I sell parrot cages, toys and supplies

by Tracie
(USA)

I searched high and low for the best company to build my first website with. I knew very little about computers and all the lingo was, and still is, very confusing to me. I needed a company that made building a website easy and that would also make the path to reaching my audience clear. (I needed the "yellow brick road" in other words. LOL )

I signed up with a man in Australia that offered extra help if I needed it while getting my site built. That, along with all the great reviews, sewed it up for me. There were a lot of negative reviews where people complained that SBI was too expensive and gave references to cheaper companies, but the cheaper companies didn't have the support base that SBI has. The SBI forum alone is worth what we paid for our first year!

Now lets skip ahead a few years. After I built www.parrot-and-conure-world.com the tortise way, I started getting sales. Within a few months my sales paid for my yearly renewal fee. After a year and a half, the website was paying our bills. In my rush to make money, I did a sloppy job of following some of the important instructions SBI had given me. I needed ideas on how to fix what I had done, and not have to redo my site at the same time. This is when the SBI Orlando Conference came up.

I worried that I was wasting my money going to the SBI Orlando Conference. The forum was so great, I thought maybe I should just spend my time there. My husband encouraged me to go, and told me it would be an investment in our business. I had never gone to a conference in my life, never been away from home alone, and never shared a hotel room with a stranger! I was 48 years old. LOL

The Orlando SBI conference was so beneficial, I would have paid twice what I paid to attend it a second time if I could have talked everyone into coming back another weekend!! Having people, up close and in person, to talk to and throw ideas off of was wonderful. Hearing other's stories and seeing what they have done with their sites inspired me.

My husband started his first website last year with SBI. The site looks nice, but he needs help and encouragement in some areas before it will be done and bringing in traffic like he needs. I talked him into signing up for the 2010 Dallas TX SBI conference. I am so excited, and jealous, that he is going. Due to circumstances at home, I can not attend with him. :-(

If you think you can not afford to go to an SBI conference, you are wrong. You can not afford to NOT go to an SBI conference if you want your site to be the best it can be. Sell some things you don't need, sell meals or cookies to people, clean some houses, whatever needs to be done, go to at least one SBI conference. You will not be sorry.

P.S. I built a second website, http://www.discount-bird-cage.com , thinking a retail only site might be best for selling cages, and that site doesn't get hardly any traffic, because it is NOT an SBI site. I built it with all the knowledge I got from SBI, but it just didn't fly. It looks pretty, that is why I left the link for you to see, but it only gets about 1 sale a month. Ha! Stick with SBI, you will be able to make a living if you follow the instructions and don't skip steps to get done early.