SBI Review: The Pros & Cons of Site Build It

Site Build It (SBI – affiliate link) is a comprehensive suite of site building and marketing tools for entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and small businesses. It offers a step-by-step video and written guide that teaches users the most important online marketing techniques to succeed in an online business. I tried SBI (affiliate) myself several years back and can see a lot of value in this system for people starting an online small business or taking small business online for the first time. If you are already familiar with online marketing, have more money than time, or need to build a more complex online presence, SBI (affiliate) may not be for you. So without further ado, here is the pros and cons:

Pros:

• Extensive step-by-step guide to online marketing video and written guides
• Has a strong set of brainstorming and market research tools to help you narrow down your niche market, evaluate the competition and determine how best to position your business against them
• Website builder tool is broken down into blocks so that basic search engine optimization (SEO) rules are followed on your site (for example, meta tags)
• Extensive traffic building and monitoring tools
• Resources to help build content and create a relationship with your online audience
• Monetization strategies to expand the profit possibilities of your site
• Active and supportive online community
• Extensive “Tips and Techniques” area which includes the best advice from the forum
• Social networking integration
• Easy email automation tools
• Included web hosting
• Good value for $29.99 per month (or $299 yearly)

Cons:

• Going through all the training and working the system is time consuming – you can avoid this by utilizing their “Do it for me” (affiliate) services
• The website building templates look dated – there’s a work-around if you are tech-savvy, but then  you probably wouldn’t need SBI (affiliate) to begin with
• There is so much info in the forums that it may take a while to find the answers you want
• If you already have a good handle on internet marketing, much of the information here will seam repetitive
• The system is cumbersome for more advanced users who don’t need to go through each step

In conclusion, if you plan to create your own online small business and need step-by-step guidance, SBI (affiliate) is a great set of tools.  If you want access to all their tools and learning materials, but don’t necessarily want to create the entire site yourself, their “Do it for me” (affiliate) services may be a good bet for you.  However, if you want to grow a larger business, you may need additional functionality and a “bigger” looking web presence, SBI’s limitations will keep you from expanding the functionality of your site.

What happened to my day? A RescueTime review

As an small business owner, it feels like my time is pulled in all directions: leads need to be generated and managed, clients must be well cared for, vendors manged, business administered, and finances accounted for. I was wondering what activities were taking up most of my time and if I was making the best use of my time.  It felt like I was working and working but not really getting anywhere.  Enter RescueTime, a software app that automatically logs your activities and creates an easy to read dashboard to let you know what you do all day.

The program is easy to install and can leave a little icon in your task bar.  The free version only tracks time spend on the computer, but RescueTime Pro gives you the ability to create real-time alters, track offline time, and get a deeper set of data.  The real-time alerts allow you to set a pop-up to advise you about predetermined activities.  For example, I know that I have a tendency to get caught up reading my favorite business blogs.  But spending an hour on Small Business Trends or Marketing Profs is quite productive; four hours, not so much!  So, in order to contain my inner marketing geek, I set up a notification to pop-up if I have spent more than 55 minutes at one of these sites.

So, where does my day go?  After making some tweaks to what RescueTime considers productive activities and what I consider a productive use of my time, I discovered that two activities were taking up too much of my time.  Sorting through a mountain of emails and veering off to read the latest articles those emails were pointing me to.  During the course of providing marketing consulting services to various small businesses, I ended up signing up to email lists each time I conducted research for my clients.  And, being a sucker for good info, I couldn’t help but stop and read a few of them.  Yes, I am an information hoarder!  Despite my reluctance to give up interesting info, I forced myself to unsubscribe from several lists.  In my calculations, this should give me back two hours a week.  So guess what?  I am going to spend this time actually writing for this blog.

If you are an entrepreneur or (especially) a solopreneur, one of the biggest obstacles to success is managing your limited time.  My consensus of RescueTime is that it is an excellent tool to see exactly where your time is spent without taking up too much additional time.  At $9 per month, I calculate that if I am even one hour more productive with the Pro version, I’ve achieved a respectable ROI.

Out of Hibernation

After almost a year and a half of hibernation, the Affordable Marketing Blog is waking up and changing it’s name to Feasy Marketing.  During this long nap, we were busy dreaming up an amazing enterprise software company, FossaTec Business Systems, and how it could revolutionize the way that corporations handle internal services.  Unfortunately, this once pleasant dream ended with a lot of tossing and turning and the difficult decision to close down FossaTec.  Now that I no longer spend all my time trying to run, fund, and market that company, I have gotten back to my roots at Aldeia Global Marketing and to this blog, which is our voice to the outside world.

The new Feasy Marketing Blog will focus on making the marketing function faster and easier for entrepreneurs.  As a two-time entrepreneur myself, I know how it feels to both run a successful business and how to go out of business.  Although I prefer success, I’ve learned a lot more from failure!  In re-launching my old, successful small business marketing consulting firm, Aldeia Global Marketing, I will finally be putting into practice much of the advice I’d been dishing out for years.  And the Feasy Marketing Blog is the place where I share this advice with you.  I will provide an honest assessment of the tools and techniques I’m using in my own business as well as passing out some tips I’ve learned along the way.  Note that many of the links I provide for products I review will be affiliate links.

Please feel free to share your ideas, comments, and suggestions for ways to make marketing faster and easier for entrepreneurs and small businesses.  After all, as small businesses succeed and grow, so does the job market and our overall economy.  I look forward to building a relationship with you in the new Feasy Marketing Blog!

Best Wishes,

Alexa Ronngren

Cargo Finance: UPS gives small businesses working capital!

On September 9th, the company is launching a new program for small businesses called Cargo Finance. Basically, UPS customers will be able to borrow up to $100,000 to use as working capital. According to a BusinessWeek article:

“One of its trial customers is Pedors, a $2 million Marietta (Ga.)
importer of orthopedic shoes. Along with shipping Pedors products from
Chinese factories to U.S. warehouses, UPS pays the Chinese supplier up
front for the goods. Pedors wires UPS half the cost of the shipment
once the shoes leave China and has 60 days to pay the balance, with
interest. Pedors Chief Executive John O’Hare says working with UPS has
helped his firm expand its product line. “This service cuts out all the
middlemen in international trade,” he says. Prior to the UPS deal,
O’Hare relied on a bank credit line secured by his personal assets.
With UPS, the collateral is the shipment itself.”

UPS: Making Loans to Small Biz

This is a great opportunity for small business importers or exporters! And now that the value of the dollar is relatively low, US goods are less expensive to some foreign markets, such as those in Europe.

No time for marketing?

Today, on the Duck Tape Marketing Blog, John Jantsch a blog titled “I Don’t Have Time for Marketing” :

Parkinson’s Law is the adage that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” It was first articulated by Cyril Northcote Parkinson, appearing as the first sentence of a humorous essay published in The Economist in 1955.Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing, Sep 2008

Since I started Aldeia Global Marketing, Parkinson’s Law has had been quite active in my life!  As a marketing consultant, you would think that marketing my own business would be on top of my to-do list.  Unfortunately, after creating and executing my client’s marketing plan, I often find that I don’t have time for marketing” my own company.  Of course, if I don’t take care of marketing in-house, how can I line up future clients.  Perhaps I need to hire a company like mine to do our marketing!  Seriously – if you don’t have time for marketing, find a way to make time.  Hiring a company like Aldeia is one way to “make” time.  Another way is by creating more efficient processes.

One of the biggest drains in our time as small business is the very passion that can drive our business to success.  We become emotionally attached to our businesses and want to get every detail perfect.  Voltaire put it best when he said “Perfection is the enemy of the good.”  Sometimes things need to be perfect.  But more often than not, good is better than perfect.  Why?  Because you can get a lot more “good” accfomplished than “perfect”.

Encouraging customers to recommend your business

Today one of my favorite marketing industry websites, Marketing Sherpa, had an interesting how-to article about cutting marketing expenses. The article lists the 11 steps taken by a marketing director for a plastic surgeon’s office in order to reduced marketing expenses. What caught my attention is that the main theme running through the article is to concentrate your marketing efforts on existing customers. This is a great strategy if you sell a product or service that is consumable or have a variety of offerings targeted at the same audience. But in this case, it was a plastic surgeon. Isn’t plastic surgery an infrequent type of expenditure, where clients spend years between procedures? The idea here is to target existing clients and help them become advocates of your business. One of the most brilliant techniques was giving customers a laminated card with their before and after pictures. This allowed them to easily share their experience with friends and family.

I imagine the same marketing technique can be used by web designers, remodeling contractors, hair dressers, gyms, and other businesses that create a visual difference in their client’s lives. So, how do you encourage customers to share their experience with your company?