Need a website but worried that building your own website will be complicated or too expensive because you’re NOT a geek?

Fear NOT!

It has never been easier to build your own website.

A number of services offer website building packages that let you create your own personal, business and/or ecommerce websites without the need to know how to code HTML.

Better yet, it won’t cost you an arm and leg to build your site using a website builder as you won’t have to hire a developer to create the site or a designer to make it look great. They’re all plug ‘n play. Choose your template, input your information and you’ve got a website that you can manage yourself.

Below I list and differentiate between website builders that I recommend for affiliate marketers and small business or ecommerce sites.

BizZites

I LOVE this website builder for affiliate marketers, especially those affiliates who want to integrate merchant datafeeds into their sites without the hassle of using a third-party service. Structured on a WordPress platform (with beautiful template choices) BizZites sites will be natural traffic magnets. There’s absolutely nothing else like it currently on the market.

Go to BizZites | Read my BizZites Review

SiteBuildiT! (SBI)

Around since 1997, this might be the perfect website builder for small business owners who want to build ecommerce sites. Tools include domain name registration, site builder, point-and-click page creation, a content management management system, search engine optimization, autoresponders (newsletter management), traffic stats and more.

Go to SiteBuildiT! | Read my SiteBuildiT Review

Yahoo’s Site Builder

Used by Lance Armstrong, the Oakland Raiders and Ben & Jerry’s sites, Yahoo! Small Business solution was winner of PC Magazine’s Editors’ Choice Award in June, 2008. Yahoo! Small Business is chock-a-block full of features to start your own online store. Plans start for as little as $25.97 per month. Note: I mention Yahoo’s website builder only in passing as I have no personal experience with it, except to have spoken with small business owners who have used their services successfully to build ecommerce sites.

Go to Yahoo

Website Building for Small Business Owners since 1997

If you’ve visited my online business and affiliate sites, you already know that I’m a total WordPress junky, so it might surprise you to see me talking about – let alone recommending – a website builder like SiteBuildit! (SBI). And you’re right, I wouldn’t recommend SiteBuildit! for experienced web developers or WordPress bloggers.

However, if you’re just starting out, need a website and are looking for an all-in-one site building ecommerce solution, SiteBuildit! might be right for you.

Since 1997, Ken Evoy has been offering his customers an extraordinary range of site and business building tools through SiteBuildiT that let you register your domain, host your site, build your site, research your market, tweak your site for the search engines, drive traffic and much more – all from one interface.

But Ken’s key intent with SBI is much higher than mere site-building – the focus is on business building. As he says, “Why build a Web site…when you can build a BUSINESS?” which SO echoes my own focus.

Content > Traffic > Presell > Monetize

SBI uses a system called CTPM to help SBI! owners build sites out naturally by building content, generating traffic, preselling and then monetizing. And as Ken reminds us, ” ‘M’ cannot happen if you fail to first execute C T P. This is where 99% of small businesses fail. He has a whole page devoted just to helping aspiring online business owners understand the importance of using a “Content > Traffic > Presell > Monetize” approach.

What I believe is also critical to keep in mind is the fact that a website is just a tool with which to DO business. So, building the site shouldn’t be where most of your time and energy is spent. What you don’t want to do as a small business owner is hunt and peck all over the ‘net to find this or that plugin to make this or that application work. To see all of the tools offered in the SBI! system, visit SiteSell Tools.

Traffic Magnets

One of SBI!’s MOST beneficial features is that SBI! sites attract traffic. According to Netcraft.com and Alexa.com, 35% of SBI! sites ranked in the top 1% of all sites and Fifty-three percent (53%) were in the top 2% and 62% scored in the top 3%.

If you’re just too busy to build your own site, even using SiteBuildiT!’s plug ‘n play site builder, you can always get one of SBI!’s certified webmasters to do it for you!

SBI! Customer Loyalty

And just one more thing before I close – you’ll find that SBIers are a downright LOYAL lot. They use it, they love it and they’re always keen to tell you why. (Granted, I do the same regarding WordPress – so it’s no wonder successful SBIers like to talk up their system likewise.)

Whichever way you want to look at it, SBI! has been and is still one of the best all-in-one site building tools on the market for small business owners, and it keeps proving itself over and over and over again — all for less than a buck a day.

To learn more about SBI, you can take a quick tour (if you’re short on time) and compare SBI!’s features with Yahoo! Web Hosting Pro, Verisign Web Business Expert and Microsoft bCentral Professional.

I’ve condensed and simplified the steps required to start your own business as an affiliate as much as possible in the following article.

Plan to spend time at each site/link below researching and learning more about the process.

Give it enough time, and it WILL start to look much easier!

Here we go.

1. Choose Your Niche

   Pick a topic you know and are passionate about, then surf the web to find sites related to your interest.

   Pay particular attention to sites with excellent content and products. What products and services do they offer? What keywords would customers search to find those sites? Make a list. Can you think of ways you would improve those sites? Take notes.

   Learn more about niche and keyword research

2. Register a Domain & Arrange Web Hosting

   Select a dot.com that is relevant to your chosen topic. Keep it short, simple, and devoid of hyphens (if possible). A web host is a server on which your site resides.

   Here are the web hosting services I currently recommend.

   If you want to register your domain separately, I recommend GoDaddy

3. Start Building Your Web Site

   Start a blog or get a site builder. You’ll find an article on the benefits of learning HTML and other site-building resources here.

   If you’re already committed to using a full ecommerce package, check out SiteBuildiT! first.

4. Develop Content

   If you hate to write, content development may seem rather daunting.

   Fear not, getting information together for your site is probably easier than you think, as there are many wonderful resources of pre-written content available to you

   Here are 5 ways to put content on your site.

5. Source Products to Sell

   Having a site won’t do you much good if you don’t list any products or services for your visitors to buy.

   I suggest that you join the following affiliate networks to start with — ClickBank k and Shareasale… but only AFTER your blog is up and has some content.

6. Build a List

   Overlook this step at your peril! It is essential! Build a list to keep in touch with your visitors and sell them MORE related products.

   Learn all about email marketing. I personally use and recommend Aweber’s autoresponder service.

7. Market Your Site

   Here is a list of my favorite 3 ways to get traffic.

   However, the fastest way to get visitors to your site, is to use pay-per-click search engines advertising where you pay only for visitors that clickthrough to your site.

   My personal favorite PPC’s are Yahoo! Search Marketing (which often offers a $25 credit), Google Adwords and Microsoft AdCenter which you can join now receive $50 in FREE PPC credits.

There you have them, the 7 basic steps to get your own online business off the ground.

Start today, work diligently and pretty soon you’ll start to see phenomenal rewards.

Why do so many people love SBI? As a website and business building system, Ken Evoy’s Site Build It! (SBI!) has been changing lives for the better for years. The video below gives you a quick sample of people who love SBI. To see many more video examples of how and why so many work-at-home moms, dads and entrepeneurs use SBI to build their online businesses, visit the I Love SBI video page.

Too, Ken is running his annual “I LOVE SBI! Special $100 Valentine Gift” event until midnight February 14th. For just $100 dollars more per order, you can surprise your loved one with their own SBI!

Please note that you can save the gift for yourself provided you start your second site within 8 months of ordering. Too, this offer only applies to new orders (not renewals).

How’s your year-old SBI site coming along? Still working at it or maybe you’ve kind of let things lapse? Wondering whether or not you should renew next year? Well, Ken’s just done something that I think will help re-motivate you or spur you into acting and making the most of your site. Here’s what Ken had to say on the SBI forum about his new plan …

$299 can be a lot when it comes time to renew and you’re not making much money yet.

That’s when and how the idea came…

“Why not let SBIers RENEW on a monthly basis?”

Sometimes, all it takes is a month or three before the real progress, the first plateau jump, happens. The act of renewing certainly renews one’s motivation. And good things do tend to happen to those who redouble their efforts and commit to making it happen.

Anything that helps folks take action is a GREAT thing as far as I’m concerned, especially during tough economic times when coming up with a full year’s payment might be somewhat difficult. So, if you were thinking about letting that SBI membership lapse — think again, and don’t let your initial outlay go to waste!

See what one reader posted on the SiteSell forum about the book’s content. I couldn’t have said it any better myself…

Hi Ken,

I started reading MYCPS 2 days ago and today is the second time.

IMHO if you disregard Sitesell brand, with a minor improvement, you can change the title into “Principles of Web Marketing.”

Why the title? Here is my observation.

First,

Quote:
Building a business is all about building relationship
and …PREselling is the online version of relationship-building
and …PREselling warms up and builds trust and respect

… trust and respect build loyalty. Finally, loyalty builds retention.

The concept of preselling to build visitors, and later customers, loyalty is fundamental for both offline and online business. For online business we learn the importance of retention from how high is our Conversion Rate and the cost of acquiring new customers.

Like the butcher and the hairdresser –which are offline examples– we learn that in offline world we’ll do business with someone we know personally. We like to do business with persons who knows our needs and wants and offer products or services even before we ask them.

The personal relationship with customers in the above examples once owned by small businesses now practiced by big corporations. To serve every customer personally a company such Amazon invested in very expensive and sophisticated Customer Relationship Management Softwares.

My point here, if big corporations enter personal relationship game then small businesses have to serve their customers better.

Second,

How can we serve our customers better?

With Content – Traffic – Presell – Monetize concept small business can defend the personal relationship advantage. Despite using high-end CRM softwares, as customers we don’t communicate with a real person we know. Whereas small/home business owner communicates personally with customers and their customers know his/her voice and personality.

So with every improvement of personalization technology and much smaller target market/community small business still can win the value war against bigger corporation. Online we can achieve this by providing high-value-added content/information in the form of words. It’s about what we offer or the main benefits.

Besides content/words, there are two additional differentiation we can apply to leverage small business position.

One is context or look and feel in your terminology. In consumer goods industry our site look and feel is like the packaging of the product –the content or words to be exact. It’s about the way we offer
our target market. Our personalities and how we see our target market will color our contexts.

The other one is infrastructure or technology, facility and personnel as the enabler of words and look and feel creation. SBI with its features belongs to this differentiation category. And last but not least, we, as the subject of all creations, play in the center stage.

So… Have I given a complete body of knowledge to serve our customers better?

Nope. There are at least two additional ideas: marketing strategy and branding.

Marketing strategy is about how to win customers’ mind share. In MYCPS you taught segmentation and targeting at chapter 2.2. If many SBIers complain about low income site I suggest them to read and reread this chapter.

Segmentation and targeting are about developing market map and selecting which area to serve. We have to use our scarce resources wisely.

Once we decide the area to serve we can find and develop our positioning statement. Depending on our situation we can write our own USP or VPP. Chapter 3 covered how to leverage our USP or VPP with related domain name.

Now, Let’s talk about branding. Your sub title How To Build Your Brand of One… remind us not to trap into commoditization. In a commodity market where supply and demand command price, we are the price taker. By branding we can command price since our brands free us up from supply and demand curve, we are the price maker.

To summarize my review, I’d like to see a triangle of brand – positioning – differentiation. Brand is a value we promise to deliver to our target market. Positioning is a strategy to direct your customers credibly. And differentiation is a tactic to integrate content, context, and infrastructure in the form of our offers to customers. All is almost well covered in MYCPS.

Let’s analyze Sitesell.com to get some evidences whether you preach what you teach. Sitesell brand promise is to add value by providing products and services to make sites can sell. Your positioning statement: Ecommerce for the rest of us –simple and effective ecommerce for everyone. Your differentiations: high value affordable contents with unique, easy to understand presentation, and supported by the high-powered SBI as your main infrastructure.

Again, although MYCPS seems like about writing content that presell, IMHO with some polishing you can change your book title into Principle of Web Marketing. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t say Principle of Web Selling.

That’s an incredible endorsement for Ken’s “Make Your Content Pre-Sell”, and like I said before, I couldn’t have explained it any better myself.

Pick up your copy of “Make Your Content Pre-Sell” today!

I know I haven’t written much about the SBI! (Site Build iT!) web site building recently, believing that webmasters will become more self-sufficient in the long run if they start their business by going the blogging route with BlueHost and WordPress.

That plan may be too much of a stretch for some new webmasters, however, and where SBI! is an excellent fit.

Rather than list the 100′s of features and benefits of Ken Evoy’s SBI!, I thought it would be better if you saw videos of SBI! owners saying exactly what they love about the website builder.

There are 12 videos on this page and you’ll see why everyone from work-at-home moms, retirees, regular guys and even 6-years – with a WIDE range of interests – can manipulate SBI! with ease.

Better yet, Ken is having his annual I Love SBI! $100 Valentine’s Day Special… valid only until the stroke midnight on February 14th, 2008.

For your viewing enjoyment – and a chuckle – click ‘read more’ to see “A Cowgirl Dares to Dream” by Donna.

[tags]SBI,Site Build iT!,Ken Evoy,discount,sale,Valentine[/tags]

Here is a question that I received from Teri…

Hello, I have purchased SAH and SBI. Can I just sell SAH and/or SBI from my site? I am having so much trouble getting a niche together that I wondered if I started as an affiliate for the above then I could generate some income (and eat and pay the rent) while I am trying to understand what I am doing. As you’ve guessed I am a newbie! Thank you for your time. I do appreciate it.

Here is what I told Teri…

Hello Teri,

Cheers,
Rosalind

BOO! If YOU’ve been thinking of getting SBI!, now is the time to get a move on, while Ken is doing one of his rare ‘specials’… buy one, get the next for just $100. Think you don’t need or want 2 sites? Well, here’s a stat for you. Half of SBI! owners own more than one SBI! site. Then again, if you’re feeling generous, you could also give it to a friend or a loved one.

Stay-At-Home-Moms and Webmasters should also take note…

BTW, this offer lasts only until the stroke of midnight on Halloween.

PLEASE NOTE: Since this article was first written, I’ve added BizZites to my list of recommended Site Builders, especially for affiliate marketers who want to easily incorporate datafeeds into their sites. Read my BizZites review here.

During a recent telephone consultation, my client mentioned that she was having a problem changing the background color of her site, so I offered to show her how to change the color on the cascading stylesheet (CSS) that I saw referenced on her pages.

Well, that was easier said than done, as my client was using GoDaddy’s “WebSite Tonight® Site Builder” package, which does not permit FTP access.

Furthermore, the stylesheet wasn’t accessible through the online interface, so I couldn’t amend the code.

Delving a little deeper, I saw that WebSite Tonight® offers a limited number of template choices. If none of those is to your liking, or if you want to get a little more creative with your design, there is no option other than to upgrade to another hosting package or change hosting companies.

Most site builder packages are similarly limited in scope and functionality.

They are perhaps best suited to those who want to build a ‘business card’ site consisting of only a few pages; but as an an affiliate who wants to build a big content site that includes a blog, a newsletter signup form and other – what I call ‘basic’ features – you’d be out of luck.

I do recommend one site builder in the Super Affiliate Handbook, and that is SBI!, or SiteBuildiT!

Regarding SBI!, David, who recently read the handbook, asked:

“I have never delved into the realms of HTML and now find I have a good excuse to do so. SiteBuildiT! looks like a very good option, however my only concern is further done the track would I have control over the development of the site(s) or otherwise, in respect to alterations using my own HTML experience?”

That is such a great question, as we should always be anticipating future expansion of our sites and businesses.

In a previous version of the Super Affiliate Handbook I made the comment, “As a webmaster with reasonably good knowledge of HTML and graphic design, I found the SBI! interface a little clunky and frustrating to use.”

That was because SiteBuildiT! sites historically had an “SBI! look-and-feel” about them. Each had the same two-column, left-side navigation format, and like many site builders there were a limited number of styles from which to choose. Because I believe that affiliate sites should be as unique as the individuals creating them, I saw this as a drawback.

Why was I still recommending SBI! if I thought it had limitations?

Well, first of all, nothing is ever perfect.

Secondly, as I also mention in the SAH, “I can overlook this downside to take advantage of the amazing topic research and search engine optimization tools that SBI! offers”. Total newbies are able to do research from within the SBI! interface and then build sites in profitable niche markets.

Better yet, these SBI! sites get traffic very, very quickly.

Furthermore, Ken Evoy (the founder of SiteBuildiT!, SiteSell and a host of other online services and infoproducts) changed the SBI! structure to allow webmasters with HTML knowledge to use their creativity on their SBI! sites.

If you visit the SBI site, go to the bottom of the homepage and click on “Client Sites” to see a variety of sample sites. Some use the SBI templates, while others obviously create their own designs.

And although I’ve been recommending hosts that use a CPanel interface with Fantastico for the ease of WordPress Blog and CMS (content management system) installations; I see that SBI! has also built Easy Blogging capabilities into their ecommerce package.

More than any other site builder of which I am aware, SBI! has a features list that could choke an elephant.

Best of all, the price is SO reasonable.

The regular price is $299/year – which works out to $24.92 per month. Ken has figured out that if you were to purchase all the tools included included in the SBI! package separately, it would cost you more than 5 grand a year.

Even if you only wanted just the basics – such as domain registration, web hosting, an autoresponder service and web site statistics – it would cost much more than the $24.92 a month that SBI! costs.

Lastly, Ken doesn’t charge a set-up fee.

(I was appalled to learn that some site builder web hosts charge 1500 bucks to ‘set-up’ their clients’ accounts. Seriously, all it takes to set up a new web hosting account is about five form blanks and 2 minutes of their time. There’s absolutely no excuse for that sort of gouging.)

In summary, most site builders are limited in scope and don’t allow for future site expansion. If you are looking for a web host that has an site builder interface, review all the features thoroughly before you purchase an account.

SBI! is still a good option for new webmasters and affiliates who are looking for an easy site builder.

Cheers,

Ros