That was the comment left on one of my YouTube videos a few days ago. And it’s not the first time I’ve heard the scam cries regarding SBI!.

Apparently this person heard about the $10,000 prize Ken Evoy, President of SiteSell.com, awarded to the customer who created the best “I Love SBI! video.”

So his comment warned others there was a prize out for videos like mine. I guess he thought my video was created for the sake of entering the contest.

Sorry, Mr. Anonymous-YouTube-commentor, some of us actually use the product and love it. And while I make it no secret I belong to SiteSell’s affiliate program, I still believe in the product and endorse it because I used it to create my site, Flat Stomach Exercises.

In fact, I didn’t even enter the $10,000 I Love SBI! contest.

I also want to point out that everyone who was eligible for the contest had to actually own SBI!. So these weren’t SiteSell employees or random people paid by SiteSell to create hype.

Let’s not fool ourselves. The $10,000 prize was a great incentive for many I’m sure. But these videos were made by happy customers who were proud to show the world how much Site Build It! changed their lives.

Many of these people were able to quit their jobs because of SBI!.

[Update August, 2009:  See updated traffic stats from my Site Build It! website.]

Why Site Build It! Cannot Be a Scam

Every now and then I’ll get a comment on my YouTube channel from someone saying Site Build It! is a scam because it didn’t work for them, or they believe it’s overpriced.

I guess I must have a different definition of scam than some of these people.  In my opinion, a scam is product or service that doesn’t deliver what is promised.  Or the company overcharges for the value provided.

Never does SiteSell promise you’ll make money if you use their product.  Nor do they guarantee it’s easy to make money online.  The only thing they DO promise is that you will get valuable tutorials and tools to build your site that will set you on the path of success.

You have to understand, however, that your success largely depends on YOU and your own efforts.  Building a successful website takes work, patience, learning, creativity and motivation.

Site Build It! provides you all the tools you need for $299/yr (a website builder, newsletter manager, autoresponder, search engine ranking help, traffic reports, tutorials, a topic brainstorming tool, etc.) but YOU still have to bring your own brains and motivation to complete the process.

And here’s a message for those of you who may be turned off by the price of $299/year…

First of all, almost everyone knows that you can easily get a web host for under $10/month.  But cheap web hosts are not in the business of actually helping you build traffic and make money.  They simply host your site and the rest is up to you to figure out.

Websites don’t just attract traffic when you launch them.  It requires effective pre-planning and an understanding for how Internet marketing works.  Cheap web hosts don’t teach you anything about this, but SBI! does. As a customer myself I can tell you THAT’s largely what you’re paying for.

If you were to purchase all the tools that SBI! provides separately you’d be paying much more than $299/year so I definitely wanted to clarify that for people who wonder why the price is so much higher.  Site Build It! is NOT just a regular web host.  It’s a system of tools and tutorials that teaches you how to build a heavily trafficked website.

And with the 30-day money back guarantee, the product is completely risk free.  If it’s not for you, just ask for your money back within the first 30 days.  I promise they’ll give it to you.

If they don’t, just let me know and I’ll get on the phone to SiteSell’s creator, Dr. Ken Evoy.  (Yes, I really do have his phone number.)  But I know that’s not going to be necessary because they have always honored their guarantee.

So before you write something off as a scam, just make sure you do your homework and ask the proper questions before making assumptions.

Is SBI! for Everyone?

No, it’s not. And I would never proclaim anyone that uses it is going to have automatic success.

There is work involved, lots of reading and definitely a good amount of patience and motivation required… just like any other business or money making venture.  I just felt the need to clarify the scam statements because it’s so easy to lump SBI! into all the other get-rich-quick programs on the net.

And I wouldn’t blame people for being skeptical because there are a lot of scams out here. Fortunately for me and the other video makers, SBI! is not one of them.

Watch a demo of me using my SBI! account

It amazes me that many web hosts don’t speak to beginners. They advertise their hosting services using technical words like “bandwidth”, “transfers”, “gigabytes” and more.

The average first-time website builder is not going to know what is meant by a lot of these terms, and mosts hosts don’t bother to explain it. That’s always been my pet peeve and I’m willing to bet they lose many potential customers because of it.

Below I’ve explained, in laymen’s terms, many of the features you’ll see advertised as part of the web host package.

Web Space – The main feature web hosts promote is the amount of space they offer for your site. It’s usually expressed in MBs or GBs. (megabytes or gigabytes). Just for the record there are 1,000 MBs in 1 GB.

The average web site will never use more than 50 MBs, but because of competition, web hosts keep increasing their space and are now offering up to 20,000 MBs (20 GBs) in some cases. I would estimate 90% of webmasters will never need anywhere close to this amount, but it certainly can’t hurt to have it.

Like I said, competition is what’s driving these hosts to keep increasing the amount and they want people to think they need this much space when they really don’t.

However, if the price is low ($7.77/month) like Powweb, then it certainly can’t hurt to have more than you need.

Bandwidth/Transfer – This is the amount of data sent from your web host down to your visitor’s computer. So every time someone visits a page on your site, they download all the images and text from your host’s web server right to their PC. This process happens behind the scenes and most people don’t realize it even occurs.

Your web host will generally offer a bandwidth limit (expressed in megabytes or gigabytes per month), and it’s important you don’t ignore this number. If you go over, you will be charged a certain fee. The more you exceed the limit, the more it will cost you. Each host has it’s own rate for overage.

Now I will say, most websites don’t even come close to going over the bandwidth alloted, but every now and then this does happen – especially if you have a site with a lot of pictures, video and/or large amounts of traffic.

A good way to determine how much bandwidth you’ll need is to use this simple formula:

Visits x Page Views x Average Page Size x 30 days in a month

So if your site gets 2,000 visits per day, 3 page views per visitor and the average page size is 25KB then your bandwidth usage for the month is…

2,000 x 3 x 25KB x 30 = 4,500,000 KB = 4,500 MB = 4.5 GB

So for this site you’d need to make sure your host offers at least 4.5 GB per month. These days that won’t be a problem. Powweb, for example offers 400 GB per month and would be plenty of room for most sites.

Beware of the unlimited bandwidth claim! Some hosts will advertise unlimited or unmetered bandwidth as if you have no limit to the amount of traffic you can receive. What that usually means is they don’t monitor your traffic up until you reach a certain limit, but once your site exceeds it, they will start monitoring you.

It’s never UNLIMITED. That’s just a marketing ploy because they realize most people never come close. Trust me. Big brother is always watching and they will charge you if need be.

FrontPage Extensions – Having this feature allows you to create and publish your website using Microsoft FrontPage. This is great if you are a beginner and plan to use an editor to create your pages. I highly recommend it.

FTP Access – FTP stands for “file transfer protocol” and it’s the process of transferring files from your local PC to the web server.

So let’s say you don’t have any web editing software that publishes right to the web like Microsoft FrontPage, you’d create your HTML pages locally on your computer and then use an FTP program to transfer the files to your web server.

I recommend using WSFTP. It’s free and pretty easy to use. You can learn more about how to use it here.

SSL Certificate – SSL stands for “secure socket layer”. Basically you’ll want this if you plan collecting sensitive data from your visitor (address, credit card info, etc.) Unless your host is free, almost all of them offer some kind of secure method of transmitting data.

Now that you understand more about various web host features, you can make the right decision about choosing the best host for your website. View my web hosting options page.