Continued from Page One.

After I had designed the basic layout, it was time to add content -- that is, mostly introductory text -- to the home page. SBI recommends that you write all your content using a plain-text editor like Notepad and to save your files as straight ASCII text files. If you use curly quotes or apostrophes in word processing program like Word, you'll get weird symbols.

While most of the page is text, SBI gives you some basic HTML code that you can use to spice it up (in my case, I chose to add a photograph). If you have a question about how things work, there are tiny question marks on the interface. Clicking on any of those will bring up a dialog box with more information.

After creating the home page, you use SiteBuilder to build the different internal pages for your site.

As you can see in this screenshot, this is a part of page, where you enter your data in blocks. Here, you have the choice of entering Headlines, Text, Text Links, E-Mail Links, Graphics, Dividers, Line Breaks, etc. It's here that you enter the links that you've gotten from different merchants' affiliate programs.

Depending on the information they provide, you can use affiliates' banners, pictures and text -- or just text links. In the manual, SBI advises against using banners, as they can actually turn visitors off. What they recommend instead are in-context text links, which many affiliates provide.

One exception to banner ads is the Google AdSense program. Those come in a variety of formats and are an excellent way to earn income on your site. However, placing them into your site without knowing of HTML can be problematic, especially if you want to use a Google tower ad. If you don't use HTML tags, it doesn't work properly. Fortunately, there are forums you can access which give out the necessary information.

I ran into one particular issue when building pages -- specifically, when I wanted to create multiple pages using the same basic topic and keyword information. In Dreamweaver, a Web design program I usually use for my own sites, I typically create one page that I want to use and save it, then resave it multiple times using different file names. But that didn't work in SBI. If I tried to save a new file name, it simply overwrote my first file and I lost all my data. The only solution was to create a new page from scratch, re-enter my keywords, and save it with a new file name.

As you build your pages, you can check to see how your content is working by clicking on the Analyze It! button at the bottom of the SiteBuilder page. Analyze It! checks to see if your page meets over 30 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) rules. This report will tell you exactly what you need to do to get your page scoring as high as possible at the engines. However, each themed site is different, meaning that the rules change. It's good to use this report as a general guideline and to also experiment beyond the boundaries of the rules.

Once you've built your Web page, the SBI World Submitter automatically submits it to a variety of search engines. That is crucial for getting found online.

Conclusion
From here, you use what you've learned to build more pages and attract traffic. Some of this will be in the form of Link Exchanges, Pay per Click programs, etc. Over time, you'll also want to create an e-mail newsletter and build lists of subscribers.

At point, it's uncertain as to what my returns will be as my site has yet to be indexed by the search engines. However, one surefire way to jump start the process is to do link exchanges with other sites. That will begin the process of getting traffic flowing to your site. Another method (mentioned by a SBI user) is to post Google Adsense Ads on your site. In his opinion, that jump-started the search engine process.

Further Notes, Pricing and Availability
Although the software works well overall, there are some bugs (as noted earlier) that need to be addressed. These issues will be resolved with a new release of the Site Build It Manager, which has many improvements. It also comes with a new release of the Action Guide, which has been completely rewritten.

Another new feature is the Multi-page Re-Uploader. It's in the final testing stage and will allow users to upload 20 pages at a time without having to re-do the entire sequence each time. It's very similar to FTP and seems like it will be a big help.

Currently, you can purchase Site Build It using one of two options:

You can purchase it for $495.00 for a full year -- this is all-inclusive with no additional monthly charges. Currently, the software is being offered with a $100 rebate and a special bonus of three free months.

With option #2, the fee is $299.00 for a half-year of SBI -- as above with no additional monthly costs. There is also a promotion to receive an immediate $50 rebate and a bonus of two months.

Additional Resources
One book that got me started on Affiliate Marketing is Robert Allen's Multiple Streams of Internet Income. While a few years out of date, the information is quite valuable and I recommend it highly.

Wordtracker is an excellent online application that works well in conjunction with SBI. Wordtracker is a keyword searching application designed to help you find the appropriate keyword concepts for your site. Prior to using SBI and Wordtracker, I would come up with keyword combinations that I thought were pretty nifty, only to find that they scored poorly when I did an analysis on them.

For the bulk of this article, the majority of my keyword searches were done using the Site Build It Manager. It was only towards the end of my research when I began to make use of Wordtracker.

Nathan Segal is an associate editor for ECommerce-Guide.com's sister site, WebReference.com.