Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

SiteBuildIt! test first impressions
I'll have to say that my first impression of SiteBuildIt! was not what I expected.

That's not a bad thing, though.

I set my son Joel up with the task of building his first website with SiteBuildIt to see if it lived up to its reputation for being an effective tool for helping even the inexperienced create successful websites.

I expected on his first day that he would jump right into keyword research. As a matter of fact, I had told him that was the plan for today.

Was I wrong! But I really should have known better.

After all, I've seen how many people jump in and try to get a site up quickly with no preparation. And I've seen those people stuck with underproducing sites that, a year later, they give up on, concluding that "all that talk about making money on the Internet is just a bunch of baloney."

SiteBuildIt! starts people out right, helping them understand and develop the totally different mindset they need in order to succeed on the Web.

The first day of the 10-day preparation period is devoted to teaching how to reach people through what they're searching for instead of simply slapping up a site and expecting hordes of people to happily wander in with their wallets open.

It hammers home the need to look at selling on the Web in a totally different way—not as "how can I get them to buy from me?" but "how can I provide them with what they're looking for?"

This first day with SiteBuildIt challenged the preconceived ideas I had come in with, namely that Joel would do a website on soccer and monetize it by referring visitors to other sites through affiliate programs. SiteBuildIt encouraged us to keep an open mind on what to do a site about and how to earn money from it and let ideas come out of the brainstorming process rather than trying to force our preconceived ideas to work whether the brainstorming process confirmed the validity of those ideas or not.

In all, we did a lot of reading. And I came out of all that reading even more impressed with SiteBuildIt. Clearly, this is no take-the-money-and-run company or product. They impressed me as sincerely seeking to help their customers succeed. And they have a track record of customer success to prove it.

There is no way you would see a company that didn't truly care about its customers' success go to all the effort of educating its customers to give them every possible edge like SiteBuildIt does. They even go so far as actively pleading with readers to follow through the preparations step by step instead of jumping in and trying to succeed by trial and error instead of following proven processes.

My one concern as we read through the preliminary materials was that it might seem too overwhelming to Joel and lead him to cool on the idea of building his own website. After he called it quits for the evening, I asked him how building a website through SiteBuildIt seemed to him now.

He said it was more reading that he expected, but that it made sense and still seemed like it would be fun. Then he took the next section of preliminary reading off to his room to read later.

So far in my test of how SiteBuildIt works for a sitebuilder who is completely new to ecommerce, I'd say that SiteBuildIt shows a lot of promise as a tool for newbies. It educates and guides new sitebuilders to give them the best chance of succeeding.

I'll keep you informed as I observe Joel continue to build his first site with SiteBuildIt.
Jeff