I recently received a letter from a new friend who knew that I’d been using Sitesell’s SiteBuildIt (SBI) to build an online business. I’ve been at it for about a year and a half now, and this is basically what they asked me...

***I’ve been thinking about SBI, but I just can’t see paying $299 to them. I’ve heard I could get a nice little website set up for free or very cheaply. I know there is more involved in SBI than that, but is it really worth the risk? Do they really help you get traffic to your site?

These were very fair questions, and I figured if she was wondering, other people probably were, too. So here is my answer to her and to you based on my own personal experience of using SBI.

I know what you are saying. I was VERY nervous to shell out the $299 for my first site with SBI (charged it on my credit card, actually) :). What sold me on the idea was...

1. I had been asking the Lord to guide me into something that was legit.
2. When I read their free Affiliate marketing course, it had a completely different “tone” than all the other stuff I had come across. It promised that it was going to be hard work and take real effort to build a genuine online business.

That was such a breath of fresh air after all the get rich quick stuff I had been reading. Sure, I WANTED to get rich quick, but deep down I knew that it just wasn’t realistic.

I got a real sense of the integrity of the man behind the business model that shone through the pages. That may sound silly, but it’s truly how I felt.

I asked my husband if I could give it a try for a year and see if I could make a go of it. He gave me the green light, and I decided to give it the full year to see if I could turn a profit. I didn’t want to spend any money other than the $299, but I did end up spending about twenty dollars for some photos that I wanted to use (it wasn’t a necessity).

If you are serious about building a money-making business, you aren’t going to want to use one of the “free” sites. For one thing, they put banner ads, etc., on your site. You don’t want that.

Even if you pay someone a small fee to build a general site for you, you are going to have to pay for a domain and hosting (about $100 per year or so). Also, all you are getting is “decoration,” so to speak.

A pretty and functional site is nice, but if no one visits it, it’s like building a business in the middle of the desert—a waste of time.

It’s the mechanics of research and building properly that I love most about SBI.