though sometimes emotional, are definitely informative. Thanks for everyone putting in their input and knowledge. I am still trying to figure out the right way to do this, and may come back to the info here whenever I get a bit lost.