So, what DO I have to do?

OK, now at this point maybe I have convinced you that you won't have to deal with the technology that makes a website tick...so you may be thinking "OK, then what DO I have to do?

Well, it boils down to a little bit of thinking and planning, some organizing, some online research, and some writing. At each step of the process there would normally be a huge amount of extremely time consuming and boring data gathering and comparison. Happily, SBI automates all of that. Normally, you would be left on your own to figure out what to do next at each step. There are thousands of books and ebooks on the topic. All you have to do is read them all and then figure out what to do when they all disagree. Or, you could just follow the online guide that is built into SBI. It takes you step by step through the whole process on a path that has led thousands before you to online success.

By now, maybe you are thinking "well, I don't mind thinking about my subject and letting SBI do most of the grunt work, but what about this 'writing' thing you mentioned. That's got me a little worried. I'm no Hemingway". Not to worry. The type of writing that works the best on these sites is the kind that most people excel at; simple honest "two friends chatting" sort of writing. I like to describe it this way. You've got a friend that shares your interest in the topic you've chosen for your site (let's use lizards for an example). Your friend sends you an email saying "hey, I just saw something on TV that says there will be a Discovery Channel special on white lizards next week. I never heard of white lizards before!". Having just returned from a vacation to New Mexico, you fire back a quick email about the white lizards you saw there. Maybe you're thinking "but I don't know anything about the lizards in White Sands New Mexico", and my response would be "me neither, I just Googled it while I was writing this". But seriously, I'm not going to do a website about lizards and neither are you. You're going to do a website about something you already care about and enjoy learning about. And more importantly, the writing you'll do is just the same sort of writing you would do in an email to a friend who shares your interest.

So a successful website has lots of pages right? Right; that's where the work that I alluded to elsewhere on the this site comes in. It takes time and effort, but it is certainly not rocket science. "But where do I get the ideas for all those pages I need to write". Not to worry, SBI to the rescue. This is one of those times where SBI provides a useful simplification of the process and hides a huge amount of important technology under the hood. You see, the name of the game here is getting your website to move to the head of the class when people are searching for information about your topic. The key to that is supplying lots of the right kind of information. Information that the Search Engines like. Normally there is a mountain of research involved in figuring out which topics the Search Engines will like the most. SBI does that for you.

And it really does do it for you. You think about your topic a little bit, type a handful of words into SBI to tell it what your site will be about, and it comes back a few minutes later with a long list of topics relating to your chosen website concept. You take each one of those topic ideas (called a 'keyword phrase') and pretend it came to you in an email from a friend. Many of them you will already know enough about, since it's a topic you are interested in. Like "earless lizards". Duh, everybody who is into lizards knows all about earless lizards! The other ones you get to have some fun and do some online research with both the tools that everybody knows about, like Google, and some special tools built into SBI that other people only wish they had. You learn a little bit about it, and then "fire off an email to your friend". In fact, you can even use your email application to type the text in (and spell check it), and then when you're done you feed that text into the SBI machine, and it turns your "email" into a properly formatted web page and adds it to your site for you.

There is a little bit more to it than I've described here, but this is the bulk of what you'll be doing. Taking a new keyword phrase about your subject and writing "an email to a friend about that". You'll need to do that about a hundred times. Sounds like some work, huh? But it sounds simple right? That's what I told you, it's hard but not complex. Not easy, but simple. The real beauty of it, is that since you chose the topic, it's FUN!

In addition to this writing, you will also be doing some organization to decide what to put where in your site, and you'll be looking around for various ways that you can make money off of the people who show up to look at your site. SBI helps with both of those too. For most people who do this, making money amounts to using your site to educate people about the topic (warm them up, so to speak), and then send them off to somebody else's online store to buy something. Everything is already set up to make it easy for you to get paid for bringing them a customer. Just some more of that hidden technology making your life easier.

So that is pretty much it. Making some decisions up front, letting SBI's gears whir for a bit, and then settling down to the process of "writing a bunch of emails" about something you already find fascinating and probably know quite a bit about.

Here's some stuff from the SiteSell website that will fill you in on some of the other features of the SBI "business machine":

A quick explanation of the CTPM process