“The RoseBouquet”

Today I think I’ll give you a behind the scenes look at working with my SiteBuildIt! (SBI) site. It’s true that I have many irons in the fire, to use an old cliche, and I only mention one or two each week here, but this one has been more on my mind, and especially yesterday, so if you’d like to see what it’s like to build one of these creme de’ la creme sites, here’s a peek at aloe-vera-and-handy-herbs.com

A quick background; SiteBuildIt! is a proprietary software designed by Ken Evoy of Montreal, Quebec, Canada. You subscribe for a year at a time, and don’t have to know any html to use it. My personal frustration has been that I do know html and almost have to unlearn it to use this system. SBI has many wonderful features, such as great help with brainstorming for the most suitable, profitable topic for your site, and then automated submissions to the search engines, so that you are guaranteed excellent traffic without having to pay heavy duty for it. There is a video training course, to guide you through every step. Most people who try this plan and stick with it become enthusiastic devotees. (Listen to them rave in their ILOVEmySBI videos!

Well, as an affiliate, I’d been reading about these since the beginning, and finally was able to subscribe in November. My efforts to start this Azaleas business really cut back on my time to spend at it. It seemed to be relegated to Saturday evenings, when I was so exhausted I fell asleep. But early in April I resolved to rearrange my schedule to give three mornings a week to my SBI site so I could get further ahead faster. I have now got 10 web pages done. I did my research and built them offline the way I’m used to, but now I need to build them in the SBI software to get them online. That’s where I ran into a challenge yesterday.

My old method is to just drag and drop my completed pages by ftp to the site, and presto, they are ready for the world. In SBI I need to copy and paste the parts into blocks, every element into its own block. Never mind any html coding. (Well, I did sneak in some). Then you have to click the “Analyse It” button. Another window/tab opens, and you get this page of instructions telling you where you don’t have your keyword showing up enough. You need it in your title, description and keywords (meta tags) and in your heading, and a certain percentage of times in the main text of the web page. In my case, I needed it to appear 13 more times. So I went back to fix those spots, or so I thought.

Hit Analyse It again, and this time I’m doing better in the earlier blocks, but I need it to show up in my links and another 7 times in my body. Okay, I go back and edit it some more.

I went back and forth like this on two pages for about two hours. I have never been so fussy with my keywords before! But I’m sure beginning to see that if this system is so fussy, then when it encourages me to hit “Build It” that page will really make all the search engines happy. The traffic should stampede in to this site!

Right now I’m not even sure I will get all the 8 other pages “built” over Thursday and Friday. It depends on how fast I catch on and deal with this matter of keywords. I do believe it will pick up pace as I learn the ins and outs of this system. I do intend to keep adding more and more pages, but I was focusing on a core set to describe aloe vera, and how to care for it, and the benefits.

Once I have 30 pages up or am getting 50 visitors a day I can start adding various methods of monetizing the site. That means things like putting in AdSense codes, and other affiliate ads. I’m looking forward to that - it’s when this site will become an income stream!

Of course, resourceful me, I’m ready to adapt these principles to my other sites. Things should improve all around.

Incidentally, if you want a d-i-y SBI site, go here, SiteBuildIt! If you’d rather pay a bit more and have one of the SiteSell webmasters do all the work for you, (still less than most other webmasters charge) you should check out Services - SiteSell