If you know me personally, you already know that I’m very frugal with how I spend my budget on marketing, ebooks, and related services. I must say, the product I’m reviewing for you here is one of the best investments you can make to help really get your online presence off the ground. In fact, they’ve won me over and I’m already working on rolling it out for some side projects I’ve had under consideration for some time now.

On first glance, it looks like a simple hosting and content management solution, which seems about right when you look at the $299 price tag. But when you really dig deeper, they are offering a lot more…this is a full “how-to” kit for not only creating the site itself, but how to run an online business from the ground up.

Here is a great example of this product being put to use effectively:

Strategic Planning Helps Start off on the Right Foot

You see, they provide a slew of tools to help you get your strategy figured out from the start. One of the biggest challenges associted with launching web sites and ecommerce businesses is that it takes much more than a domain name and some fancy HTML. These guys offer you training on how to manage the sales process correctly from the start. In fact, they push you to go through a full battery of trainings before you ever get to the point of creating content, posting, and promoting it.

For example, give a look to their outstanding and free Video Action Guide, which is chock full of tips and tricks for getting off on the right foot.

So what exactly do you do to train and prepare before you start working on your site? They have a model which helps you best understand how to manage online commerce, which outlines the following four step process for it:

Content > Traffic > PREsell > Monetize (“C-T-P-M”)

There are some important steps before diving right into content though. First you must pick a product or set of products that you will be able to tap into successfully. Then, you need to figure out who will buy it. And finally, you figure out how you can go about actually selling to them. It’s a great system, because as I learned back in B-school, the “Ready-Fire-Aim” approach is only good for shooting yourself in the foot.

Keyword and Niche Selection Tools

One of the coolest features of this product is called Brainstorm It!. Built on Wordtracker (which is included free with your annual SiteBuildIt! membership, approximately a $120/month value if I recall correctly), they take a very unique approach to keyword research. Anyone can use the free keyword research tools, and those can most certainly add value if used correctly. But this product goes one step further and estimates profitability of each and every keyword based on a search engine supply and demand analysis. Don’t worry, you won’t need to go back and review your Economics 101 textbook, because they use a simple indexing system to help you instantaneously interpret which keywords have the most potential to deliver high rankings.

The Profitability metric is the most important part of this tool. Without it, you are really just estimating each word’s potential impact based on gut feel. This takes the guesswork out of selecting products to sell, keywords to optimize for, and domain names to pursue.

Easy Content Management

SiteBuildIt! provides an interface that is simple enough for the newbie to use, but flexible enough for seasoned web pros to use to manipulate HTML as well. I’ll focus on the easy to use part since seasoned web pros can figure out the Content Management System (CMS) pretty easily. The main steps to setting up a web business (aside from composing content, which is a given) are as follows:

1. Theme Selection – You can customize quite a lot of the look and feel of your website using a simple interface. The tool gives you the ability to upload a custom logo, toggle between various color schemes, control the ingredients in the navigation bar, change fonts, and much more. If you know a little HTML, the possibilities are nearly limitless. Even if you don’t know HTML, you should be able to create a decent looking site with the tools they offer “out of the box”, so to say. You can view a slideshow of sample layouts build in this tool on the SBI Samples page.
2. Create / Edit Home Page – SBI is great in that it not only has you input content and headlines for each page, but it also includes SEO-ready fields for each page such as keywords, Page Title, and description (a.k.a. Meta Description).
3. Build Out the Site – Using all simple dialogue boxes, you can then do a variety of things including adding pages, creating RSS Feed Links, modifying the navigation, and more.
4. Launch Emarketing or Enewsletter – Any good marketer can tell you that it is important to build out a mailing list and establish regular communications with its members. SBI includes functionality for building forms, managing lists, and executing on email-based activities. Even better, SBI comes standard with “drip marketing” capabilities, so you can immediately kick off the nurturing process the very day prospects sign up to your list.

You can read more about the wide assortment of design and execution tools available in SBI on the company’s “Tools” page.

Ongoing Optimization Tools

In addition to the great keyword and niche tools I already highlighted, SBI offers some great features to help you improve and grow your optimization. This is important, because sites that do “okay” can be tweaked and tuned to do very well over time. This is how the ecommerce superstars do it, and SBI has it covered.

Here are some of the features that stood out when I first reviewed the service for my own purposes:

1. Automatic Sitemap XML Generation – If you want your site to get regularly crawled and indexed by the major search engine spiders, an XML-based sitemap is required. The problem is that precious few of us understand XML enough to do this. SBI automatically updates the Sitemap for each and every change you make, without requiring anything on your part.
2. Search Engine Reports – With all due respect to Google Analytics, this analytics offering is much better in my opinion. You can see what pages rank best and drive traffic. Each report’s insights help you to determine how to increase traffic and monetization. Most pros don’t have easy and reliable access to this type of information. Traffic Stats and Click Analysis help you understand what your visitors like most. Understanding them helps you know what to write about, which in turn leads to more and more business.
3. Value Exchange – If you keep up with SEO, you know that inbound links are important, but they must also be relevant to your content to provide the value you need from them. This is an inbound link-building tool that helps simplify the process of finding and managing high value inbound links for you.

The ROI Analysis I Did for Myself

You should have a pretty good idea now about what this product can offer you. I have found it to be useful and well structured. While a $299 annual price may make you take pause, it’s really not that much money when you consider the full feature set. Think about it, if you decide to do all of this yourself, you have to consider:

1. Domain registration – SBI includes your first domain for free. The cheapest you can find .COM domains on GoDaddy, for example, is typically $10.69.
2. Hosting – A simple website with the lowest hosting plan including a single email address is typically $60-$80 per year. That does not include things like an online store or other more advanced features that are standard in SBI.
3. Email Marketing – Although costs for email marketing services vary rather widely, SBI allows you to get rid of that extra service and login you need to worry about, not to mention the difficulty of embedding signup forms on your site. Some examples of costs for other services with a 5001+ name database include $47 (iContact), $69 (Aweber), and $72 (Vertical Response). iContact does not offer drip marketing, so you are looking at saving approximately $70 / month ($840/year) for an equivalent service once your list grows to this size.
4. Your Precious Time – If you’re like me, time is the one thing you have that always seems to be in short supply. It’s a constant struggle to balance work, family, blogging, social networking, and still fit in a little time for decompression, rest, and possibly a little recreational fun. I spent years studying how to do search engine marketing, blogging, web site manipulation, search engine optimization, and a variety of other related techniques. Unfortunately, the game seems to change every month! Rather than relearning each of these techniques every time they change, SBI offers the tools I need to do the same analysis (and even learn new techniques on an ongoing basis) in a fraction of the time. You can make more money, but you can’t make more time. What’s your time worth?

These are all of my reasons for considering SiteBuildIt!. Surely you’d have your own. Go take a look at SBI for yourself and let me know what you think about it. They offer a 30-day guarantee of satisfaction, so even if you decide to try it out and realize it’s not the right tool for you, you really have nothing to lose but a little time.