X-Blogger Tells His experience

I came across a story that I must share. An X-blogger was trying to build his business online with a blog but without knowing how to do it. He made friends with a few people who were quitting their jobs because their blogs were making enough money.

He put in a lot of work over 6 months to only find that he was getting very little results and wasn't happy.

So he decided to build a website and go with the same company that I use and recommend to everyone.

Now, I know how to get found in the search engines. This works with a blog or a website. Blogs should only be an extension of a website and not solely used. They wont be around forever and are severely limited.

If you are resistant to doing a website and will only do a blog and need to know how to get it found, let me know and I can help.

TJ

Here is Travis' story that is a must read.

I’ve been doing a case study of my own to see how well this “SBI thing” would pan out. I think today I can say that I’m officially an X-blogger. Now I didn’t have a long prosperous blogging career like some, I was still a newbie but here is my story:

I researched blogging for 6 months before I started one. I was teaching family and friends how to invest, but I had the desire to help more people. I decided to take my passion to the web and just have one site with everything on it. This way I could teach more people.

I had tried to build a web site before but 8 months and many long hours later I decided that learning computer code was not for me. A blog seemed like a good alternative.

Besides, most of the bloggers I had become friends with over the 6 months were now doing it full time. I managed to become friends with them right when they were quitting their jobs.

On average they invested 2-3 years of “sweat equity”. Replacing your corporate income in 3 years didn’t seem like a bad trade off. I didn’t even consider making money at first I just wanted to teach people, but after learning I could make money from blogging I was sold.

Fast forward 8 months. I have 126 posts on my blog. I’ve commented on a gazillion other blogs. I managed to secure 11 incoming links, and have many friends in the blogging community.

I was invited to be a guest blogger on a few sites which gave me spurts of visitors every now and then, but on average I had 10-16 visitors a day. I was told this was normal and it might take a year or so before I saw any real results.

No one, and I mean no other blogger I talked to had a firm grasp on SEO. It was more like “inundate the search engines with quantity and you’ll eventually gain popularity”. Nothing like what SBI teaches.

I put adsense up after 3 months because someone told me that was about when you should do it. After 6 months I had made only $20.

I worked on my blog nearly every day and after 6 months of hard work I only earned $20. Now I wasn’t in it for the money, but that wasn’t cutting it. I sacrificed spending time with my wife to build that blog and spending time with her would have given me a FAR better return on my efforts. You know the 80/20 that Ken talks about.

My wife was okay with it because she supports me in my endeavors, but I wasn’t! I was dissatisfied and I began to research how to improve my results. Low and behold I stumbled across SBI.

I had heard about SBI before because I found the site 2 years ago when I was researching web hosting for my first website. Of course I was skeptical and the price was a bit higher than the $4 a month hosting I eventually settled for. So I bypassed SBI.

I don’t regret it. I was so immature 2 years ago (business wise) I don’t think I would have appreciated SBI like I do now! It’s amazing what a little failure can do to your senses.

This time my pain and disappointment humbled me and made me more open minded to considering SBI. After some contemplation I said what the heck why not. I've got nothing to lose. They DO offer a money back guarantee.

Immediately I realized that SBI was serious business and this was going to take some work. I left a message on my blog that I was going to be participating in a business start up and will be off the air for a few months.

Well its a few months later. My SBI site went live I think January 28, 2009. I have 22 pages built, no incoming links yet, Alexa rating of 2,526,223, avg. of 8 visitors a day, AND to my delight I’m on Google’s 3rd page back for one of my keywords.

I thought it was a fluke so a few days later I typed it in again and a variation of the keyword phrase and I’m still on page 3 & 4 out of the 609,000 results that came back. Amazing!

Side by side comparison

Time Site Live on the Web
SBI: 2 months
Blog: 8 months

Pages/Post
SBI: 23
Blog: 126

Alexa Rating
SBI: 2,256,223
Blog: 11,851,029

Avg. Visitors
SBI: 8
Blog: 16

Sites Linking In
SBI: 1
Blog: 11

And this is not even considering keywords, title, headlines and the sorts. I’m not a rocket scientist but so far it looks like my SBI site is having a better start than my blog did.

It seems to have more promise AND I love the community here, so I don’t think I’ll go back to regular blogging. I’ll transfer my feed and whatever post I can to my SBI site/blog and invite my 16 blog visitors over to the world of SBI.

I feel sorry for my other blogging friends. You should have heard some of their stories on “how much” work they put it and how little results they got. They’re happy now 3 years later, but it was a very long journey. I’ll invite them to SBI sometime in the future AFTER my snowball starts rolling and I’ve produced more results.

Why do some succeed while others fail? I don’t know about everyone else but for me it was because I didn’t have SBI.

No offense to bloggers, but I think it’s the blind leading the blind. A few “get it”, but I’m sure it’s because they use SBI principles.