A Note About This Website

My experience

You may be thinking about having your own website. Or you might just be interested in how the internet works. So I thought I would take a few minutes and share some of my experiences with building this website.

It is very satisfying to be a doctor, and I help a lot of people. But in my practice I can only help one person at a time.

So I started a website, with the purpose of helping larger numbers of people. It was not this website that I started. It was a previous site.

The planning stage

I approached building that first website the way I approach every new subject. When I want to learn something new I read in detail and carefully apply what I read. That’s what I did with my first website.

I could have hired someone to design and build the site for me. Many people do that. However, there is a problem with that approach. It works fine if you want to have 4 or 5 pages for a local business in order to give out directions to your office and tell about the services you offer.

But I have a lot of information to share and I wanted to have a site with hundreds of pages.

I didn’t want to have to contact the person that built the site every time I wanted to edit something or add a picture. That way is too limiting and too slow.

So I learned the details of building a website, including how to construct the pages, how to get them to show up on the internet and all the other things. I followed the guidelines carefully, and the site looked good and worked well.

A problem with traffic

There was just one problem. I didn’t have any traffic to my site. There was just no one visiting the site.

Do a search on Google and you’ll see why. Search for “weight loss.” It says “about 183,000,000” results. That's 183 million.

That’s a lot of competition. With that many sites the competition can be overwhelming.

That’s why it’s possible to build a website about weight loss -- even a very good site packed with useful information -- and never have anyone see any of your pages.

There are just too many other sites that are well established to ever be found by any of the search engines like Google and Bing and Yahoo.

Now, given the odds against success I could have just given up. However, I am not one to quit once I’ve put my mind to something. I still wanted to reach people and help them with weight loss, and I didn’t have a better way to do it than the internet.

Looking for answers

So I did some more research. There are lots of resources for building websites. There are different companies that will help you build a website.

There are various companies that take the site once it is built and publish it on the internet. There are marketing companies.

I kept my eyes open for new ideas. And as I researched I came across the company that I use now for my website. The company is called Site Build It.

How websites work

The main thing that caught my attention with Site Build It was the tools that are included in the program. Specifically it has tools that help websites get more visitors.

I was interested because that was the problem that I was having. I really had no visitors to my site.

Site Build It (also known as SBI) has an interesting approach to building websites. It seems obvious once you know it, but that's true with many really basic truths.

SBI recommends two things when starting a website: One, they say to provide valuable information that can really help people. And two, to provide the information that people are already searching for.

Now, that made sense to me. Provide the information that people are searching for. But that idea is actually a different viewpoint from most companies that promote websites.

Building trust

Most people that put up a website are in a hurry to make money. So when they build a website they start by trying to sell something.

But this SBI philosophy was that you should first have high quality information on the site. With that information you can build trust.

Then later if you have other valuable services to offer, people will know you and have confidence in what you are offering. That made sense to me.

But they also say to publish the information that people are actually searching for. Well, just how exactly would you be able to figure out what someone would be searching for?

Traffic from Google

It turns out that SBI includes a service that monitors the entire internet. They keep records of all the Google searches and Bing searches and Yahoo searches.

They find out what the average person actually is typing into Google when they do a search. And at the end of the month they add up all the searches.

For example, they might find that people continually search for “what’s the best food for my Pomeranian” or “how do I fix the chain on my bicycle.”

There are many thousands of these things that people search for, and they get added up each month. So with SBI you can find out exactly what information people want. That's really helpful when you are planning out a website.

Then they do the next step, which is to find out how many websites have information about those things that people are searching for. Maybe there are 200,000 sites with information about how to fix the chain on your bicycle.

What do people really want?

And that answers two questions. First, you know what people are searching for. And second, you know how many websites have that information.

So you now use that to figure out what information you should put on your web page.

Suppose you have a bicycle shop. And you want to write a page about bicycle repair. You use the service to tell you how many people are looking for information about repair.

And here’s the brilliant part of it:

You find all the things that a lot of people are looking for.

And then you pick the one for which there aren’t too many pages on the internet already.

See? Lot’s of people looking. Not too many websites covering it already. That really helps you fill a need. You can put out the information that people need, but that they're not able to find easily.

Now, I thought that was ingenious. It sounded to me like it really made sense.

Starting over

So I decided to build another website, only this time I would use this new company Site Build It. That’s the company I use now to build this site.

I started this website several years ago. And how did it go? Well, actually it was pretty slow at first. Why? Because I didn’t follow all the rules.

The first rule didn’t follow was this one: Don’t pick a subject where there are already 183,000,000 other websites.

I could have picked something else that was easier, that would have more visitors to the site more quickly, but that wouldn’t have solved my problem. Because my problem was still that I wanted to be able to contact as many people as possible about weight loss.

The competition

Now, the sites that I am in competition with are not trivial websites. The top sites are major medical centers, federal government sites and well-funded commercial sites. Kind of an uphill battle.

And I wasn't interested in having a corporate website. There are plenty of those.

I suppose I could have set up an office and hired some website coders if that was what I wanted. But I really just wanted to be able to communicate my views on weight loss and health.

Making progress

So that’s what I did. In the bit of free time that I have, between my work in the hospital and my work in my private office, I have just a small amount of time on weekends to work on the web site.

I am able to add a few pages to the site each week, and over time it grows.

At first I really didn’t have any visitors, or what we call traffic, to the site. I was just writing for myself at that point, and my wife would read it and tell me she liked it, which of course is what wives do.

But no traffic. Still, I enjoy doing it, I find it interesting and relaxing, so I kept at it. And after a while I started to get a few visitors.

A bit of traffic

There is a part of the SBI program that keeps track of how many visitors there are and how many pages they looked at. Pretty soon there were 10 or so people a day looking at my site.

Most of the visitors were from the United States. But then I got some from other places. A couple from Poland. A few from Chile. Canada. Czech Republic. Other places.

Still, it was slow. I knew that the system worked for a lot of other people, because I had seen the web sites that other people made through Site Build It, and a lot of them were very successful.

But after a while I started to think that maybe it just wasn’t possible to make any inroads in such a competitive area.

Following the rules

Actually, after some time I realized that I was doing something else that was slowing me down. I stopped following the SBI guidelines as well as I should have. You see, there are a number of other things I was supposed to be doing.

There is a sort of automatic program with this website -- another one of the tools that comes free with the service -- that checks each page.

And that program tells me if I have done all the right things that make it easier for people to find my website pages.

It automatically checks for things like the right titles and headlines to help Google know what the page is about, so Google will know it’s the right place to send people.

Sometimes I would just overlook even these simple things. And so I just kept on making the site in my own way, traffic or no traffic.

But despite all of this...

But then something happened. Despite the competition, and despite the fact that I wasn’t doing all the things I was supposed to do to make my site easier for people to find, I started to get more people visiting my website.

I had more visitors from more countries. I had more people viewing more pages. And each month it started to grow.

I began to be contacted about my web site. People told me it helped them.

They wrote in with questions. Other people wrote in with their own information and experiences to help others.

Some people contributed actual complete web pages of their own and they're now part of the site. And over time these things started to grow faster and faster.

Why did this happen?

It happened because there are dozens of things that the SBI program does for you automatically. It tells Google and Bing when you build a new page, and tells them to come and see it.

It sends out emails and notices of your new pages to previous visitors that requested that service.

It does all sorts of things for you, so you can just spend your time making new pages and not worrying about how it's all done. And it's all automatic.

Getting lots of traffic

And now I don’t have just a few visitors. I get thousands of visitors each month from almost every country on earth and they view tens of thousands of pages.

I reach far more people in a single day with my website than I could in months seeing patients one at a time.

And the numbers keep going up.

Making money

Now, you might ask if the web site makes money. Actually, my primary purpose isn’t to just make money.

I know that’s not usual in our modern society, but I have my income as a doctor and my wife is a doctor and since our children are grown and there’s just the two of us now, we don’t have to worry about money.

I do sell my books on the web site, and the site does generate some other income.

And when I identify other high-quality products that I feel can really be of help I will have those for sale on the site as well. But as I say, for me it’s not really about the money.

However, if you are looking to start a site, money may be more of a concern for you. So here's what I can tell you about that...

I do know a number of other people that also have SBI websites, and many of them do rely on their web site for their income.

Many of them have been quite successful and earn high incomes from their websites. I mention this because I know that money can be a concern to many people.

Some of them use their site to generate more customers for their brick-and-mortar businesses. Some others sell their products and services on their sites. There are a lot of ways they can make an income from their SBI sites.

Why I like SBI

So, for me it comes down to this: Having a web site that reaches people around the world and helps them with a problem in their life is one of the most satisfying things I have done. And really, I don't think it would have ever happened without SBI.

I have included a link to a very interesting video about Site Build It for anyone who may be interested. It shows how it all works and why it's so successful.

Yours truly,

Dr. Dan

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