Business-Growing Lessons of a Success Story

by Louann
(Caribbean Sea)

Louann (from wedding-flowers-and-reception-ideas.com) sent me an e-mail about her SBI! experience. It contains so many superb lessons and I was so moved by it that I decided to share it with all (with her permission). With that brief intro, I'll turn it over to Louann. At the end of her note, I include the lessons for you to take away as you build YOUR online business.

-Ken

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Hello Ken,

I just wanted to send you an personal update on my SBI journey. I know you love knowing about the impact you and the team make on the lives of others. I send this note in that spirt, not bragging.

May 2nd was the anniversary date of my first published page on my SBI site - I started my 5th year with SBI a couple of days ago.

Just the past 7 days I've cleared $1,600 on Google Adsense, have had over $2,300 in sales in my store and have over $300 due to me thru one of my affiliates. And my wedding season is just getting started!

Although I wholeheartedly believed in SBI from the very beginning . . . I'm overwhelmed by how quickly my website has created an astounding amount of income for my family. I believe I will crack $80,000+ in profit from this year and hope to make over $100,000 or more next year between store sales/Google Adsense/affiliate income.

I won't play down the hard work, because I devoted non-stop time to building web pages and working on research. I approached this as a business and have treated it as such.

I'm just getting ready to go back to Kyle Rodeck (merchantcorner.com) and have him do a $3000 overhaul and upgrade on my ShopSite store, making it more professional and easy to manage.

My store basically hums along on its own. Because of my traffic, the manufacturer of my best selling products connected me with a floral warehouse that now packs and drop ships for me. I don't even have to check my orders each day (although I do!!) They pull them offline, pack and ship them and deal with any problems. But it is so much more than a simple drop shipping arrangement, since my percentage of return is so much higher.

They are as excited as I am watching how rapidly the store is growing in sales. Again - I push traffic from my SBI site to my store site - which has risen nicely in traffic in its own right.

My POP score is 58.4 - but I really haven't spent much time actually building the links myself. I simply waited until the website was paying enough to pay to have it done.

Once the website was paying for itself, I invested the profits into purchasing links with Yahoo, Business.com and a couple other high cost directories, also bought link-building services. I did a $300 press release (which I paid top dollar to have assessed before releasing it).

That PR did marvelous things for me - bringing back lots of high PR websites requesting to exchange links while my website was still only a PR 1. That is the extent of my participation in link building - I was too lazy to do it myself!

I've spent the majority of my time chugging along, creating content. I'm kept very busy between handling questions, e-mails about orders, etc. I have so many long term goals, it's hard to know where to focus first. I STILL use blockbuilder and prefer to "keep it simple".

I've not done much with Content 2.0, don't have newsletters and haven't done much with videos except about 4 on YouTube. No twittering, no Facebook, no Yahoo answers or blogging.

I've flown down several times to meet with my wholesalers in Florida, taking thousands of photographs and readying a new line of merchandise to stock in my store (plus got to enjoy a week on the Gulf of Mexico to boot!!)

I did an experiment with the new third column using affiliate products. It did TOO well! When I looked back at my store sales, I was flabbergasted how they had dropped! Why? Because my third column was exploding - sending my traffic to my affiliate links instead of my own store!!

Uh . . . I quickly deleted the third column and will resume it when I'm ready to promote my OWN products instead of sending them merrily off to my affiliates!

I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I didn't even KNOW Google had released the new Panda algorithm, and first heard about it in the forums. I went back to check on traffic - but my traffic has jumped UP and so have my sales.

I hit an all time new high this Monday with 11,435 unique visitors and Tuesday's 33,314 page views for one day.

Why am I telling you all this?

Because I wanted to tell you about the "impact" I was talking about earlier . . . the most I EVER earned in an offline job was as a x-ray tech when I made $24,000 per year and worked long hard hours for that money.

I made about $18,000 the last year "pre-SBI!" working as a manager of a local flower shop. I only have a high school education and have taken a few college courses for medical terminology and x-ray training.

I was not prepared at all for creating an on-line business. Even the simple Blockbuilder stumped me and I was so frustrated in the beginning. I'm definitely not an expert on "all things SBI" . . . but it really doesn't matter.

Despite my lack of training or expertise, SBI has allowed me to earn more than I ever believed possible within a short three years (I didn't even try to put any money making things on my website the first year.)

Please don't take what I'm telling you as bragging . . . but I wanted you to know just how much you have impacted my family's life. My husband works very hard and is looking forward to an early (and hopefully comfortable) retirement. I now spend my time doing something I enjoy - and set my own hours while doing it!!

My dad always told me if I could work as hard for myself as I did for other people, I'd have it made. How true that is.

I owe you a great debt of gratitude for sharing so generously of your knowledge and time. I will always bless the day that I came across your Sitesell offer, and persuaded myself to click on the "Pay" button for (what seemed like an incredible) $300.

Who knew that I now make that amount in one day from my "passion"?

It's for that reason that I pay it forward by helping in the forums. I'm not alone, of course. I also participated in the Chicgao and Tampa conferences.

A gentleman that I met in Chicago came up to me in Tampa and said, "Do you remember me? You told us in Chicago that if you could change one person's life that it would be worth the trip. Well . . . I came down to Tampa to tell you personally that the person's life you changed was mine!"

Where else could that happen? I don't make this about me. SBI! instils that unselfish attitude in so many SBIers. The community makes SBI! even greater than the sum of its parts.

Thank you,

from the bottom of my heart

Louann http://www.wedding-flowers-and-reception-ideas.com http://www.weddingflowersandreceptionideas.com