SBI:
To Review or Not to Review?
That Is The Question
(If you didn't know already, Ken Evoy's SBI/Solo Build It, is the web hosting server I use for this website.)



Today I am answering the following question, posted on the SBI private forums for owners of SBI hosted websites.


So, I hereby challenge all fellow SBI'rs with sites listed on results.sitesell.com who haven't written a review to either:

1. Step up and create your review now.

2. Post your reason for not doing so here so I and others can possibly help you to overcome those reasons.


[quote="Dan from free-online-calculator-use.com"]If I am not mistaken, there are 500 SBI sites listed on results.sitesell.com. This also happens to be Ken's target number for the reviews needed to combat the WA fake reviews.

Obviously, and for reasons I don't understand, all 500 haven't stepped up.

I can understand why new sites, and those not listed on that results page, might struggle with what to write in their reviews. But in my opinion, there's no excuse for those who are on the list. If there is, please post them here to help me to understand.

My site is listed on results.sitesell.com, and I took the time to write my review even though I always seem to be months behind on everything.

http://www.free-online-calculator-use.com/sbi-review.html

I constantly find myself feeling embarrassed for Ken having to beg for reviews from those who have benefited from his work. But after what Ken and his family have gone through this past week, I felt it was time for me to join him in his begging.

So, I hereby challenge all fellow SBI'rs with sites listed on results.sitesell.com who haven't written a review to either:

1. Step up and create your review now.

2. Post your reason for not doing so here so I and others can possibly help you to overcome those reasons.

C'mon .05%'rs, lets show Ken we've got his back!

Dan[/quote]



Note to my readers, who may not be familiar with the reference Dan makes when he  says:

But after what Ken and his family have gone through this past week, 

Those of us who are online friends with Ken Evoy, know that his family lives in Anguilla and they lost everything to Hurricane Irma this week.

Please keep Ken and his family in your prayers.

Let's start out by saying: "You do know EVERYTHING I post on this on any other forum, gets cross posted to my SBI site, right?"

Meaning even though THIS is a private forum, the whole world is gonna see my answer.

Meaning that while I have no SBI review page, this page is going to be yet another in a long line of many other SBI topic pages on my SBI hosted site.

Just like they see every other answer to every other SBI related question I answer, on my SBI site which, you know, has 100+ pages of me answering questions about SBI and what it's like to use SBI?

Good.

Now let's answer your question.

Not in the results, but I'm the "Wendy", who Ken Evoy keeps talking about in his write a review request thread.

Ken linked to my "not quite a review" of SBI and why I chose SBI over Wealthy Affiliates back in 2013,  in his "share your story" review thread (I believe it is the 3rd thread in his series of review writing threads?).

It was my post here on the forums that he had used as his example for "how to write an SBI review", taking the article I wrote and picking it apart to use it as the step by step guide on how to write a review of SBI, which is rather ironic considering it was NOT a review of SBI at all, but rather, just me sharing my journey from one web host service to the next. 

He used my example of my search for a webhost and stumbling upon SBI by being a member of an RV forum then finding most of the RVers I talked to also managed SBI hosted sites.

I found out he was doing this when I woke up one morning to find that instead of 100 or so page views a day I was suddenly getting 400 or so page views an hour, thanks to his widespread marketing of his article and his having linked to my website in his article.

Ironically, though Ken used my forum post as the example for how to write a review, I do not have a review page on my site.

Why?

Well, several reasons. First being that I was a sales representative for 16 years, then was a retail merchandiser, and also a copy writers (a person who writes sales copy for products). 

Now, though I have no offline income and am fully living off my online sales of my books and art and also AbSence from YouTube and my SBI site.

A thing I have learned over the years is the customer (who is always right, even if they are wrong, because you smile and make then feel right anyways) does not like to be "told" what to buy. And most reviews, regardless of the product in question, tend to be written in a very "buy, buy, buy" focus, which turns people off.

So, no, my site does not have a "SBI review page".

As of today, what is does have is 1,469 live pages (+ more that are private/password access only) and many more in draft to go live at a rate of 1 or 2 or more per day. (Though there are 9,772 pages total on my old WordPress site that are slowly being moved over here as well.)

The format I write in, is exactly the same you see on the forums here. Very much a conversational "so here's what happened to me, what I did, and the results I got from it". And, as I'm in the habit of answering questions sent to my by the readers of my novels, you see me writing lots of pages on a wide variety of topics, not always "on topic" to my niche (writing dark fantasy novels).

So, what does that have to do with why there is no SBI review page on my site?

I'll tell you.

Because a high rate of my site viewers are people who have read my novels and are not seeking to become authors writing novels of their own, I end up with a high rate of questions like: 

(Look for it... you are going to see the answer to why there is no SBI review page on my site in this list...)


  1. How do you create an Elf wizard?
  2. How did you create your world's magic system?
  3. How many pages should my novel be?
  4. What editing program should I use?
  5. Should I self publish or send it to a big 5 publisher?
  6. How do I promote my book?
  7. Do I need an author website?
  8. How did you build your author home page?
  9. How do I research keywords for pages of my book's site?


Did you see it? Let me give you that list again, with the answer highlighted...

  • How do you create an Elf wizard?
  • How did you create your world's magic system?
  • How many pages should my novel be?
  • What editing program should I use?
  • Should I self publish or send it to a big 5 publisher?
  • How do I promote my book?
  • Do I need an author website?
  • How did you build your author home page?
  • How do I research keywords for pages of my book's site?


Each of those questions has been asked to be dozens of times in dozens of ways, and each of them has their own page on my website.

I answer their questions telling them exactly what I did. From my first free hosted site way back in 1997, to my BlogSpot blog, to the rise of Yahoo search engine changing the face of the internet and the way websites were built, to my move to WordPress, to the creation of Google and it's fast track change of how site now had to worship it's feet of die, to the rise and fall of Squidoo, to the bomb blowing up my house and the need for new living conditions resulting in my search for a motorhome, resulting in my finding iRV2.com the massive million member forum for rvers and meeting about 30 RVers each of whom traveled the country living 100% of their SBI sites, my researching SBI and finding the slew of WA hate reviews trying to give SBI a bad name, my asking actual people I knew who ran SBI sites about these reviews and their own forum posts on iRV2 that shared how SBI changed their lives, how I then moved my site off WP to SBI, and moved my Squidoo pages to SBI as well....

...the forum post that Ken linked to and used in his example, was a quote from that page of my website, a page that was published back in 2013, 4 years before Ken's request for reviews.

It's not a "review" of SBI and SBI is not the focus topic, but, it is the story of how I discovered SBI and how I came to choose SBI as my host, after going through many, many, many web hosts over a period of nearly 20 years. It's just my personal experience with various web hosts over the years and why each one worked when I joined, why I eventually outgrew each one and set out to search for a new one, why I picked the new one, etc.

The page is not a review for or against any of the web hosts, but rather, just my journey from one to the next, with my experiences in each.

  • * Do I need an author website?


When answering this one, I share my personal experience, with how having a website helps an author brand themselves and I go into again, my journey in building various versions of my author home page on various hosts over the years, and again, with SBI being the one I am using now, SBI does end up being the one I recommend new authors use.


  • * How did you build your author home page?


I did a whole series of pages, 20 or so, to answer this one. And have more still being written that'll go up soon. I cover all the aspects of what an author should have on their site and then go step by step instruction on "Now here's how you would do that if you use SBI", pointing out I use SBI and love it.

  • * How do I research keywords for pages of my book's site?

Now this one, is where you see me talking about SBI and Ken Evoy's BrainstormIt both. Because I used to be one of the forum mods over on Squidoo and had access to the inner workings of a web host company from behind the scenes, I ended up with a lot of SEO knowledge, and had written many of Squidoo's SEO articles and help guides.

A lot of my followers who remember me from Squidoo, and knowing how Google's Panda just slaughtered Squidoo, have since come to me looking for advice on... "Where do we go from here now that Squidoo is gone?" "How do we win at SEO now that Panda is here?"

Well, Squidoo was crashing hard in 2010, struggling desperately to keep afloat in 2012, and just sunk fast in 2013; and that's why I started researching to find a new host to work with, because being on the inside of Squidoo, but only being a minor person with no say, I could see the company was going under, but nothing I could do about it other then jump ship and move elsewhere before it was gone. Thus how I found SBI.

Researching keywords for sites like Squidoo was something I was known for and suddenly Panda changed everything, so I had to do research in how to survive Panda and the new ways of SEO and keywords. Because I had done it before, people were asking my advice on what to do after Panda, especially authors who got hit hard by Panda.

The result is a massive whopping 75 page series of articles on the topic of keyword research for authors, that included, how to implement it on your SBI site, and a whole series of pages that detail how to use SBI's BrainStormer along side Keyword.io and Google's keyword planner, to find the best keywords for your site.

Some of these pages have the words "SBI" and/or "BrainmstormIt" in the url.

And that series is on going, with me adding a new page to it every couple of weeks.

New to that series, is the page on how to use BrainstormIt after it's recent 4.0 update (which I love!)


  • * Will I do a page specifically called "A Review of SBI"?

Maybe? I don't know.  

I've got this page now though with the word SBI review in the title and url, though.

Well, the fake remains I do love SBI and it is my favorite web host of all the ones I've used.

And I love BrainstormIt and use it daily for every single new page I make on my SBI hosted site.

Because I love both of Ken's products and use them daily, you also see me talking about both of them frequently in articles all over my site. Because of my rampant offline marketing methods resulting in me meeting many of my readers face to face, I'm constantly be asked how to build sites and amd constantly in my daily offline face to face conversations yip yapping excitedly about the joys of using SBI to build my sites.

But that's all just me, fangirling as part of my daily conversations. And while Ken seems to consider this me giving his company good reviews (thus why he used it as the example in his article on how to write reviews) I myself never thought of it as me giving reviews.

Making a specific review of a specific product, always feels "fake" to me, whether the review is good, bad, or neutral. Whereas someone just sharing their experiences in everyday conversation, I do listen to.

And I think that mind set, comes from my previous long career working in direct face to face sales with retail customers. I know how to be fake to sell a product that's on sale this week. I did it for 16 years as a door-to-door salesmen no less. I'm a good salesman, you have to be to survive door-to-door sales for 16 years. But the thing is, no matter what I'm selling, I always know the pitch is fake to make the sale and that has never felt right to me.

And that's why you never seen me leave reviews on Amazon even though I read a few books each week. Yet on the other hand, you see me inadvertently weaving "reviews" into my articles without even realizing it, because I'll say... 

"Now I've never written that in one of my books, but ___ when he wrote ____, he did that..." Then I'll go off topic, like I always do, and talk about why I did or did not like said book, then go back into answering my reader's question.

Well, that's the same thing you see me doing with SBI. Heck, every other page on my site ends up mentioning SBI, even if only in one sentence, because I'll use examples in my writing and I'll say... "Well, SBI made it easy for me to do that on my site because of this..." It may be the only time SBI is mentioned on the page.

The thing is, I already have more than 100 pages on my site where I am talking about SBI, how I use it, why I love it, and especially my rampant overuse of BrainstormIt.

Plus... I'm a YouTube vlogger, and all of my pages on my site have videos made to go with them so I've got several videos where I talk about using SBi as (including the far more detailed live interview version of the RV story Ken had quoted in his post, which, I'm actually not aware if he knows the video exists, because he was quoting my forum post that was quoting my website, rather than quoting my website; and again, that video was made a full year before Ken's request for reviews went out)

Here is that 3 part video version SBI RV story interview, in case you want to watch them...


How I Discovered SBI:

RVing SBI Web Master
Murdered By Serial Killer


The News Reports We Saw On TV,
The Disappearance of One of my FaceBook Friends,
and the Horrifying Discovery that the RV seen on TV was hers and
Finding out that the massacred elderly couple seen on the news were my long time RV friends from the iRV2 forum.








The News Reports of The RVing SBI Couple
and
The Escaped Convicts Who Murdered Them:

"(CNN) -- Two Arizona prison escapees and their alleged accomplice were charged Monday with murder in the deaths of an Oklahoma couple, authorities said.

Federal prosecutors issued warrants for Arizona fugitives John Charles McCluskey, 45, and Tracy Allen Province, 42, and their suspected accomplice, Casslyn Mae Welch, 44.

All three are currently in custody in Arizona. McCluskey and Province broke out of prison there on July 30, allegedly with Welch's help,

The three are accused of killing Gary and Linda Haas, after carjacking the couple traveling in New Mexico on August 2. The complaint says McCluskey shot and killed the Haases in their travel trailer, after which he, Province and Welsh drove the couple's truck and trailer to a remote area in Guadalupe, New Mexico.

The three then unhitched the camper and burned it with the Hasses' remains still inside, said prosecutors. New Mexico police found the burned trailer on August 4."

~Read more here:

  • http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/08/23/new.mexico.escapees.murder.charges/index.html






On April 22, 2011, Renwick was consecutively sentenced to 48 years in Colorado state prison for one count of attempted first degree murder plus 12 more for a second count, involving shooting at law enforcement personnel. To avoid the costs of extraditionand trial, the escape charges from the for-profit prison in Mohave were dropped. He had 32 years left to serve on his original two Arizona second-degree murder convictions, should he be released from the Colorado prison system.[15]

The Federal Bureau of Investigation in Albuquerque accused McCluskey, Province, and Welch of carjacking Gary and Linda Haas, a couple from Tecumseh, Oklahoma; their pickup truck, and trailer at an Interstate 40 rest stop in Quay County, New Mexico. They killed the Haases in their trailer, then continued driving west to Santa Rosa, New Mexico. After noticing blood coming from the trailer, the trio drove their car and the pickup to a remote farm near Colonias in Guadalupe County, New Mexico. There they abandoned and burned the trailer with the remains of the victims inside.[16]

The men all faced charges of escaping prison and Welch of assisting their escape. McCluskey's mother Claudia Washburn and ex-wife Diana Joy Glattfelder were each separately arrested on suspicion of aiding the escapees.[8] All the fugitives were booked into county jails locally, with McCluskey and Welch reported to be in solitary confinement.[7][8][13]

McCluskey, Province and Welch were indicted for murder by Kenneth J. Gonzales, the U.S. Attorney in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who said he would seek the death penalty. (He is now a federal District Court judge.) All three were extradited from Arizona to face charges in New Mexico for the alleged robbery, hijack and murder of the Haas couple there. Retired federal judge James Aubrey Parker offered to mediate the plea bargain to save the expenditure of the anticipated millions of dollars on the murder trials and appeals, but his offer was refused by Gonzales.[23].....

.....The sentencing hearing of McCluskey took place on June 3, 2014. He received life imprisonment plus 235 years.[28][29] Province was sentenced to life in prison the preceding day, per a plea bargain in exchange for testimony against McCluskey. Welch, 47, was also sentenced on June 2, receiving 40 years, per her own plea bargain. Her defense had requested a 20-year sentence and the prosecution acknowledged that Welch had provided "substantial assistance" against her co-defendants. But U.S. District Judge Judith C. Herrera noted that Welch would have faced life plus 85 years in prison had she not provided assistance. Mark Fleming, attorney for Welch in what began as a death penalty case against all three defendants, characterized the 40 years as a de factolife sentence for his client.[30] In March 2015, Welch was also sentenced to a 20-year Arizona sentence, to run concurrently with her federal term.[31]

~Read more here:

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Arizona_prison_escape





"Mr. Renwick was arrested Aug. 1 in Rifle, Colo., after he fired shots at a pursuing police vehicle during a chase.

Law enforcement authorities believe the escapees are tied to last week’s slaying of an elderly couple at a campground in Santa Rosa, N.M. The couple’s camper was set ablaze, and their truck was found abandoned in Albuquerque.

Officials said Mr. Province and Mr. McCluskey, who was serving a 15-year sentence for attempted murder, split up in Yellowstone National Park. The search is still on for Mr. McCluskey and Ms. Welch, who are believed to have left Yellowstone and gone into Montana as heavy rain moves through the region.

Mr. Blando said the two “should be considered armed and extremely dangerous.” He said there was a $40,000 reward for information leading to their arrest."

~Read more here:

  • http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/10/us/10yellowstone.html




Their massive SBI site devoted to the Full Time RV lifestyle had been online for for nearly a decade and had been the inspiration of many full time RVers across the country. They were active in just about every RV group and forum online, daily posting photos of their trips, and daily adding new pages to their massive SBI site.

They were also the authors of several popular books of how to live the RV lifestyle.

When their SBI site, their FaceBook pages, their Twitters, and their forum posts daily (often hourly) updates suddenly stopped, it struck a chord with the entire RV community as thousands of RVers across the country suddenly went into a panic, desperately trying to find out why they had vanished off the internet.

When the news reports first hit the TV of an elderly couple murdered while camping, we did not at first make the connection because of the way the reporters had said they were "campers" and "vacationing" when the reality was they had sold their home a decade earlier and lived full time in the RV. They were neither campers nor vacationers but rather full time snowbirders.

We did not make the connection between our missing friends and the murdered couple in the news reports, because at first the names were not released, and several errors about the couple and why they were in an RV were made by the news reporters who clearly knew nothing about the Full time RV lifestyle and simply made the assumption that RV = vacation.

As millions of worried RVers cross the country began a frantic network of "have you seen them in your campground?" requested to every campground in the country... the search for the beloved missing icons of the RV community, stopped, when their daughter, posted a new page on the SBI site telling us what had happened... that the couple murdered in the grisly RV hijacking prison escape that had been flooding the news, was in fact, the very RV couple we of the RV community had been so desperately looking for.

Millions of RVers across the globe, mourned the deaths of this beloved RV couple.

Their daughter was originally maintaining their SBI site after their deaths, but then in 2013, she was murdered as well.





Sadly, with their daughter dead as well, their massive SBI hosted RV website was shut down and no longer exists today.

Likewise, with no one to maintain it, their Amazon account has been shut down and their self-published books on the RV lifestyle are no longer available.

It was during this horrific time, that I had noticed the logo at the bottom of their site which read "Hosted by SBI"

And that is how I came to find out that the SBI service existed... through the tragic murder of my dear RV friends, who are greatly missed.

So, while a direct "review page" may never show up on my site, because I don't really like the concept of writing reviews, I do frequently talk about SBI on most of the pages of my site and many of my YouTube vlogs and have several BrainstormIt/BI specific pages on my site and will continue to do so. And, I use the affiliate banners to link to SBI's various pages, so that people reading my articles actually know what I'm talking about when I say SBI.

With my recent obsession with the new release of BI, I can see several more BI related pages going up before the end of the year too.

Oh and by the way...

Here's the "SBI RV" that Ken was telling you guys about. You know, the one I bought with money I earned from my SBI site?

She was white when I bought her. I painted herby hand with a fine point #6 round brush.











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