My SBI Story

How SBI helped me create a successful and profitable website… and how it can help you do the same.

I want to tell you how SBI [Site Build It] helped me create this website.

I mentioned this briefly in the About Me page. When I created the About Me page,I did so because I thought it was important to let visitors to the site know a little bit more about me the teacher, the professional and me the person.

After all, I wanted to help people by sharing some of the expertise I had picked up over a long career in education, and if I wanted people to trust me and and accept me as a credible professional I knew I couldn’t be just some faceless, anonymous figure churning out web pages.

I knew that I had a lot to say that could help other teachers in the same ways that I had been helped by many of the colleagues I’ve been lucky enough to work alongside, and from the many experiences, both the good and the bad, particularly in some cases, the bad, that I’ve had in more than 35 years in the classroom.

So creating a page to give people a few personal details that could help put the website and my observations into context, and to reassure them that I knew what I was talking about seemed a perfectly natural thing to do.

At the same time, the whole point of creating a website was so that I would be able to communicate with lots of fellow teachers quickly, easily and in a lasting way. So this page explains a little about how I created the website.

I’ve lost count of the times my wife Pam has said to me, after the hours and hours and hours I’ve spent over the years preparing lessons, researching new ways to do things, leaving no stone unturned to make learning as accessible and effective and enjoyable as I could to as many of my students as I could, ‘You must have gathered enough knowledge over the years to write a book, in fact several books. I hope some day when you retire you do write it all down, because it would be a real pity if all that knowledge went to waste when so many other people could benefit from it.’

I knew she was right but I knew I would need more time than I had to write the book, so I put the idea ‘on the back burner’, one of the things on the list to do when I did retire.

In the meantime I’d started to get interested in the idea of a website. I started to wonder if a website might be a better vehicle for communicating what I knew than a book would be. The trouble was, setting up a website seemed such a complicated thing to do.

As usual I did some reading and research and tried to grapple with the ‘foreign language’ of HTML, which seemed to be absolutely vital to know in order to set up your own website. I would pester the IT support staff in schools where I worked with technical questions about various things and learned some bits and pieces but nothing like enough to feel confident I could set up a website all by myself and make it successful.

If you didn’t know the technical stuff – and I didn’t – the only way was to pay out a lot of money to let others set up a website for you, over which you had no control. That was frustrating and anyway, I didn’t have that kind of money to spend. But then along came blogging and very soon it seemed that everyone was able to ‘get on the web’ by creating their own blog. I was no exception.

I decided to create a blog about language learning – after all I’ve taught modern foreign languages my whole career, so I reckon I know a thing or two about how you learn a language and how to teach someone else how to do it.

To set up my blog I didn’t need any technical knowledge because I could create pages as easily as using a word processor. And best of all, I didn’t need any money because I could set up my blog for free.

So I blogged for several months, wrote what I thought was some pretty good stuff and thought this was the way forward. The only trouble was, that, apart from me,hardly anybody ever visited the blog to read it.

It was so disappointing to think that I might spend hours over many months creating content for the blog that nobody would read that I gave up on the idea and began to think that the book would never get written.

That’s when I came across SBI.

I visited the SBI site quite a few times, each time finding out a little more information. I began to realize that here was a way to set up a website that actually stood a chance of being read by a lot of people and didn’t need any geeky tech skills and know how.

I’m cautious by nature so I didn’t jump straight in but from everything I read it seemed that SBI was tailor-made for people like me.

I read some of the case studies of people who’d used SBI. They were ordinary people who had a real passion for something and were able to communicate that passion on their websites. And from the evidence I could see, unlike more than 90% of websites that just floated aimlessly in the ether, SBI sites were successful in terms of the number of visitors they got and the rankings they achieved.

What was really impressive was that people were creating sites about a whole range of everyday subjects, interests and passions that they could write about with authority. SBI didn’t try to attract the hard -sell internet marketers who were out to make a fast buck, the so-called gurus with their inflated promises and get-rich-quick schemes.

Long story short, I was convinced and bought my SBI website.

And I haven’t regretted it.

I want my site to be a long-term success and that’s not possible without real commitment and being prepared to work at it. But the big difference when you use SBI is that you provide the brains, motivation and commitment and SBI provides just about everything else.

You can create pages just by typing in your words, you don’t need to use HTML or CSS or anything like that [although you can if you want to].

There’s help to find the best name for your website, a name that will give you a head start in attracting visitors to your site.

There’s even help to guide you in deciding the subject of your site if you haven’t fully got the concept clear in your mind before you start.

The thing that really sold it to me was that, unlike other website providers who offer to host your site for you, take your money and leave you to it, SBI gave me a complete package including a thorough 10-part Action Guide, including really detailed and helpful video tutorials, that took me from the early faltering steps and led me by the hand to the point where I could write great content and get sustained and targeted traffic.

It even showed me how I could make my website profitable. Some of my colleagues had retired from the classroom and were earning fees for presenting their expertise at training workshops. I didn’t want to get on the training workshop and seminar circuit, so SBI gave me the opportunity to deliver my expertise without even leaving home. My website could be a permanent seminar available to a worldwide audience, and I could be rewarded financially for my efforts.

At the time of writing – 2011 – my site is just 2 years old and it’s already making a profit that is growing exponentially. My site currently gets over 13 000 unique visitors a month.

If you’re still with me at this point on the page you can tell that I’m very happy with the way SBI has helped me create not only a successful website that I know is providing top quality information to thousands of people, but also is helping me build a real online business that is not only profitable but also sustainable. I might still write the book – in fact the website will be a great vehicle for publishing the book.

There are so many more things I could tell you about how SBI helps you towards success. Like, for instance:

how to find keywords that people who use the search engines are really looking for;
automatically submitting free each page you publish to all available search engines;
using a great tool to analyze each of your website pages so that they have the best possible chance of being noticed by search engines such as Google and often beating the competition;
not to mention a community of thousands of people who already own SBI sites and who provide a HUGE amount of help in forums for just about any and every problem you could meet when creating a website.
So that’s my story so far. Thanks to SBI I have a successful website that’s growing every day. Choosing SBI is the best decision I have made in the last two years.

If you’re a teacher like me you could create a successful website in the field of education. Or in any other area of interest that you have.

Ordinary people like you and me can make a success of a website business with SBI.

Why not find out for your self.

What other teachers who’ve read30 Ways to Use Kinesthetic Learning in the Classroomsay about it:

“I’m excited as I start to think about how I can try to incorporate some of the activities mentioned in the ebook into my lessons.”

“I love how you added in the part on overcoming barriers to using kinesthetic learning… because those are indeed the concerns I have that prevent me from using kinesthetic learning activities.”

“I think the ebook is really comprehensive and detailed and easy to read.”Natalie ChanSingapore

“I just completed your ebook and realized that I already use some of the strategies in my classroom, but was amazed at other things I had not thought about.”

“I want to say that this is a great e-book that I will keep for a long time as I adjust my thinking and planning of lessons.”Jo Lisa ByersFlorida (USA)