SiteBuilder Elite

A Real Average Person's Review of Sitebuilder Elite

A new version of Sitebuilder Elite is now out (Dec. 2008). It looks really good! Here is a video link to see what it does:

http://www.sitebuilderelite.com/BuildBasicSite.html

I am a real person with a real life. I'm not some freaking person just trying to sell something on the internet anyway I can. Way too many people are simply using the internet to sell something that they then try to get you to sell for them. All that gets accomplished is a bunch of fools selling products over and over to each other and no one really using the products in any decent way. If you are interested in internet marketing as a hobby or profession, and not just in re-selling other people's software that you just bought, then there are things to learn and things to buy. There is absolutely no way around this. I work full-time out of the house, so I just do internet marketing as a hobby. This review is just one thing I bought and wanted to comment on. In the article you will see other things I bought as well.

SiteBuilder Elite is software by Gary Nugent (of Ireland). It will build you a pretty nice looking web site complete with articles, adsense ads, amazon products and some other advertising programs. These are all laid out nicely on your page, and that alone saves you a ton of time.

I've used SiteBuilder Elite to build several web sites now. Here is my experience. This is not to say you will find the same things, but this is how I saw it.

Let me say I do like the software and find it probably worth the price (currently $127 in 2008). If I had tried on my own to do with one site what this software does it is unlikely I could have done it since I am no html or php guru. So if you are building multiple sites as a hobby or job, $127 is a good price. But only if you are building multiple sites. I had some problems getting it to work correctly at first and I would guess that many people do have trouble based on some of the user remarks I have seen. But Mr. Nugent did respond quickly to my inquires and helped me resolve 100% of my problems. He will even look directly at your site if need be, on your server. But if he gets too many customers I have no doubt that will stop or he will have to hire more people.

On his sales page Mr. Nugent claims that he will limit the sales of SiteBuilder Elite to only so many buyers, in order to limit its footprint on the web. I sincerely doubt that, and that is most likely a sales tactic, one of which we have seen so many times before. Why would someone remove a product that makes them a load of money? Of course it is very possible that eventually Google will get highly intelligent and start un-indexing SiteBuilder Elite styled sites. I personally removed the SiteBuilder affiliate link from the bottom of my pages just in case Google does use this to un-index sites. Just make sure your sites have good written content also.

The SiteBuilder Elite manual

The manual that came with SiteBuilder Elite wasn't too bad. It may have been a little shy on details. I would rewrite some of the parts myself, to at least have more details and screenshots of actual web pages. I've worked in the software industry and have written a lot of documentation as well as designed web pages, for 24 years now. Gary's manual got me through the installation and answered 90% of my questions. One part of the manual was out of date, but I figured it out, and now I think that has been corrected in the new manual. There were areas where supplemental material could be added, like when it mentions using PLR articles for your site. You will most likely want PLR articles, based on my experience with the SiteBuilder Elite. I can see a whole new money making plan where Gary could actually offer niche PLR article packages! But, anyway more could have been said about using and getting these articles, about re-writing them, or adding html code to them, etc. I usually add very basic html coding to the PLR articles I use on SiteBuilder Elite, like break or paragraph or bold tages. In an era where you are competing with PLRpro or Automatic Niche Profits, a detailed manual for beginners is a huge plus.

I would have liked to have some additional sections on modifying the screen layout on your own through the template coding. Just some simple techniques would have been fine, for those of use that barely know html and don't know php at all. But Gary does say in his sales letter that you will need to know these to modify the templates, so he isn't hiding that information. Still I would like to see how a person can move the navigation bar from the left side of the screen to the right. Simple stuff would be fine.

Using SiteBuilder Elite

Ok, I installed the software just fine and read the manual. I personally read the manual 3 times. It isn't that long. I could be a slow learner. I would not buy this product if I was an absolute beginner and never even saw html before or worked on the web before.

I followed the procedure that most internet marketers appear to be following. I looked for a subject that I could build a site on within a niche that was searched on a lot but had few current internet sites addressing the niche. I had to buy some other software to do this, like Keyword Elite or Microniche Finder. I have both. Microniche finder works faster, is more simple but not as powerful. I use it a lot to find hidden niches quickly and get up to about 300 keywords. I am on a very limited budget so I cringe anytime I have to buy software to move forward. I did find than none of the free keyword finding sites were adequate to find the best keywords for SiteBuilder Elite. I am not kidding; I did try to use them and came up short on material. So prepare to spend even more money. But don't rest yet, there are more things I had to buy to get a good SiteBuilder Elite site.

The only web hosting company I now use is:

A Real Average Person's Review of Sitebuilder Elite Continued...

One of the suggestions is to come up with a large keyword list up to 1,000 keywords long on your niche and build a site based around those. So, not wanting to get carried away I built keyword lists of like 300 key words or phrases for any one niche. You basically then download the text list into the SiteBuilder Elite engine and it will build you a nice site with as many pages as you have keywords on the list. So in this case I would have 300 pages, plus the terms of service and privacy policy pages, etc. The keywords or keyword phrases (i.e. long-tail keywords) can be any length.

Once your site is done, SiteBuilder Elite will then randomly display 25 (the recommended, but you can change it) navigation menu links at a time on the left for the users of your site to chose from. It will display a video wall, Google ads, other ads, related Amazon products (very nice feature) and RSS feeds as well. You can change the size and colors on the page. There is a simple configuration screen to do all of this, and it is well designed.

Putting Articles on your Site

But a decent site has information articles on it as well and not just a bunch of links and RSS feeds or Amazon books. So SiteBuilder Elite allows you to create "scraped" articles that can be randomly displayed one at a time for each page of your site. The articles don't match the navigation menu links if you do it randomly, so if a user clicks on a link like "perfume bottles" the article won't match the subject. Here is the biggest problem though. A "scraped" article is a nonsense article that is bunch of random key words pulled off various places on the internet. The articles do not read well to humans, or even close. This may help build page rank as there are a load of keywords in these scraped articles but you also stand a big chance of being banned by Google if they somehow see the site is nothing but nonsense. Gary Nugent of SiteBuilder Elite talks about these scraped articles as if it is a nice feature that is a big plus. He makes light of the matter. It is a plus to some extent but also potentially gets you banned very easily, as well as making you lose any potential repeat users of your site.

So I highly suggest that you do not follow the scraped article route and instead either buy articles, get them from article directories or write them yourself. BUT, this presents a problem if you have 300 keywords on your site, as in my example. Ideally you need a good article for each. It would take months to find or write that many articles in one niche.

You have two choices now. You can put let's say 20 related good keyword articles up and let them be presented randomly, in which case they will not match your navigation links. Or, you can only put keywords (i.e. navigation links) on your site as you write articles. Let's say you start with 10 PLR articles you bought (if you don't know what PLR is just do a search on PLR articles and you will see what they are). Initially you could build a meager 10 page site so that you have a different article for each keyword phrase. As you buy or write another article you add a keyword to your site and a page for that. SiteBuilder does allow you to match articles with keywords so they won't be randomly presented (very nice feature).

In this way you would slowly build up your site with human readable material, and not start with 300 crazy pages with bogus information, and strange key words like "box blue dog", etc. To find 300 key words in any one niche is not easy and you will end up with some that are strange! Even at 100 you will.

Myself, I have been now trying the slower way and only using like 10 keyword phrases to start and then adding more as I have an article for each. This may even help page rank as Google sees your site getting bigger and more pertinent to the set of keywords. But you'll have to stay on top of it and not let your site go. Here is an example. History Behind Halloween. This is site is only 20 pages long so far, but the navigation links connect to a proper article. I have learned that making money on the web and also giving customers good stuff takes a load of daily work. But my goal is to have both.

The only web hosting company I now use is:

Your site is now built with SiteBuilder Elite

So, now you have your basic site built with SiteBuilder Elite and it is working pretty well. You'll have Adsense ads, Amazon ads and RSS feeds as a minimum on your site. When you set up SiteBuilder configuration it makes you enter one keyword or phrase as the main one so that it knows what products or ads to display. You will have to read the manual that comes with the software to learn of some of the options that you can change. The manual is not long and adequate enough to learn a lot from it, although it could be expanded numerous pages. I will mention SiteBuilder Elite options some here.

CARP is a third party software that you are going to want to buy. It is not expensive. It will help present your RSS feeds on your site in a way that is more easily seen by the search engines (or so I think that was the point of it). If you remember, you can have RSS feeds on your site from relevant news stories (and you should do this). When you buy and install CARP, SiteBuilder will work with it for your feeds, and Amazon links as well. It was not too difficult to implement, and Mr. Nugent answered my questions right away on how to get it working with SiteBuilder. It is a nice feature. And you can then use CARP with some of your other sites, although I have yet to understand how to fully use it. It's a little confusing to me and I am sure to many people.

As well, with SiteBuilder Elite you can change the way ads are presented on your screen and the type of ads. Kontera is one type, where it will hyperlink certain words in your articles. Peakclick is another, where it will put some links at the bottom of your page (I use 5 links, but it can be changed). Of course there is Amazon and Adsense, and you can adjust these to look different too. As well you can also work in an affiliate link into your articles that you may write for your site since those can contain HTML.

However SiteBuilder is advertised as having Chitika Mini Malls and ModernClick..as options. These I could not get to work. The reason being is that my sites do not have enough traffic. I wanted to use them for variety sake but after signing up with both services I found out that I was rejected due to low volumes of traffic. Well, of course I had low volumes, I had just started the sites! What, do they expect you to have tons of visitors on a brand new niche information site? I think the one agency wanted 15,000 page impressions a month minimum. Realistically, it takes the average web master on your basic niche site quite a while to get that kind of traffic. I'm not even close to that on any of my many sites yet, after 4 months, and I SEO like crazy, reading and trying everything I get my hands on.

Gary Nugent advertises how each of your SiteBuilder sites making just 50 cents a day, via Adsense, will add up quickly when you have 100 sites or more. I admit you can build 100 sites in 100 days with no problem with this software, working less than 2 hours a day, and I am slow. But I do not agree with each site making 50 cents a day. I've only had one site get near that level and that is more like 40 cents. This is in 4 months. Some only average 1 cent a day. I do SEO but you will have to work hard and submit a lot of back links, and pertinent articles, to get to 50 cents a day for each site with just Adsense revenue.

Hopefully now you have learned some truth about the use of SiteBuilder Elite, what it really does offer, and how you can use it successfully if you buy it.

The only web hosting company I now use is:

Here are some more SiteBuilder Elite thoughts and tips. I wasn't going to write anymore but I thought of some things I might mention that may alter your opinion, either way, on the software.

At times it seems like the default screen size of 770 pixels is a little small for the navigation bar width (the side bar with your articles or keywords and links). Did I mention that you can move the navigation bar to the left or right on your screen, which is nice. Anyway, I would make the screen size 800 pixels at a minimum. 850 would be good also. In the configuration screen that you'll use with SiteBuilder Elite you can make the screen size whatever you want very easily and the navigation bar wider also.

I get my header backgrounds from here. This is no affiliate link and it is free. In my opinion, the best header site on the web.

www.freewebpageheaders.com

I put them in Adobe PhotoShop Elements (much easier to use than full Photoshop) then change the size to be like 800 pixels long, leaving the width the way it is, and add text in a new layer, or two layers.

One of my biggest complaints with SiteBuilder Elite is that when using long article titles or long tail keywords in the navigation bar it is putting them too close together and they seem to run into each other making it hard for users of the webpage. Some of my keywords are 7-8 words long so they wrap. You can increase the width of the navigation bar in your SiteBuilder configuration screen, but then it cuts too far into the articles and Google ads that appear on each page. A better solution would be to have the software space the keywords out in the navigation bar a little more, or insert a dotted line between each (as I have seen in some other web builder software).

If you use your own articles for your pages or PLR articles you can add your own ads at the bottom of them. It is not built in to the software per se but here is how I do it. If I am promoting an affiliate, such as a vitamin company, and they have banner ads, I just take the HTML code they give me for the ad and put it at the bottom of each text article before I load it into SiteBuilder. You have to play with spacing sometimes but it comes out just fine. With SiteBuilder Elite you can put any html or text into your text articles, so you can do a bunch of stuff like changing colors, fonts, H1 or H2 headers and spacing. That is really nice.

In an upgraded addition of SiteBuilder Elite, Gary Nugent has made it so your article titles come out as an H1 or H2 headings, which will help with SEO. In the basic version they do not. You can manually make your titles into headings, via HTML, but it would be nice for it to be automated, since it is a big pain to manually type in HTML into every PLR article you buy or ones you write. To get the updated version of SiteBuilder Elite you have to join a club membership which was something like $14.95 a month last time I looked. Only you don't really get anything for the membership other than extra upgrades to SiteBuilder and quicker support. So I am not sure what the monthly membership is actually for. Seems like it would be better to just charge extra for a PRO version of SiteBuilder and be done with it.

The only web hosting company I now use is:

Just wanted to offer any updates I had. At least one of my sites (on Medieval History) has been doing fairly well. It must suddenly be ranking high for some keywords or terms. It is at Medieval Timeline if you desire to check it out.

I have changed my technique on the use of SiteBuilder Elite just a little for now. I use whatever software I have to build a key word list of up to 1000 terms long. Currently I use Keyword Elite and Market Samurai (an incredible piece of software, in my opinion only). I then use the entire keyword list, after editing, as my keyword.txt file for SiteBuilder Elite.

I place at least 25 articles in the articles folder of SiteBuilder Elite and set them on the configuration page to rotate randomly. I get these articles from what I write or what I can get from goarticles.com. 50 articles would be better, but I will do it with 25 to start if that is all I have. I don't like to do it with much less than that. Buy some PLR articles to fill your pages up.

I then create my site with SiteBuilder Elite and set the colors to look to me what is most appealing for a user to visually see the Adsense ads the best. You have to play around with it and try different things. Try thinking like a user! The point of this is to get clicks on Adsense ads or other advertiser ads.

Oh, by the way, SiteBuilder Elite does now offer a radio button on the configuration screen (you will know what I am talking about if you have the software) that will let you change the navigation bar from the left to the right side and vice versa. I saw that I previously mentioned that I didn't know how to do this, based on an earlier version of the software.

The software is getting better with each update and Gary Nugent (the owner) is doing things a little more wisely. I look forward to more improvements!

Honestly, I am not doing this review to get sales for myself. I put links in these articles, but that is better to me than doing a search on your own! I would tell you if something was not right about this piece of software!

A new version of Sitebuilder Elite is now out (Dec. 2008). It looks really good! Here is a video link to see what it does:

http://www.sitebuilderelite.com/BuildBasicSite.html

This version looks really good to me. I wasn't going to get it but I may now, after watching this video. I have been afraid that Google may ban some of these Sitebuilder Elite sites, but the more I think about it the less I think that is true.

As I have said, if you use good content and keywords to match content there should be no problem. Sitebuilder looks to me like a really quick way to get a high quality site up in just a few days, loaded with articles that you write or buy from a PLR service.

I use this PLR service which has kept me supplied better than any company I have worked with, and I have tried a few!

Article Underground

We're talking 400 pretty good quality articles per month!