Is Site Sell Site Buildit a Scam? I am writing this in response to the video arguments and text arguments of Allyn Hane: Master Of My Own Domain (this is the page). He says that SBI or Site Sell is bullshit. What he means is that you cannot succeed on the internet by being spoon feed “how to” information, as SBI do, and succeed in the long term. The only way to succeed in the long term is to know coding and internet marketing, the whole kibosh, the lot. After all, you wouldn’t go into any business without knowing a good deal about it and having the skills to perform, would you?
Normally I would say, yes, and agree that the internet business is no different to normal business. This is what Allyn Hane is saying. The truth, though, is that the internet business is not quite like any other business. For example, html code is only in existence to provide us with the means to put stuff on the internet. We don’t need to know all about it.
Sure it helps to know about it but by far the most important thing is how to express knowledge not how the internet works. And to put things on the internet at a simple level is relatively easy. There are many successful yet simple sites. Dr. Evoy advocates simplicity. His site Sitesell.com is a good example (at one time it had Alexa 500). So you don’t need to be an internet guru to succeed on the ‘net. This then supports the SBI model. They do the coding for you until (and this is important) you have found your feet and are ready to jump out of the box and do your own thing.
I know this lady in the video above, not personally but as a person who has succeeded using SBI. She's smart. And yes you need to be smart to really succeed with SBI.....
Note: Dr. Evoy, the founder of SiteSell.com would be dismayed to hear people calling his product a scam or, in this case, bullsh*t. He plays it very straight. There are scammers out there but he and SBI are not one of them, believe me. You have to work hard etc. and do your bit but with SBI supporting you it works.
Note: If you found a bad review of SBI!, it was most likely part of a group of unscrupulous competitors who recently wrote and published a bunch of fake reviews about Site Build It! (Include link where you see fit).
One of the great barriers to succeeding on the internet is to get off the ground. It is a complete mystery, still, to a vast number of people. And a good proportion of these people have lots to give. They just don’t have the means to do it and Site Sell or SBI gives them the launch pad, the means to get on the internet, progress and learn until they can stand on their own two feet. You cannot find this anywhere else, as far as I know.
I know that the founder and chief executive, Dr. Evoy, (now a consultant by the way) also founded one of the great affiliate schemes on the internet (5 Pillar Club) in which SBI people sell the SBI products on the websites that they build with the help of SBI (neat that) but few of them sell the product to any great extent, if one is honest.
It is a slightly clunky product when compared to Google Blogger for example - no doubt about it. It needs modernisation, I think (update: they have introduced new templates). But I am sure that the board of directors have decided that they must keep the $299 yearly subscription frozen under the barrage from Google Blogger and the other free website hosting businesses. The gorilla Google (I actually love Google) is hurting Sitesell and SBI. SBI sites are a little unsophisticated compared to Blogger sites. But, and this is one of the keys, it doesn’t matter if a site is a bit clunky (it may actually help if it is not too slick). The overriding factor is content, what you say and what images or videos you put up on the internet. Simplicity is all and Allyn Hane knows that because his site is simple and effective.
He succeeds on the back of what he says. One of Dr. Evoy’s mantras is to keep it simple and say what you know (on the basis that you know something worth passing on to the public) in your voice while leaving all the distracting bits and pieces, the mechanics and the "white noise" (distracting information on SEO) to him and Site Sell. This is very appealing to women stuck at home with a bit of time on their hands, for example. Yet, I agree that the selling and persuasive powers of Dr. Evoy are so good that the vast majority of new starters think that they can make a viable amount of money by following SBI tutorials and building 30+ pages.
This will never work. Most, almost all in my view, make an amount of money that is so small as to make it of no real consequence in their lives. But they live in hope. I am being brutally honest and some will disagree with that. But some go on and develop, using SBI’s great tutorials, to learn the basics and then to experiment and in effect they are learning on the job. That is invaluable. I am one of those people. When I started I knew next to nothing. I learned from SBI. I experimented and did my own thing and realized late in the day that it is better to stick to SBI methods and to keep it simple (I made mistakes, of course).
There is a mass of “white noise” out there, distracting information that pulls you off the straight and narrow SBI model. I am still learning. I have a long way to go. This site is a subdomain of my main site, www.pictures-of-cats.org. It is very easy to set up a subdomain using SBI tools. Another little advantage of SBI. There are numerous support tools and they all free us up to produce content. SBI would drive a computer geek to distraction because it is designed for people who know nothing about html and the internet but who have knowledge or a skill on other topics that are just as valuable. It allows them to express themselves on the internet. And you know, a lot of computer savvy people have very little to give the world other than their computer knowledge and even that knowledge they have difficulty in disseminating.
It is quite rare to find someone who knows the mechanics of html and another interesting and useful subject as well. SBI and Site Sell overcomes that obstacle. You only have to know one element of that double act. You can ignore the html bit and still succeed. This is very valuable for many people who are excluded from disseminating their knowledge on the internet. It opens doors to many people. A very important point that is often missed however is that not only does Site Sell SBI give people access to a world wide audience who would otherwise be excluded, it optimises the page for you.
And such are the SEO skills of Dr. Evoy and his team that the pages that a novice produces are search engine optimised to a very high degree. This is a hidden benefit but the most important part of the SBI process. This is what makes SBI sites more successful than other sites. I am sure that a novice building a web page with SBI in the most simplistic of ways (using what SBI calls, “blockbuilder”) is better optimised in a way that allows it to be found and listed by the search engines than many a page produced by computer and internet geeks. SBIers are, after all taping into the formidable SEO skills of one of the best in the business, Dr. Evoy.
There are many useful features but one, for me, stands out. Site Sell, SBI call it C2 (content version 2). It is a form that is designed for visitors to fill in to allow the site to be built in part them (see an example in action). The trouble is this; precious few use it. I have over 7,000 uniques daily, some days at the moment, and I only get 1 to 2 submissions daily. This is to be expected because few visitors are motivated to give you something. Most people are out to receive something; information etc. But so effective is this form that I use it myself and to great effect as pages automatically produced by it are routinely listed by Google on page one of a search and not infrequently in the top 5. And this applies to Google.com and Google.co.uk searches. This gives a clue as to the effectiveness of SiteSell's SEO abilities. So having achieved an Alexa rank currently of 103,000 (at June 2009 it is 94,000) after less than 2 years building the site and making about $1,000 (USD) a month I am pleased with SBI (the site is not yet optimised in terms of making money, by the way and I made $1,200+ in May of 2009) .
The annual SBI fee of $299 (2009) can be recovered in a fraction of a single month. The SEO facility alone makes the money well spent. I know there are aspects of SBI that are outdated and clunky as I said but at its core it is still highly effective and provides a service that is perhaps unique and especially attractive for people who are stuck at home and who want to work while caring for children as a good example.
I think that the kind of remarks made by Allyn Hane when he says that Site Sell and SBI are a scam and bullsh*t are from a person who has not (with respect to him) fully grasped the benefits of the process. He is falling into that trap of being obliged to write a webpage (to produce content) without having fully read about it or, better still, having experienced it. He won’t mind because all he is really doing is bringing in traffic to his site. He is being deliberately provocative but at another person's expense it should be said. Whether his post is accurate or not is secondary to provoking reaction in the public. And that is OK.
I can understand that. But SBI needs defending from these slightly misleading articles. Update late August: I am one of the people who has benefited from SBI. I would not have succeeded without the knowledge I gained through working with them. This site is a subdomain. The Alexa ranking is around 80,000 (at June 2010 the Alexa ranking is 55,000). I owe a lot of that to SBI Sitesell. I really do and I am not just selling SBI. The site makes about 2,000 USD per month undermonetized.
I am a 60 year man with no previous experience of website building and within 2 years I am in the top 80,000 sites in the world. There are hundreds of millions of sites. And a lot of sites that are doing worse than mine have a team of geeks working on the site. I work entirely alone! And being 60 it keeps me alive! I need to do something and be focused. My site and SBI give me that. One great thing about SBI is that you can walk away if it doesn't work out for you at no cost as far as I remember. And you can change the website domain once and restart without charge. I did that because my first two month attempt I decided would not work. SBI are very helpful but best of all is they teach you as you work how to get your site noticed by Google and the other search engines and that is so very important.
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