Statistics, forms, link exchanges, an ezine and my first e-course!

Note: If you haven’t read my previous posts, you should catch up now with post 1, post 2 , post 3 and post 4 before reading on … it’ll all make much more sense.

Dear diary …

1 month into the New Year and progress is steady but undramatic.

I keep reminding myself about the mantra of SBI! … content, content and more content.

No early monetization, wait until you have enough visitors on the website, nice and slowly does it.

I know this way is the right way, but it’s really hard to hold off and be patient while my site is building.

I keep reminding myself that I’ve only been ‘live’ since 12th November, so I haven’t even been going three months yet … what do I expect?

In my first full month of December I had 2292 page views, in January I had 3959 page views.

In December I had 363 visitors, in January I had 695 visitors.

So traffic is building steadily and I already have two keywords ranked at number 2 in Live Search.

But you know, I’m terribly impatient, even though I know you have to be in this game for the long haul.

So, how’s it going?

Well, apart from the aforementioned impatience, extremely well.

I mentioned in my last post how much I’m learning from this entire SBI! experience and the learning continues.

I’m almost a bit embarrassed at how many folders I’ve filled with print-outs from SBI!’s support sections, but they’re so informative and useful, I need to add scribbles and ideas as I go along … I’ve filled a whole shelf full of notes now!

Forms

I’ve really been getting ‘in deep’ with SBI’s form creation options over the past couple of weeks, and I’m really pleased with what they’ve enabled me to produce.

When you create a form in SBI, it’s easily generated via a templated control panel and adds the CAPTCHA challenge automatically.

If you want to see just how difficult form creation can be, look at my previous posts on CGI forms and putting forms on your website.

In addition, for each form, you can build in an email notification to yourself, plus a customised ‘thank you’ page and an automatically generated acknowledgement email.

See how it works on my competitions page (live until March 31st 2009), my ‘webmaster services‘ page or my ezine sign-up page.

Link exchanges

One of the terrible jobs every webmaster has to do is arranging link exchanges.

I’ve mentioned SBI!’s link exchange before, but I’m really beginning to love it.

My linking in value is nearly 35 , SBI! reckons you’re fine to leave it at about 50 or so, and I’ve achieved that so quickly by searching for linking partners via SBI!, assessing the proposals I get for each of my keywords, then sorting out a satisfactory arrangement between me and my new linking partners.

It’s a great way of doing it and saves on the thankless task of scouring the search engines for possible partner sites.

My new ezine

I’ve never produced an ezine before, so I’m delighted to have christened SBI!’s new automated ezine service.

Take a look at my ezine page and note how SBI! automatically archives the old editions AND submits them to the search engines so they bring in extra business and ‘link juice’.

The sign up and management process is all handled automatically by SBI! and as you produce all your emailed content, you get to check it against a ’spam rater’ too so you can tweak it if necessary to make sure it doesn’t end up in spam filters.

My automated email course

I really love this function … you can set up automated email courses using SBI!’s form builder so that, once somebody signs up - at any time - they will receive sequential emails - created by you - at 24 hour intervals.

Try my free e-course to see how it works … now that’s what I call a great marketing tool!

I should mention by the way that all these features that I’m raving about are all part of the basic price for SBI! ie $299 … you don’t pay extra for these functions.

I keep discovering new functions that I get in the package … I found out tonight that all data from any forms that have been submitted is automatically saved and can be easily interrogated.

It’s worth mentioning that there’s a special offer on at SBI! HQ at the moment, but it ends at the stroke of midnight on Valentine’s Day, so if you have been thinking about taking SBI! out for a spin, it’s a good time to sign up.

Remember they offer a 100% money back guarantee so if you don’t get on with it, you get your money back AND they let you keep your domain name for free if you’ve already registered it.

And finally …

More to come shortly as I’m about to start monetizing … and this really will be the proof of SBI!

I’ll keep you right up to date with all developments via this blog.