Review of Ken Evoy’s “Site Build It!”

Site Build It! is a complete content publishing system for anyone who wants to build any type of content-based website that ranks well in the search engines.

Included with the purchase of Site Build It!, you get one domain license, a site building ‘Action Guide’, video tutorials, access to keyword research and  topic research tools, an online site building tool (with ability to upload pages  created offline), mailing list functionality, access to a supportive community of fellow users, and much more.

Site Build It! is a service run by Dr. Ken Evoy in Canada who started his online publishing business with a book titled “Make Your  Site Sell.” I have personally had one Site Build It! site about web audio since 2003 and have seen continuous improvement of Site Build It! over these last several years.  (I use the FTP version of site design.)

See some sample Site Build It! sites including a very famous one built by Evoy’s daughter.

The Positives

Site Build It! is truly an all-in-one solution of training guide, research tools and website hosting. There is no other affiliate/content publishing system that, in my opinion, effectively combines those three items  into one package.

The Action Guide

The Action Guide walks you through a 10 “day” process of building a site. In Evoy’s parlance, a “day” is not necessarily a calendar day, so think of it as a 10 “step” process. It might take you a month to go through the first four “days”.

The first four “days” (no matter how long they actually take) are all about researching your topic  and finding the best topic around which to build a site. The concentration is  on finding and analyzing keywords, including sifting through their supply, demand  and their popularity using a variety of online tools provided for that purpose.  The fifth “day” you finally decide on a domain name and register it in the system. Then, you can start building your site, either using the online  site building tools or designing your site elsewhere and uploading pages.

Personally, I like the concentration of analyzing your intended topic to a  complete extent before purchasing your domain name. Ken Evoy stresses the “turtle  philosophy” of moving slowly and doing it right from the start. Thorough  research up front really makes for a better site in the end. They really want  to make sure you have picked a worthwhile topic that will bring visitors to  your site, which I thoroughly applaud. James Martell follows this approach,  too, as does Dr. Andy Williams.

The concentration of the Site Build It! philosophy is abbreviated C>T>P>M. Early in the first day of the Action Guide, Evoy adds the  letter “B” to the front to turn it into B>C>T>P>M. In  English, this translates to: Brainstorm your topic and keywords -> Develop Content and your site -> Get Traffic coming in -> Presell Visitors with the Content -> and finally, Monetize the Traffic.

There is a “day” devoted to building relationships with your visitors through an email list (a simple autoresponder and mailing list software is built  into the purchase price). There is a “day” devoted to analyzing your traffic stats (stats included with the purchase price).

Back when I got my first Site Build It! site in 2003, the Action Guide was a PDF file, and the keyword research tool was a piece of software that you installed on your computer. As of July 2007, everything is online which makes updates by the SBI crew much easier. (Case in point, comparing a January 2007 printed version of the online manual against the current online manual, I see that almost all references and examples using the Yahoo/Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool have been seamlessly removed from the manual since that Tool was phased out in early 2007.)

The online Action Guide is very clearly written with pictures, links, and colored text, with links to other relevant materials throughout the members area as needed. It also assumes no technical knowledge. I’d rank it right above a “novice” level, but it certainly doesn’t come across that way.

Video Training

The video training is comprehensive, too. In fact, it was created by one of the students who won a competition that Ken Evoy ran for the purpose of finding someone to create video tutorials!

The step by step instructions are broken into 20-30 minute segments and are visually interesting to watch. Very clear. There are even two versions of the video training: one featuring a voice track with an accented male voice, and the second featuring a woman speaking with an unaccented American accent.

Research Tools

On the keyword research tools side, the system is proprietary to Site Build It!, but appears to be an amalgamation of Wordtracker results, Google counts, and Yahoo counts. I’ve used used Nichebot.com for keyword research,  too, and see some similarities between NicheBot.com and Site Build It!  in this department.

For comparison, James Martell primarily stresses the use of WordTracker for  keyword research, however, WordTracker doesn’t give popularity rankings. Dr.  Andy Williams also leans toward the use of WordTracker, but uses it in conjunction  with his keyword analysis software which lets him slice and dice the keywords  in all kinds of wonderful ways.

The content research programs are also quite good, giving you one-stop access to a lot of sources for content ideas for the pages of your site.

Site Builder Software

The online site builder is very well organized and simple to use. As you create pages, it automatically checks your META tags (title, description, keywords), as well as the keyword density of your page content before you save the new information. You can incorporate pictures, graphics, audio, Flash, and video into your site, too. Any links you include in your pages are trackable, whether they refer to other pages in the site, or whether they go off to affiliates or other sites.

There are many templates for your overall site design, and you can tweak colors and lettering as needed. The resulting sites are clean and professional looking, without being too slick or too amateurish. Remember, the overall focus for the sitebuilding efforts is on the content (which is what visitors really care about), not the “look” of your site. The cool part is you can change the look at any time without having to do a lot of rework, and sites look pretty much the same across all browsers. Additional templates were created and chosen through a contest among SBI users.

And, as you build pages, SBI automatically submits them to search engines. Wow! There’s also a “where each page ranks” in Google, Yahoo, and MSN, plus instructions for submitting by hand to manual directories.

Private Forums

Perhaps the best part of Site Build It! is the crowd of success-oriented people in the private forums. They are there to help you through your struggles and frustrations, and they are helpful and encouraging. Building websites in the privacy of your home can often be a lonely endeavor. When you have a question about the process, it’s nice to have a cadre of other users (and even Ken Evoy himself) you can turn to rather than remain frustrated forever.

If you feel you might need such support and encouragement, Site Build It! is definitely the way for you to go. James Martell just started a forum in 2007, but it’s not nearly the size and depth of the Site Build It! forums. My personal experience is that public forums, which tend to sometimes be helpful too, tend to lean toward being more negative. SBI Forums are great.

If you follow the guide through all 10 “days”, you should have a highly performing site at the end.

The Criticisms

I have very few criticisms about Site Build It! It’s a solid web publishing system with great support and continual upgrades and improvements.  The current version is so much better than the first versions I used in 2003.

If you have a lot of website design experience, you might find the online site  builder a bit restrictive to your abilities. If you’re a PHP hound like myself,  you’ll probably go nuts at all that you CAN’T do since all the pages are .html  extensions and there’s no PHP allowed (as of July 2007).  Therefore, there is no WordPress allowed either, and no MySQL provisions.   

You can’t “preload” content for delayed appearance on the site.  Therefore, if you want to continually update the site, you need to login to SBI every day to make your changes or new pages.  That’s a small bother from my “advanced-user-status” viewpoint but might not challenge the novice who doesn’t really know any other ways to update a site.

You CAN incorporate Javascript, but that option also has it’s own problems in cross-browser functionality.  

If you don’t like the templates provided by the online builder, or you want more control over content layout, you can always design your site in Dreamweaver or some other software tool and then upload the pages through the “FTP It!” section of the site. (It’s not “true” FTP, and that might bother some people, but I’ve found it to work fine.)

Some advanced web designers might balk that you’re beholden to Sitesell (the parent company of SBI) for your site. Also, some people might complain that “everything” is online through SBI. I say, “well, tough luck to you.” This is the system Evoy has setup and it seems to work pretty well. If you don’t like it, go for the “do it yourself from scratch” approach of Martell or Williams.

If SBI works for so many people who have followed the process from start to finish, then it must work well. One respected affiliate marketing expert, Allan Gardyne, is an enthusiastic fan of Site Build It! and has several sites on the system, and a couple of public case studies of his own success. Good enough for me.

Note: Since everything is based online, you’ll do best if you have a high-speed internet connection.

Comparing James Martell’s Affiliate Marketer’s Handbook, Dr. Andy Williams’ Building FAT Affiliate Sites, and the Site Build It! Action Guide, I find that the SBI Action Guide is a little light in how to pick a narrow enough niche for your site topic if you want to build a content-based site for the purposes of building affiliate income.

There is a separate area of the Site Central Members Area called “Niche Choose It!” which is helpful, and a downloadable ebook on “Info Product Ideas”, but I still find that Martell and Williams do better on picking raw topics for the purpose of an affiliate-based site.  This may not matter to small business owners who might be building a site to promote their own products and services.

In the “Day 6″ chapter on building your site, there’s a lot about how to make pages of content from the technical perspective, but not a lot of help on “how to write good content.” That’s not really terrible though, because there is Evoy’s separate FREE PDF book titled”Make Your Content PRESell” which covers the topic of writing in complete detail.  Plus, you can get a FREE copy of Gary Antosh’s excellent book “Web Content Made Easy.”  Great supplement material for sure.

Overall Recommendation

So, is Site Build It! worth $299 per site (July 2007)?

Considering all that you get for the price including:

• one hosted domain
• an excellent step-by-step action guide that stresses the slow and steady approach
• fabulously clear video tutorials
• comprehensive keyword research tools and topic research tools
• a good online sitebuilder with many bells and whistles including a short autoresponder and mailing list capabilities
• webmail
• an RSS feed for your site, and
• a success-oriented helpful crowd on the private forums …

… Site Build It! is one heck of a great value!. The total investment of US $299 is really less than $24.95 per month which you might easily pay just to host a site somewhere else, but not get similar support and encouragement from others that you get through the SBI forums.

Site Build It! is primarily targeted towards less-technically-inclined site builders. 

If you have website design experience, you might find the online sitebuilder to be a little bit too clunky for your tastes and levels of patience.

Of course, if you have trouble following directions, prefer to do things “your way”, and don’t have the patience or discipline to follow the success trail laid out in the Action Guide, you’ll probably struggle along, too.

The SBI System is not just limited to people who want to build affiliate/content websites. Even if you own a small business and are trying to attract clients, Site Build It! is a great solution, too.  However, if you don’t want to build your site yourself, there are SBI Certified Webmasters all over the world who will do it for you!

The army of SBI fans are truly devoted to the SBI because of the way it has helped them develop great sources of income while working from home. The fans love Site Build It! and they have made videos to prove it!

These periodically updated case studies give testimony to the power of Site Build It! 
http://case-studies.sitesell.com