SBI Reviewed Articles

Are you a small business owner? If you answer yes, you have probably thought, at one point or another of creating a website for your small business.

As you probably already know, I am a firm believer in SBI for small businesses, and I will try to address some of the reasons why in this blog post. Specifically I will address the cost of NOT using SBI.

1) The first thing that you will need to buy is a WYSIWYG. For WYSIWYG’s you really have just two options.

a) SharePoint - A product by Microsoft, formerly known as FrontPage. Costs $300.
b) DreamWeaver - A product made by Adobe. Costs $400.

2) Now that you have the WYSIWYG software, you need to find a web host. There are many options available here, and you will probably go with GoDaddy, or 1and1.

Depending on what host you use, you could spend any where between $2 a month, all the way up to $100 a month. You will probably spend about $5 per month however, for a total of $60 a year.

3) The next step is to buy a domain. Domains usually cost around $10 a year. Not very much, but still it’s ten extra dollars that you have to pay every year in addition to everything else that you plan on buying.

4) You will need to also sell your products online, so you need to buy a shopping cart software. Most hosts come with the ability, and resources for creating a shopping cart/ecommerce store, however they require you to set it up yourself. This is usually very complicated, and in order to do it successfully, you would need to purchase a third party service to run the shopping cart for you. This will cost you about $100 a year.

5) And the final (and most expensive part) of this whole process is site promotion. There are 3 main things that you need to get in order to successfully do site promotion.

a) SEO consulting firm - You must hire an outside company to look at your site, and tell you how to optimize it so that you can get indexed highly in the Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.). This will usually be a one time fee of at least $1,000.

b) Link Building - Once you have your website optimized for good keywords, you will need to promote your site, by getting back links. You will have to hire a company or in some cases multiple individuals to do this for you. If you hire a company, you will probably spend around $100, and you will want them to redo the service every 3-4 months.

c) Finally you will need to constantly research the keywords yourself, so that you can find out how to better change your site, and promote it better. In order to do this, you will have to find a keyword research tool. You will end up using WordTracker, which costs $300 per year.

If you add this all up, it totals a minimum of $634 a year, and $1,300 one time fee. The actual amount though will probably be much more, as these were very conservative estimates. You can easily spend more than $1,000 a year, and easily pay a one time fee of over $5,000.

With SBI, you get all of the tools, and resources listed above (Plus Much More) all for one low price of $300 per year. You will save a ton of money, and time by using SBI. This is the main reason why I believe so strongly in the company SBI.