Dr. Ken Evoy
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Name: Dr. Ken Evoy
Industry: Internet Marketing, Business Building
Website: www.sitesell.com
Products: Site Build It
Ken Evoy’s Bio: What more can be said about Ken Evoy? He started out with probably of the most influential manuals in internet marketing history with “Make Your Site Sell” and has then gone on to have built the Site Build It marketing empire. Site Build It has attracted more than 40,000 customers and 80,000 affiliates that believe in spreading enlightened ideas to individuals who build successful businesses that they previously couldn’t imagine.
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Interview Transcript: Download The Ken Evoy Interview PDF
David Jenyns: Welcome to an exciting call today for www.davidjenyns.com. I’m extremely excited today. I’m going to be chatting with the person who’s perhaps had the biggest impact on my internet career. I don’t even know if he knows it. I got first introduced to Make Your Site Sell way back in 2002, early 2002. That was a manual on pretty much how to sell online. When it came out, it was so far advanced from what ever else was out there. Even today, you can pick up that manual and it is a solid report that you could follow for building an online successful business.
I kept an eye on his website for what he did for Make Your Site Sell. Before Make Your Site Sell, and SiteSell, he did a lot with penny stocks and I followed along with that as well. I was especially very interested in the stock market and I took a lot of the principles that he taught and that he wasn’t even necessarily teaching. I was copying what he does because I know he is an avid tester. I applied it to a little thing I did with the MCG, selling pieces of the MCG. I also applied it to my Metastock website.
I joined as an affiliate in early June 2003. When I signed up, shortly after the next year in 2004, I moved into my SiteBuildIt website being in the top one percent of all the websites online at the time; I dominated my niche within Metastock. It was the number one within its category on SiteBuildIt in the financial sector and has been for a very long time. At the moment it is bouncing around.
Then in 2005 I ended up becoming an affiliate for Ken’s SiteBuildIt and promoting it.
I would always find it awesome that Ken would hand sign his cheques and even write notes to his top affiliates, keep up the good work and all that sort of stuff. I really used to get a buzz when I’d get that cheque in the mail. In April 2006, I was lucky to chat with Ken. He gave me a call and we talked about a few different things: what I was doing as an affiliate because I’ve been in the top five percent of all SiteBuildIt affiliates since January 2005. I haven’t dropped out once since 2005.
I was one of the first affiliates to use the Don’t Buy SiteBuildIt. At the time I was advertising on Google and getting a 25% click through rate and it was huge. I was smashing it out of the park and I had Ken’s affiliate manager contact me and asked me whether or not I had something to share.
Sadly that technique did get a little bastardized for want of a better word. So many people started using it and it really did start to hurt the brand because you’d search for SiteBuild It, a company that I loved, and all you’d see is these ads, saying Don’t Buy SiteBuildIts. I think SiteBuildIt made a smart move a little while ago and said, look we’re going to have to stop this. It was something that worked in the early days but it really did move away.
When I chatted with Ken back in 2005, he asked me had I heard about a thing called web 2.0? This was back in 2005, well before Twitter, Facebook or MySpace were really in that vogue. I thought I was on the cutting edge and knew what was going on. I said, no, and you asked me, Ken, I don’t know if you even remember, but you said, have you heard about this web 2.0 thing which has since gone on to be massively huge, obviously. We all know where web 2.0 is these days.
At the moment he is the head of the ship over at SiteBuildIt. I know this is a huge intro, but they’ve got 40,000+ customers, 80,000+ affiliates. He’s built up a massive empire and I’m so honoured just to get a little bit of his time. So I’d like to welcome you to the call Ken.
Ken Evoy: Thanks very much David for that wonderful introduction. It has been an interesting and long and winding road from starting out with making SiteSell which was based on a hobby, and the penny mining stocks which was a mathematical model that I had developed to find basically good looking stocks.
It’s never given me pleasure just to make money just to make money so, when I got onto the internet to do a little research for these stocks, within a month I realized the internet was really an infinite number of niches. As opposed to being a consumer of information, which I was in my first month I was online, I decided it made an awful lot of sense to be a producer of information and to use that information to reach people with a similar interest that I had and to sell a product.
In those days, Amazon was getting started, and the big question was, could the net be actually used for commercial purposes? That’s when I set about basically teaching myself to write software, so I could take my little data base and turn it into a product. Even then it was very much like SiteBuildIt. It was a combination of an e book and a tool. How to build a website that would sell, writing good sales copy and finally how to get found by the search engines.
So over a period of a year, I learned how to do all that, and I launched a little product PennyGold and I think if you look up penny mining stocks, I think you’ll still see that old site, it’s goodbytes.com/pennygold, in the top ten. People still find it. They’ll send an email in asking for this. We sold a thousand copies at $1000. I thought it would take three years to do it. We sold out within a year and a half. We still get emails to this day from people who find that site, saying, I will pay anything for that, $5,000, $10,000. I have to have it. The answer from support is, what part of, it’s not for sale, do you not understand?
I still get emails from people who use that original software. A couple of months ago a very nice guy sent a golden penny and basically said, you changed my life. I bought your product, with my last $1000, borrowed a couple of thousand dollars from family, was in debt. Now I have a $600,000 house paid for, $700,000 in the bank, absolutely no debt. I do nothing but invest my own money and my friends’ money in return for a percentage and earn a very handsome living.
I was very happy for that chap, but I could not do that. It gives me no pleasure to make money just to make money. There’s nothing productive in that. It was kind of a hobby. It was an experiment in human psychology and developing a mathematical model to predict it. But once I knew it worked, and made quite a bit of money doing that, it became more interesting, once I found the internet to say, I wonder if I could turn this into a product and sell it? Based on all I learned from that, that’s where Make Your Site Sell came.
Make Your Site Sell was really the first book that was really at a reasonable price, hard core, based on experience, that worked, information on how to develop a site. Originally it was meant to sell but it grew into building traffic, the whole, everything you need to build a successful website. From there, through the branded books Make Your Knowledge Sell, Make You Words Sell and so on were written.
After a few years, we realized the vast majority of people loved these books, read these books but don’t use the books. It’s only a very small number of exceptional people who really can take information like that, use the information, figure it all out, turn it into a system and succeed. I’d say we’ve launched an awful lot of big careers, most of them internet marketing, not in the general business sphere, not in the small business sphere of raising turtles or whatever it is they happen to know and love. It’s a complicated thing to build a successful business.
Even back then it was very easy to put up a website, but not to build a successful business. So the bottom line was, we were going to go back to the PennyGold model. The PennyGold model was a combination of the book and tools you needed in order to execute properly. If I’d just written a book about how to successfully invest in penny mining stocks, most people would not have done it properly. Give them the tools they need and suddenly everyday people are able to do extraordinary things.
I think that’s the biggest lesson I’ve learnt from SiteBuildIt, is remove the difficult part, the technical part, the part that requires you to really have been 95% average in high school and university in statistics, it’s all hard core left brain stuff. Take that away and it enables people to focus on what they know and love, their business, and they can really do extremely well.
That’s when we decided to leave books, and what started out as a very simple little site builder, grew into a series mostly aimed at affiliates. It grew into a complete ten day process, from brainstorming all the way through to monetizing at the other end. The basic concept of Make Your Site Sell which was making a site that sells. Having the product on the internet, a website is useless. It’s just a collection of words and pictures that sits on a hard disk someplace and if you don’t get traffic it might as well not exist at all, even if you spend $700,000 on it.
However if you build a site that delivers content, that delivers the information that people are searching for, now you’re on the right track. Good content builds traffic when it’s properly formatted. Again, there is every tool in the SiteSell needed for what you should be creating a site about. You may be interested in snowboarding, but there’s a way you can turn snowboarding into something that is unprofitable and there’s a way you can sub niche it in a way that is going to be very profitable.
So proper brainstorming, keyword research is important. We invented the whole concept of a theme based content site. Back when search engine optimizers were laughing at that concept in the late 90s, we developed this in a series of articles that later became the Affiliate Masters course that became SiteBuildIt with the tools. The engines looked at more than the single pages. They look at entire sites, what they’re about, how well they’re respected in terms of inbound links and so forth.
Good content builds traffic but it also does more than build traffic, it pre sells. It builds your brand of one. I know a lot about cactus. I love to grow cactus. I did a site on cactus where we live. I can not only write well about it, knowledgably, I can speak to people who know the niche and understand that this guy really knows what he’s talking about. I’m building my brand of one, I’m building my credibility through just sheer great content. As that starts to happen, you start getting what’s called off page criteria.
The on page criteria, which is putting keywords in all the right spots on your page, basically was enough in the old days before Google, AltaVista and even other engines were measuring things like how many inbound links. When somebody clicks on a link in a search engine results page, how long do they stay away before they come back? They’re looking for other indications, not only was this relevant, but was this a good page and meets our searcher’s needs?
The next thing is, most of that you don’t need to really work on. If you develop great content, most of this happens. The exception is building a good inbound links program. You really as well as building good content, need to develop a good inbound links program from a variety of different resources, so that doesn’t mean just getting a list in Yahoo or a directory, but from a variety of resources get quality inbound links that tells search engines, hey, people like this site. They like it enough to link to it.
That starts raising your site the way the way a tide raises a boat in search engine results in general. So over time SiteBuildIt became this more and more comprehensive set of tools, that showed you how to build content, that showed you how to build content that would drive traffic, that would pre sell your traffic and finally now that you have hundreds and thousands of pre sold visitors per day, now you’re ready to start to monetize that.
Again monetization is something that we cover, not assuming that you want to be an affiliate or an AdSense advertiser but taking a view from where you are. In the early days we find out what you want to do and then enable you, show you, and give you the tools to build a site that’s going to enable you to turn that site into business.
That’s still one of the biggest concepts that is not understood on the internet when we’re fifteen years into it now, the difference between a site and a business. People still talked about putting up a site and about how easy it is to blog and none of that has anything to do with building a business, with developing pre sold traffic that you’re going to be able to monetize. It’s staggering how major web hosts, how the blogging craze, everybody blogs because everybody else blogs. But what is blogging really? Blogging is really just building a website that is in a certain timeline, in a time oriented, time sensitive format.
The reason blogging took off is because the technology called RSS came along and RSS enabled you to distribute your content rapidly. People can subscribe to your blog and immediately know what it is that you blog. Immediately knowing is important for the blogging world.
We took RSS and we were studying that in the early days. We track a lot of major trends from very early on. Some of them come and go and just make a little noise and don’t happen. That’s part of the value that we deliver to SBIers. A lot of what we deliver in terms of value is what we don’t cover. They just don’t need to know it, never needed to know it and it came and went. Web 2.0 was clearly going to be important and we said how do we take this and make it relevant to our small business person? The answer is in blogging.
The RSS was the key technology, not the blogging software. What RSS enabled us to do was take a typical SiteBuildIt site, which is an evergreen, theme based content site which has momentum. The day you stop blogging is the day your traffic starts deteriorating because we were looking at most blogs as being time sensitive.
Theme based sites are evergreen. You build your sites, you build your links. It takes months, even years before you really start to see significant deterioration. However, let’s incorporate RSS and enable us to distribute the information as people create new pages without them having to do a single thing more, without having to become a blogger, without having to learn any of this technology.
Immediately they are able to have a blog page of their most recent pages, have it distributed, have it pinged to the engines. A lot of people don’t understand how much there is underneath the hood of SiteBuildIt because we try to make it look simple. Like Tiger Woods, look at that swing, it’s so clean, it’s so tight, it’s so simple.
That’s what we do with SiteBuildIt. Underneath that we were the first people to develop the site map XML automatically from content. Yahoo came out with a different format, that was on within a few days. When Yahoo changed and went to Google’s format, we were back with that. When Bing, Microsoft at the time came out with their version of it, we modified for that.
If anybody reading this has no idea what sitemap in XML file is, they don’t need to, that’s the whole point. Everything is taken care of behind the scenes, so that the average SBIer, if he’s using tools, they’re business tools. You’re sending out an Ezine to your subscribers. You should do both. Because you have a good subscribership to your site, your blog, does not mean that you should also not have an Ezine.
So SBI encompasses everything to enable people to basically do what the very first product PennyGold did. It has the content, the theory and all the tools to enable people to build businesses, not websites. A website is just your place of business. People mistake the place of business with the business.
That’s about as long as your introduction, David. That’s where we came from and where we’ve gone to over the ten years that we have been doing this. What amazes me is still nobody in the world does this. It just makes so much sense to me. It’s like the MacIntosh of web hosting.
You have to make the obstacles disappear to enable the average person, the everyday person who knows something about something whether it’s Pilates, whether it’s crocheting, whether it’s propagating turtles or cacti.
Whatever it is that you know and love, you can create an e business about that, that is going to earn you income in a variety of ways. It may be selling a service, it may be selling a hard good, it may be through Google AdSense. There are fifteen major ways to monetize your traffic once you have the traffic. The key, of course, is getting that traffic and even more, converting the traffic.
David Jenyns: You talked about a few things. It was fantastic the way you went through that process, and you even answered one of the questions I wanted to talk about, which was that idea of how do you build a successful business online. You distilled it down.
I think that’s definitely one of your skills, is the ability to take the complex and make it simple. That idea of, all you have to do is get some good keyword research, build up some content, it will pre sell your visitors when they come there. Make sure your on page criteria is right with that content that you do put up on the website. Do some off page criteria as in link building. Try to get quality links in and then look to monetize it. Really they are the steps.
I think one of the biggest hurdles people have when they’re coming online, is building that trust and the loyalty with the visitor when it is they get there. You positioned yourself very early on by the thing you did with penny stocks .How do you build that trust? You basically sold that product and then kept to your word once it sold out, even though you had people saying I want to buy it, and I’ll buy it for $10,000, you said, no, I’m sticking to my word.
That leads into, how do you build, because that’s the biggest hurdle people have with doing online business with someone, is that trust and that loyalty?
Ken: I once gave a talk to a group and told them basically, even if you are the world’s biggest thief, the world’s worst psychopath, the old saying that honesty is the best policy is not just nice in the offline world, it’s a must in the online world. We’re talking about the ultimate communication medium.
So if you don’t know how to treat a customer properly, if you’re not dedicated to building a great product, you’re going to have a very miserable life. I suppose you could earn a few dollars by continually turning over very angry customers. But sooner or later they’re going to add up in forums and all the places that people can go now to complain, until finally you’re out of business.
I can’t imagine that anyone would actually want to lead life that way, but it certainly is a lot easier if you understand that basic concept of being transparent and being focused on creating a great product, what we call over delivering.
Your customers are very real people. We sell internet marketing information, if you want to boil it down to a phrase I hate to use about ourselves. It’s the same thing as we are a web host. At the end of the day, we need to host websites. But that’s not what we do. What we do is all the software that’s wrapped around that which enables people to succeed. You do need to acquire skills that enable you to position yourself properly, but not in a misleading fashion.
If you start to lie, if you exaggerate, you will be discovered. It’s just as much work to develop a great product and build a great business in an ethical manner as it is to be thief. One of my favourite examples is the old movie Heat with Robert de Niro and Val Kilmer. I don’t know if you’ve seen that movie.
David Jenyns: Yes, I know it well.
Ken Evoy: They’re brilliant thieves. They rehearsed for months. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on capital expenses, practising armoured car heists. I remember looking at my wife and saying, the amount of time and money and energy they’re spending on this, why don’t they just start a business? The worst case scenario with a business is you end up bankrupt, but if your thievery goes bust, you end up in jail.
Why not build an ethical business, why not deliver great product, and yet what do we see all around us David? We see so many get rich quick, so many blatant exaggerations. One of the things we always talked about on SiteBuildIt was proof, the proof of success.
We document that proof in so many ways, so many verifiable ways that people can read, follow, check. The case studies that we did seven or eight years ago are the same case studies that just grow and grow over the six or seven years. How powerfully does that speak about SiteBuildIt?
Nobody else does. People all come out with these crazy claims of how much money they’ve made in their first month but there’s no documented proof of success. You know there’s no such thing as get rich quick. If I had a get rich quick product, I would not sell it. Would you sell yours?
David Jenyns: No, obviously you would be out there trying to get rich quick off you own scheme.
Ken Evoy: Who in the world, in their right mind buys this? They buy it because the people are brilliant copy writers, who manage to convince them that this time it is different. Even against your better judgment you know it can’t be different, it’s just not possible. If everybody could get rich quick the world would be a different place.
It’s a really interesting and complicated question. The way to build trust is just simply to stand out by being honest, by really focusing on your customer. It is so boring, it’s so trite what I’m saying, and yet so few people do it.
I have a weekly meeting with the head of support and we go over so many metrics, from a special address where people can reach me if they’re really totally unhappy with the level of support they received. That’s a metric. How many people complain in the forums is a metric. Everything is measured so we can improve it and bring it as close to zero as possible. Ten percent of the outbound emails are monitored by a human reader and she gives it a score as to how good it is, including things like grammar. So every single element is constantly focused on improving customer support.
Once you’ve got that mindset, it really becomes very simple. How good are we? How do I know? I need to measure. Once I measure, I can start doing things to make it better from your customer to your product.
We have a wish list, David, in terms of what people want. That’s interesting in itself because to some degree as a product developer, you have to lead, you have to take the product into areas that aren’t being asked for because it’s not their job to see the next major trend. That’s probably my single most important job. What is the next major trend, whether it’s RSS and how do I use that for SiteBuildIt or web 2.0 and how do I use that for SiteBuildIt. The most important job is taking the product into those important new directions.
As well, an important job is listening to customers. ‘I wish SiteBuildIt could do this. This part of SiteBuildIt bugs me. Yes, I can do it by doing this, but it would be much quicker if I could do it this way.’ When enough people get on board and support a wish, then it gets onto our production schedule. Some of them are ridiculously simple and just oversights.
We can’t have, and we don’t pretend to have complete understanding of all of our customers. If you just admit that to your customers, and say, I can’t know everything you want, but I sure would like to know what you want, it’s good. People respect you for that. Instead of the typical big company, or famously politicians, I did not have sex with that girl, you’re open, hey, I made a mistake. We’re going to fix it.
We don’t know everything that you could possibly want. Tell us. We’re going to give you that. People respect that. You stand out by letting people know that you do care about them, not just saying it in words, but acting, delivering on what it is that you’re saying. So building trust at that level is the big part of your question.
The smaller part of your question in terms of a website is much simpler. It gets back to again CTPM (Content, Traffic, PreSell, Monetise).Nowadays CTPM has become so well known, so used, that it is now in the land of overuse and abuse. People start now developing software that will slice and dice content.
You want to do a website, but a bad website on Anguilla. You’ll do a search on the Caribbean island Anguilla. You’ll take the first four or five sites, you’ll seed it in the software, it slices and dices content, turns out ridiculous pages, builds some fake links in from free hosting places like blogger.com or HubPages. There are a bunch of them that have become blogger heaven. Hopefully if you do hundreds of these little mini sites, a few of them may go in the top ten and then make you a few dollars.
I can’t imagine anything more soul destroying, more depressing. It’s not a business because, sooner or later, Google has already discovered parts of it and will ultimately crush it completely. For all that work, because it is work, it’s like going back to Heat. Why spend all that time and energy on something that ultimately is going to get destroyed and gets you put into Google jail, when you could be doing it properly, building a real business that has real equities that ultimately people like my daughter with her website about Anguilla.
She could sell that to companies here in Anguilla or Caribbean tourism companies for at least a couple of hundred thousand dollars, because of the traffic. Not because of the income she generates, because they could develop much more income because of their larger reach, but she has a unique property. She has thousands of visitors a day who love her website and who monetize it. Now she puts on her own advertising, she has Google AdSense, she sells some hard goods.
She could if she wanted, live here in Anguilla and build a tour company and make a great deal of money hiring people, training them and doing tours for tourists because she’s probably the most well known person on this little island of Anguilla amongst tourists.
She’s done that, she’s built that trust and recognition by delivering great content, by knowing her area.
People focus on a lot of different areas. Just to let you know, this logo, the Better Business Bureau online and this and that, nothing speaks better than somebody who writes content that other people with an interest in it recognize as being great. The funny thing is the average person can do that.
What they can’t do is figure out search engines, worry about CSS, is master all the various complicated stuff which is tedious, the brainstorming keyword and all that paper research that has to be done upfront. If you don’t show people how to really think about this properly, they will end up with the weirdest site concept if they’re even thinking about CTPM. Give them the correct process with tools and all of a sudden, these people are able to operate at an extremely high level. Once you free them up to write about what they know, it’s amazing.
The majority of people can’t write very well. One of the most common complaints was, I can’t write. Even if I could do this, I can’t write. You say, how ridiculous is that? Of course people can write. They can talk. They can go in to their boss and ask for a raise. They’re perceived as having a certain kind of personality by the way they communicate with friends. They’re constantly negotiating with spouses and children on a variety of family type issues, but it boils down to negotiating and communicating.
Suddenly you’re in front of a keyboard and you can’t write? That’s nonsense. So we put out a book and you can get for free at mycps.sitesell.com. You can download that book and it’s very simple. It just simply destroys this myth that you can’t write. Yes, you can’t write to be Hemingway, but it’s not about being Hemingway.
This is about communicating something that you know already, communicating at a very simple, easy to read, grade seven, grade eight level, and getting your personality into that writing so people understand and see who you are. Anybody can write at that level, and yet curiously people somehow think that they can’t communicate. It’s been an interesting exercise of just constantly knocking down the roadblocks.
Mycps is a great low tech example. Content 2.0 that we just launched is a high tech example. Web 2.0 you alluded to earlier. That’s obviously now a major and important future of the web. For those who don’t know it, it can be summarized basically as, your visitors create content for you in a way that spreads virally. In a nutshell that is what web 2.0 is.
Amazon was probably the first company to do that with their reviews. It wasn’t true web 2.0, in that it wasn’t viral. But in terms of users creating content for you, that was the beginning of that concept. Then you look at some of the other examples like Twitter. Twitter doesn’t create content, users create 100% of that content. Facebook, YouTube, you could go on and on, whether it’s video. With Facebook the first thing you’re uploading is yourself. This is who I am. After that, the platform is there for social interaction.
A great next use for the internet after searching for information is social interaction. How much value that has for the average small business person when you only have x number of hours is a completely different thing.
Our job is sorting this out, turning it into a module, giving you some ideas how to use Twitter and niche Twitter in a time and cost effective matter. Don’t go overboard. The focus of a small business is still websites. But now, it’s web 2.0, get your visitors involved. Get them to tell you what they miss about Anguilla, or how I propagated this particular cactus. You can create versions of Yahoo Answers. There are an infinite number of things you can do with this and when we launched this two years ago internally, SBI is selling it as a separate add on module. It became so successful SBI has literally tripled and quadrupled already very good traffic.
We simply bit the bullet and said this needs to be. Up until now SBI has been all in one. This module surpassed our expectations and became part of what we call SBI’s 2.0. It is the first true web 2.0 platform for your small business person.
Up until now web 2.0 has been well financed by venture capital driven companies that had an idea like Twitter. Before Facebook there was MySpace. Before MySpace there was Friend Search. Facebook finally got the recipe correct. It took hundreds of millions of dollars to build a platform to enable visitors to come on and create better content for them which is what builds their traffic. Some have yet to prove a model as to how they’re going to make money with this.
But with a theme based content site, you are now getting your visitors to build more and more content for you. You get more long tail keywords which are those rare keywords that, for a site like Anguilla, you might know ten keywords. In fact there are over 40,000-50,000 keywords for which you could find Anguilla. That builds up more traffic, stable traffic.
If suddenly the most important keyword isn’t in the top ten, maybe your ego cares, but your pocketbook doesn’t because by now the vast majority of the traffic is coming from very stable long tail tier two or tier three traffic and you have such a presence, so many inbound links to go with that traffic, to go with that content that you really did build a site that is becoming invulnerable to incursions by larger companies.
People say blogging is web 2.0. That’s only in the weakest sense. With blogging, you still have to create the content and basically you’re limiting your visitors to comment on what you’ve written. That’s very restrictive and it’s also not the best way to build a business.
It’s like creating a pile of magazine clippings and over time those magazine clippings become less and less relevant. If I wanted to find out about Anguilla, I might find fifty little clippings here and there instead of a couple of good pages, or if you want even a mini site within a bigger site, that is all about Anguilla in one spot.
So for your average person who is searching for information, a theme based content site anyway is much better than blogging. As web 2.0, you’re hitting out of the park now. There’s nothing like getting visitors to create true, honest to goodness web pages on a variety of content that you probably would never even think about writing about.
On top of that, other visitors comment on what they’ve created, it all starts spiraling around through emails to each other. It all gets fed into your RSS feeds so other people see your sites being updated. Google sees your sites being updated. Its spiders come more often. We’ve talked about at SBI how it all snowballs, and how momentum builds pre 2.0. Well post 2.0, the snowball snowballs. It’s like we’re talking about exponential growth now.
A lot of people think this has been like a blueprint from day one. It hasn’t been. SiteSell was supposed to be all there was. It kind of grew from there until finally I got frustrated when I realized most people can read information, they just can’t actually put it together and use it. That’s where it all came from.
David Jenyns: I think you mentioned some key things there. Obviously the web 2.0 is where everything is going online at the moment. There is the idea that the information that the user feeds back into the website helps it grow. It’s like the user is giving back what it is that they’re looking for. That’s obviously going to speak right to the other users out there who are reading that. They’re effectively getting the same information that they’re looking for. I can see that snowball building.
I think the few key nuggets that came out for me from there, were things like the way that you evolved as far as asking customers what it is exactly that they want and building it. Like you said, the Make Your Site Sell when it first came out, that was kind of your end game plan. By evolving and giving back to the customers what it is that they’re asking for, it is very similar to web 2.0. It’s like you’re giving back the information that it is that they’re looking for.
Then taking it down a level, you were managing to effectively measure everything. I think that is one thing that has come out for me, the way that you’re so granular. I knew before that you kept an eye on those numbers, but you really can’t improve what it is that you don’t measure.
I think it’s fantastic to hear how much you pay attention, even down to the level of customer support. We all know businesses, and that’s what you’re about, building real businesses, are centered around the customer. So obviously at the core of that, you need to be supporting that customer, providing that customer service. That interaction is important.
That is one of the things I know as your business has grown, it’s probably got harder and harder to do this, but in the early days, you just signing those cheques to the affiliates and hand writing those notes, you were connecting with those affiliates and making that bond with them to want to help grow you. I think it started to build on itself.
The question that came out for me after all that you were talking about was, you talk about finding those passions, be it cacti or whatever it is that you’re most passionate about. There’s that age old argument about should I be going for, a passion or should I look where the money is and look for something with commercial intent? Or do you just build it around the passion and the money will come?
Ken Evoy: Well that’s my personality and I think it’s most people’s personality. Most people hate the job they work at, even if they’re making $100,000 a year. They’d rather not be working Monday to Friday 9 to 9. There are those lucky souls who have a job that they absolutely love. Why would you then go and want to build a business that is going to doom you to resenting, oh, I have to sit down and create another web page.
I’m very much passion based. If I’m not interested in something, I can’t do it. However, my best friend who was one of the top bankers, the smartest businessman I’ve ever known anywhere, any place, retired a little while ago. He looked around for various business deals, or he didn’t even look, they came to him. After two years, do know what business he decided to get into? Pizza Hut.
He now owns hundreds of Pizza Hut franchises. He travels around the world with top executives. None of this is a passion of course. This is logistics. This is about buying a group of Pizza Huts in a given city, knowing that he can turn them around, run them better. They may be money losers and he turns them into money makers. For him, business is the passion. For me, it’s the particular business that has to be the passion.
If you’re the type of person who can make a website reviewing lawnmowers or whatever, that’s good. The closer the keyword is to a product in general, the more it’s worth, the more somebody searches for a trademark. If you’re searching lawnmowers – John Dere, John Dere is probably somebody who’s closer to making a purchase.
Writing reviews of products on content sites can be very lucrative. It can also be very boring. It can be also a dangerous because it’s getting a little overdone. But there’s no doubt about it, right off the bat, you can probably make more money with a product content site than a general theme based content site.
With SiteBuildIt, we explore those issues anyway. Day 1 is a general introduction, day 2 is the beginning of brainstorming, where you measure three site concepts one against the other, and that’s the direction we take our brain stormer into basically becoming a smart brain stormer. How to pick the best niches for you, how much time do you have, what are you interested in? It helps you narrow it down or widen it, depending on some of your answers.
Developing a set of keywords and how in demand they are and how much supply there is, even though we do it in a unique way and a more reliable way, now the more important functionality is making that brain stormer smart. We help you develop a niche that, maybe you’re more passion driven, maybe you’re more money driven, but at the end of the day, by the time we’ve taken you through day 4, you understand what your motivations are, you understand what the monetization models are going to be for this site for which you have yet to pick a domain name. You understand what the monetization potential is, not just the different ways, but this should be a highly monetizable site.
Only on day 5 do you actually pick the domain name. You asked a really interesting question and it’s one we address in SiteBuildIt because it’s an important one. There are people who are quite comfortable developing an expertise. You can do a lot of research, become an expert in lawnmowers and write a website. It may not shine with the same quality as a gardener. My Dad was a lawn freak. He knew everything there was about lawns, fertilizers, lawnmowers way back then. There are people out there, I’m sure, today.
That person given the same set of tools is going to outperform somebody who is simply doing it for Google AdSense and affiliate income. In the long run, when Google decides, you know what, there are a few too many products, sites out there writing reviews, probably the one who is passion driven is going to make it because Google tracks much more than just the words on a page, much more than just inbound links.
It’s on record that there are over two hundred off page factors from the obvious ones where somebody puts down a link in my search results that I give a surfer, how long did they stay away before they came back. On the top ten, which one are they clicking on? There are obvious ones like that. There are ones that you and I cannot begin to imagine. Picture hundreds of computer science PhDs, whose only job it is to figure out what’s the best site to give for any given query. They’re going to get pretty sophisticated and way beyond anything you’re going to read in any SEO book or forum.
We don’t pretend to know the depth of SEO to that degree. We don’t need to. If you create great content, get your keywords correct on the page, not to the degree that you used to have to. In the old days there were specific numbers. Now it’s really, get it more or less right. Don’t make any glaring errors like not putting your keyword in the title. Build some inbound links and then all of those other off page criteria. You get this great content out there, and the content 2.0 becomes even faster and RSS bloggers back a few years ago before that, again accelerated it.
Google starts taking up more and more of these signals that people like this material. It is not only relevant to a search on lawnmowers, it is now a measure of quality. That’s what Google is going for more and more. Ultimately in ten or fifteen years, and again, Google is on record as saying this, ultimately they want to have artificial intelligence. That is where their search engine reads the page and just says, that was a really good page on lawnmowers or Anguilla or propagating turtles.
The challenge I always put to SEO, is your site ready for that test? Of course I don’t think there is an SEO in the world except for the whitest of white hats, like the joke who would say, yes, I am ready. SEO sites certainly are ready because they’re created from a passion, a knowledge, two points first and get the search engine right second in order of importance. You do have to get them both correct. It’s a long winded answer to this short question but it depends on the person. For me, I couldn’t do a site that didn’t excite me. There are people who can do sites on keywords that are profitable.
The next level of course is spamming. People who simply take other people’s content, slice and dice it and. create more site content for inbound links and that has just crossed the line. It has crossed Google’s line as well. The shame is that they’re teaching people how to do this and hopefully those people will get flushed when Google takes a serious stance on that type of abuse.
David Jenyns: I think they will. Obviously Google wants to give the best user experience that they can. So I think what you’re talking about, some of those little flash in the pans are not about building a business and building a real business that provides real value, not trying to take advantage of these little arbitrary opportunities.
I think that’s why it’s absolutely key and why I recommend that people start with SiteBuildIt. There is so much noise out there, sometimes you can just get caught up in all of the noise and not get any work done. If you have that step by step approach that you can follow through, it just makes it so much easier. All that hard work goes in behind the scenes. It’s like, I’m a little bit of a Mac fan boy. So much goes in behind the scenes you don’t have to worry, it just works. It’s the same sort of thing where SiteBuildIt just works if you follow that process.
I think you probably see, and you touched on a few things that people do, obviously chasing those little get rich quick schemes. You’d see a lot of new people coming online. Where do you see people making the biggest mistakes early on? Are there either one or two key mistakes, where you say, if you avoid this, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and heartache.
Ken Evoy: Well, from the point of view of starting a theme based content site, and if you’re a small business person you don’t have to create a theme based content site, you can blog. Some people perceive this as being anti blogging. What I would say is, if you want to create a news oriented site, if you want to be a site that has the latest breaking developments in Anguilla, then blogging is the correct software to use. SiteBuildIt isn’t the correct software to use.
If you’re a very clever person like Seth Godin for example, a pundit, a commentator, who has a lot of beaux mots, a lot of clever little sayings to come up with a day, then you’re building your brand for your next bestseller. Blogging again is a great software because it creates a type of site where really, and Google has shown this in interesting Google studies, people basically read blogs, they find them, they subscribe to the RSS, they come to read your latest posts and they leave. That’s the way you use a blog.
If you want to do a research on how to propagate a tortoise, you’re not going to find that in a blog. I don’t know why you’d do a blog on propagating tortoises, but if you were to do a little blurb on something you discovered while propagating this particular species, it isn’t beginning to answer your overall article that you’re looking for on the propagation of tortoises. Of course, since these are time sensitive, just like Twitter, if you become inactive Twitter, you’re going start to see Google recording, putting tweets into the search engine results, become inactive in Twitter, and you’re going to fall off the map very quickly.
If your blog starts going down in terms of frequency of posts, you start becoming less and less relevant. Develop a theme based content site which is the correct format for most small business people, that is your single most important decision. What’s the biggest mistake? Blogging.
Everybody blogs because everybody else blogs. The bottom line is it is the wrong format. Think of blogging as simply a format, another way to build a website that comes out differently. It doesn’t come out nicely organized in three tiers. Yes, you can have categories based on keywords, but those categories when you click on them, are a bunch more posts related to that; there’s no coherent nice organization.
Think of a very good reference book written by you with your particular expertise in an area, your particular way of writing, and with your particular way of getting messages across as opposed to a bunch of magazine clippings. Which one are you going to use when you’re searching the internet for information?
We subscribe to over two hundred blogs. I love blogs. But we subscribe to them to keep up to date on what is the latest stuff that’s coming out. You know that noise that you were talking about? The vast proportion of that noise amounts to zero. We have to follow that because every now and then, something comes out that is the beginning of something big or is just a really clever little idea that we can twist and use it this way for theme based content sites. But for the most part it is a lot of noise.
A lot of people spend a lot of time coming up with their latest thoughts. Or if Google does a press release, immediately you’ll see twenty blogs report that Google is doing this. It’s tiring, what’s the point? We don’t really aim at internet marketers. Most internet marketers could really use SiteBuildIt.
You’re really great at what you do, David, but you are one in a thousand. The average person in the internet marketing game does not do well. They’d be better off focusing on something in the real world that they enjoy doing and they know about. Use SiteBuildIt and unlearn a lot of the bad lessons they learned and build a real site that turns into a real business that builds long term income.
The first biggest mistake is doing what everybody else does and blogging. The second biggest mistake, once you’re building a theme based content site, choosing the wrong niche. That’s why we focus more and more on the brain stormer. People don’t understand that if you only have two hours a week, don’t make travel your niche. It’s just not going to happen. There are little companies called Travelocity that are in your way.
Pick something that’s going to be at the other end of the section. Don’t pick Italy, don’t even necessarily pick Sicily. Maybe pick a little unknown region of Italy. That’s what your site’s going to be about because you have decided this is as much time as I have. Therefore I’m going to build a site about a niche that is winnable, so I can in fact build traffic about this narrow niche that will turn into income. Maybe in my next one I’m going to do a broader one.
Making people think about what they know, what they can do, what they love, but at the right level. Sometimes you’ve got to slice that down. Don’t do a site about the Caribbean, do a site about Caribbean cruises. There are all kinds of ways and sometimes they go too narrow, but that usually isn’t the case. There are all kinds of ways to broaden a niche you’re thinking about, narrow a niche that you’re thinking about. Show people how to think, how to use the tools properly because if you choose the wrong niche upfront, you’re in for a year of pain. Finally you realize, you make a post at a forum and somebody says, why would you make a niche like travel?
People fail at SBI. Ten percent of people refund SiteBuildIt and it’s always for the same reasons. It’s too much work. I didn’t realize that I had to do this much to build a web business. The internet does not suspend the law of gravity. Apples still fall to the ground. It does not suspend the law of business. It takes work to build a business.
The good news is, let’s say you put ten hours into your business. Without SBI, 9.9 of those hours are going to go into mastering some new technology, technique, something that’s changed, something you shouldn’t have to worry about, you should be focusing on your business.
With SBI all ten of your hours go into building your business, creating the content, using tools that otherwise would make something very complicated, using a tool without which would take you longer. Blogging is probably the most common mistake. Two hundred million blogs. You know the old Bruce Springsteen song? ‘Fifty seven channels and nothing’s on?’ There’s two hundred million blogs and there’s not an awful lot on the internet.
There’s a small number of extremely talented people who do a very good blog. Specifically in the internet marketing area, I find there are people who write good stuff for us to keep up to date with. But out there in the real world where there are people who are interested in ’57 Chevys, blogging is just the wrong choice. It’s not the way to build a business.
That’s the way we look at SiteBuildIt. It’s funny because ten years ago we named SiteBuildIt, when everybody was thinking sites. Now, after ten years, we’re looking to rebrand, call it SBI, the same way Home Box Office is HBO because it’s not always just about movies at home, it’s about their own innovative programming. SiteBuildIt is not about site building. It’s about business building, how to develop long term, profitable businesses.
In the next year or two you’ll see us, re branding, slowly changing over SiteBuildIt to SBI and now making those SBI information points in your mind start to become about business building. We can’t have the word site building, yes you build a site but that’s just a part of what is necessary to the real thing, which is building your business.
David Jenyns: You talked about some of those tripping points that people are getting stuck on, following what everybody else is doing, choosing the wrong niche which I think is a really big one. Part of that had to do with the amount of time the individual has. I know it’s the same with everybody, we’re getting less and less time, more and more noise is popping up, so it is much easier to get distracted.
Mindful of that, if you were to pick a few really key leverage points, areas that someone should focus on to try and get the biggest bang for their buck when it comes to time, where would you say people should try and spend their time, mindful there’s not enough hours in the day?
Ken Evoy: I’m not saying this because I’m trying to sell SiteBuildIt, but SiteBuildIt leverages your time enormously. Having all the tools in one place, all coordinated so they work together, all within one system that is laid out where all the information that we track and digest both in our forum and in hundreds of outside locations. Using SiteBuildIt is a tremendous leverager of your time.
Aside from that, it really depends on where you are. People take SiteBuildIt, and non SBI sites grow to a point where it is too big for them to manage. At that point you have to decide, is this as big as I want to get? I’m making $50,000,$100,000,$150,000 a year by myself, no overheads, very nice, I’m happy. I don’t have to argue with anybody, a partner, an employee.
The next big leverage step, and there is a whole section on this in SBI, is about contracting out to developing nations, for tedious stuff. There are technologically savvy people out there who have graduated from IT schools who can do research for you. They can do stuff for you that you would like to do but would take too much of your time, but if you give them exact instructions, you can get information back that is of value to you in terms of what you want to do next.
Leveraging your business at a certain point, whether you’re hiring employees and you really want to grow your business, like happened with SiteSell. SiteSell has now almost seventy people. It wasn’t the plan. It grew at a certain point where, from one programmer and one web master, a UI guy and I was doing support, maybe three or four people. Immediately when SiteBuildIt took off, I needed a support person, otherwise, you would never get much further because I’d be doing support twenty-four hours a day.
As your business grows, hiring people is important. A lot of the people in forums have written, I’ve been there, done that, I don’t want to hire people. I’m very happy with my site, making $80,000 a year. I spend twenty hours a week at it, I love what I’m doing, I don’t want to hire people. That’s perfectly reasonable.
Knowing what it is you want to do with your business, at the far end of the spectrum I would say, knowing when and who to hire and add to your team so that you can really grow that business to greater and greater levels is a key leverager, a skill you need to acquire.
At the far end, as you’re starting, taking your time and doing the proper research. I know, and we’ve talked about this ad infinitum, we know SiteBuildIt is not only the best product of its kind, it is the only product of its kind out there. The average person doesn’t know that. The average person sees nothing but scam after scam online, people who promise great riches, business success and so on.
Just like with PennyGold- when we sold PennyGold, there was nothing scammier in the whole investment world than penny mining stocks. The fact is though, that they’re so predictably scammy that you can develop a mathematical model to predict the next time that these stocks, certain stocks would be manipulated.
But try and sell that online. That was a challenge, David, because the arena was full of scam artists. Internet marketing is also an arena for scam artists. There are some good people out there. Ralph Wilson, one of my first early heroes. Alan Godine, these are people who supported SBI early, but I wouldn’t ask them to be affiliates, because I respected what they were doing. Ten years later, they’re still delivering good content. It’s a good question, and it’s really the most important decisions that you make that leverage everything you do afterwards are the first ones you make.
So do your research until you’re sure what you want to do. If you want to be blogger, then SBI is not right for you. If you want to build a small business online, and you don’t have $100,000 or a million in venture cap to create a Twitter, the next big thing, most small business people are going to create theme based content sites. The cost is low, the energy is yours, it’s your time, it’s your energy. It’s up to you, you can control the process.
There’s absolutely no reason why you can’t build a successful business, unless you make wrong decisions upfront. If you decide to buy blogging software to build a theme based content site, you’re making a mistake. If you buy SiteBuildIt and then decide to build a site based on travel, and you only have two hours a week, you’ve made a fatal mistake.
If you choose a niche that is too narrow, some off island off Anguilla, there’s just not enough demand for that. No matter how much content you create, no matter how well it is written, there are just not enough people who are going to search for that particular tiny site keyword.
I’d say those initial decisions that you make early on, how am I going to monetize? If you want to sell an e book, but you’re not somebody who likes to put up with customers, I’d say put up with customers. When somebody in a forum says that, put up with customers? I’ll tell them right off the bat, I know that you’re not meant to sell product.
If you’re attitude is putting up with a customer, don’t go there, you’re not going to be a happy puppy because customers complain. If you’re not focused on improving things, so that customers are happy, and your attitude is putting up with customers, you’ve now made an important decision that you’re going to have to live with for years until you can hire people to take care of that part of the business, or you give up. The odds are you give up, because you’re doing something that you don’t enjoy.
So the major leverages, David on the front end when you’re starting out are the first few key decisions that you’ve just got to get right, and on the back end it is when you decide, this is as much as I can possibly do. It’s really deciding, do I want to start bringing other people on board and then putting them in the right spot.
David Jenyns: One of the key leverage points I can see as well is what you manage to do so well is to keep your finder on the pulse, to see what’s coming down the pipe, what’s on the horizon. I think I got my first insight when, sure I got it back reading Make Your Site Sell but also when we had a chat a long time ago and you mentioned web 2.0, this thing that was so new. So I’m interested to know, where do you see things heading online. Are there any shifts you can see happening or further developments? You might like to throw yourself out there and put yourself out on a limb and give some insight as to what you see as coming.
Ken Evoy: Right now we’re in what I call a period of digestion. Years and years ago I wrote about how video, music, anything that could be digitized was going to be distributed to the web. I believe in the next ten or fifteen years, we’ll start to see video websites. Not video in websites, but video websites. You’ll click, almost navigate within a video to get to other parts of a video based website. As the band width becomes faster and faster, websites are going to change. Of course before that happens, Google has to figure out, or the next great search engine has to figure out voice recognition, and understand what’s in those websites.
But video was something we talked about years ago and we’ve seen that happen. RSS and blogging, we talked about that. Web 2.0 is obviously a major part of our push for the foreseeable future, continuing to improve content, too, so that people can get more and more out of it.
When I say digestion, social interaction is an offspring, a cousin if you will, of web 2.0. People are creating content. They are creating content as they interact socially. That’s a major shift.
If you asked me five years ago I would tell you, how do people use the web? They use the web to search for information. How do people use the web today? They use the web to search for information and those are still the people who interest us in the business world. They also use it now to interact socially. Is there some crossover in business applications? Of course, just as there is in the real world. There is doing business and there is socializing. You don’t socialize only to do business, which some people seem to mix up online, but you do socialize sometimes because it has a business purpose.
That’s the way you can think of the whole social interaction explosion that has been happening on the web today. When I say digestion, what I mean by that is, more of the same: the development, the ongoing refinement, the pushing of the major trends that started a few years ago over the next two or three years.
Right now, what else is important on our horizon, there’s nothing major. Are there neat little modules and things that we have coming out? Yes, but that’s not really what you’re looking for. What you’re talking about are the really major things like video. We were talking about how the web is really going to fundamentally change as the majority of the world is on 24/7 high speed.
You know when you see that movie Apollo and you see somebody pulls out a slide rule. Everybody then says, the slide rule remember the slide rule? Remember dial up?
Now with fibre optics, the speed of the web is getting earth shaking and that has implications for, we talked about how the web is going to split, and you see it happening. The network simply did not use the web. Not so much it didn’t get the web ten years ago, it did not use the web. Now look at how ABC, NBC, CBS are starting to merge more and more the programming you see on TV with the programming that they carry online. Why? Because the band width is there.
We talked about, this is years ago, how two tiers were going to evolve. There would be very big corporate sites that could use this cutting edge technology, the very high band width and develop and deliver completely different websites to what you and I would even consider to be a website per se.
Then there is going to be the lower band width, almost the interesting part of the internet. This is where all kinds of people are living and sharing ideas, writing terrific websites that are turning into businesses, talking to their grandmother by video Skype across the country, where all the rest of us live and play. Again there is overlap, there are no strict black and white boundaries.
To make a long story short, I see no brilliant new things that are looming on our horizon. I’m sure there is still the great unforeseeable thing that is in some venture capitalist’s hands right now. It’s going to be a twist on social media, on web 2.0 or whatever.
Where is the next great thing coming from? It usually comes from, and because of, changes in technology. Ajax. A lot of the changes in technology are what enables today’s sites to exist. They’re more or less the expression of technological advancement and we couldn’t do this ten years ago. It wasn’t possible because of band width, it wasn’t possible because Ajax didn’t exist, it wasn’t possible because all these things have to fall into place before the next great trend that consumers of the web see.
Those aren’t on the horizon as far as I can see. Maybe a smarter guy like O’Reilly could give you a better answer than that. But as far as we can see as SBIers, as a typical business online, it’s going to be more of the same, interesting, pushing in new directions and you’ve got to be there to catch those new directions, but no major new technology that we can see that will make a major difference.
David Jenyns: I know you keep up to date with so much information it’s amazing how you can keep your finger on so many different things. Who are reading at the moment? Are there any people that you’re reading, or what you’re reading at the moment?
Ken Evoy: You mean in terms of blog wise?
David Jenyns: Yes, blogs or even any books where you see, yes, this is where I’m getting a lot of this information. You’re distilling so much and a lot is obviously going to be your own insights, but I always like to know where the influences for great thinkers come from.
Ken Evoy: Obviously there are the books that have come out lately like Super Freakonomics. At the end of the day, it boils down to, influences are important, but it is the way they tell the story. A great one was What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell. There are books like that which just spark your thinking and your imagination.
The whole thing about global warming, Nathan Myhrvold was the CEO of Microsoft and Bill Gates calls him the smartest person in the world that he knows anyway. He has basically put together a think tank. They have got more patents than any corporation in the last decade. The way he looks at global warming is just fascinating.
He starts off, if global warming turns out to be due to human behaviour, that’s an interesting observation coming from the smartest guy in the world, and they’ve come up with a solution that would cost less than Al Gore’s marketing budget. It’s stuff like that which has absolutely no relevance to our particular business that sparks your brain and gets you thinking, how these guys think out of the box. The Freakonomic guys, I like them.
Online, people like Kevin Kelly. There are people I think are must read, like Danny Sullivan; I like the way he writes about search engines. Although we track a lot of SEO writers, I think he writes with a certain clarity of thought, doesn’t get hung up on all sorts of ridiculous little things. Matt Cutts, it’s important to read him, whether you think he is a PR guy for Google or whether he writes his own stuff, regardless, it’s still interesting.
When Google came out with their webmaster guidelines, a lot of SBIers jokingly accused Google of plagiarism because basically it’s what we’ve been saying from day one. Matt Cutts and Danny, and some other analysts, we’ll take a lot of their stuff and just keep pushing it and pushing it, but at the end of the day, it still all fits into the CTPM model, but coming at it from different angles which can stimulate our way of thinking.
We have interesting people in our own forum who come up with some good ideas. Tomaz, who has a tennis site, does very well, now makes over $1000 a day and still contributes to the forum. The forum is about give and get, help and be helped. It is the friendliest place, there are no flames, everybody is focused on moving forward together, but Tomaz will push relentlessly on the importance of link building. He does everybody a service because, although of course it’s well covered in SiteBuildIt, there are five major resource areas just about link building, he stresses link building.
He has to build links to get that snowball going. There is a point at which things do start to build momentum and you can slow down and eventually it takes over on its own. Elad, one of our case studies, he started out in day 1, he was a typical guy, worked in a cubicle and started a website. Here’s a man who did research until he found a good niche on birthday cakes. I don’t know whether it is still a good niche, because six or seven years later he’s had a lot of copycats since then.
But Elad goes over some months, two million visitors, and it’s consistently above 1.5 million visitors. Elad earns a very healthy living, travels around the world, and basically, every now and then visits the forum and writes interesting stuff, but Elad does not build a single link because he is beyond that point. Tomaz will make the great example of, guess what, guys, you’re not Elad.
It’s important to build links, and he’ll come up with his best five ways based on his experience of building links. So there are really some excellent people in the forum. I would do a disservice by just naming one, because I could probably name fifteen or twenty. I’d forget one and he would be mad. Even in the forums there are great people.
People like John Battelle. I like reading the Pro Blogger and the Copy Blogger. Derryn Rowse. It’s just good writing about writing, good writing about blogging. It’s not particularly because I believe in blogging but I like the way they write, I like the way they think. People who regurgitate, people who basically spit out the same thing, there the ones that get thrown out.
Seth Godin of course is on my list. I enjoy reading Seth Godin. Tim Ferriss with the 4-Hour Work Week, although he has a flawed model, the concept is interesting, parts of it are very much CPPM, but his monetization models are flawed. It’s not a way that people are going to be able actually earn income. But he is an interesting thinker. It’s important not to read just very narrowly in your particular niche of online business building but read the people who touch the periphery. There is no end of good bloggers out there.
Although I tell you that blogging is not the right medium for most small business people, for who we track, it is basically all bloggers. We’re not interested in a general site about blogging, about search engine optimizing, about whatever, it’s the latest and greatest. Tech, crunch, flash. There is no cohesion to them, there is no individual entity, they will just find, pick good stuff, most of it is irrelevant to the average small businessman, but some of it challenges us, some of it you just file away, and say, ok, let’s see if other people keep mentioning this. We don’t have to be on the cutting edge, you tend to bleed on the cutting edge.
When we’re talking about web 2.0, that was like cutting bleeding edge stuff. As you start to understand it better, and finally as you see how it fits in with SiteBuildIt, that’s when you jump in with both feet and start writing a tool that’s going to make sense for SBI owners. I could probably go on and on, but those are some of the people that we read. I’m sure there are a couple of other researchers that have their favourites. Then of course there are all the Google blogs that you have to keep up with, just so you aren’t missing anything.
David Jenyns: If people want to keep up with you, do you have a blog? I know you have you Twitter and also post different things in the forums. What’s the best way, obviously people can check out SiteBuilIt, or sitesell.com. What is the best way to keep on the pulse of what you’re doing?
Ken: We have a blog and the blog is used as much to transmit our Ezine and communicate to SBI owners as it is to blog per se. In my case it’s trying to raise intelligent things every now and again. Probably it would be subscribe to my forum feed, and to do that you have to join the affiliate program because the forums are closed.
It’s a funny thing. I Twitter because I tried to figure out how to use Twitter for small business clients, for SBI owners. At a certain point, our company gets to a certain size that we could hire staff to Twitter and we may very well start to do that and to start blogging and so forth. But we have 100,000 affiliates now who get the word out pretty well. They use social media.
When we first did PennyGold, I had a product to sell, an e good. I built traffic and I monetized that traffic. I was an SBI owner for all intents and purposes. When we came out with Make Your Site Sell, we realized now this covers an infinite number of niches. Every small business person needed to read Make Your Site Sell. Most small business people really should be using SiteSell. If they’ve yet to build a successful e business online, they should be trying SiteBuildIt, and if they don’t like it, ask for their money back. There’s so much to gain, and just ask for your money back if it’s not for them.
That’s about it. It’s just about getting the steps straight, thinking clearly and straightforwardly to make very clean and simple decisions. People so overcomplicate matters. There’s not much more to say, David.
David: Even all of those names that you mentioned, your name fits for me well within the group of people you keep your eye on. If people do want to find out more about you, definitely check out the SiteBuildIt blog or just go to sitesell.com to find out more. That links through to most of what you guys do. Perhaps we’ll wrap up there. I can’t thank you enough Ken. I know how busy you are, and the call took a bit of orchestrating but it was well worth it and I know people are going to love it so thank you very much.
Ken Evoy: It was my pleasure, David. You are one in a thousand, like I said, who just goes out there, reads the materials, gets the job done, and you do a great job. So my thanks to you.
David Jenyns: Thanks.
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