But Wait, I uh, ummm, hmmm...

In other pages you have no doubt picked up on the very basic idea that I'm talking about having you build a website about something that interests you, and make money from that website.

Some of you have built a website before and found that it was very technical, and probably found that you didn't get very much traffic. Others of you have never even thought about building a website and wouldn't know where to start -- and perhaps have an unpleasant feeling in the pit of your stomach each time I mention it.

I like analogies. I think a well designed analogy can often do what a picture does; something very similar to that "picture is worth a thousand words" thing. Sure, it has lots of words in it (maybe more than a 1000), but you get the idea, it can give you that eureka feeling of "getting it all at once".

Here's an analogy that I think will make this whole idea of building a successful and profitable website much more palatable for you. My analogy is intended to explain both how this will be very different than you were expecting it to be, and also how the SBI product fits into the mix.

As I write these words, the Apple iPod is about the hottest selling piece of consumer electronics on the planet. It is revolutionizing the whole music world. To witness this thing unfolding, you would be tempted to believe that Apple invented the idea of downloading music files into a portable player and skipping any sort of record or tape or CD. Surprise, Apple is a johnny-come-lately to this whole idea.

Way back in the previous Millennium, as much as six years ago, a little outlaw company called Napster was revolutionizing the theft of music by making it easy for nerds to "share" their music with friends they had never met all over the world. Back then, if you were a nerd, you could download any kind of music you wanted to for free. There were convenient and inexpensive players too. True, they didn't hold very much music at a time, but it was easy to download some new (free) music whenever you got bored with what you had on your player.

So why didn't Napster have the same success that Apple did a few years later? Was this too high-tech for the people who were buying music back then? After all, you had to be pretty "plugged in" just to know about Napster or LimeWire or any of the other hacks that allowed people to easily steal music from around the world. Many people were still getting used to CD's back then. To download free music you had to know about it, and you had to know about searching the Internet to find it, and you had to learn about things like "ripping CD's", and MP-3, and codec rates, and dozens of other technical things that, frankly, left the bulk of the population standing there with a "deer in the headlights" look on their face.

So what happened? Did the people change? Did the technology change? Yes, but only in small incremental ways. What changed was the PACKAGING of the technology. What Apple did that made all the difference, is that they packaged a complete solution. They simplified the hardware and the software down to the point where it was all "plug and play". They made it simple for non-technical people to get involved with the part they knew and understood and loved...the music -- and they hid ALL of the technology behind a curtain. Suddenly taking all of your music with you wherever you go and buying it without going to the CD store was about as complicated as using a TV with a remote control. The iPod and iTunes software are only 4 years old and the online music store just over two years old as I write this. Now Apple, a computer company, sells more music than anyone else in the world.

This same simplification and packaging is precisely what SBI brings to the table when you're talking about building a home-based business that revolves around a high traffic website. It allows you to spend the vast majority of your time focusing on the topic of your website rather than dealing with the myriad of technical nuances that make all the difference between success and failure for a website. If your website is about lizards, you spend time dealing with lizard issues, not HTML and site-maps and Search Engine Optimization. Instead of JavaScript and PHP and SQL, you will be thinking about "home car repair", or "low cost home decor", or "sexy lingerie", or whatever it is that you enjoy thinking about and learning more about.