$60 a year hosting and an $8 domain on WordPress can create an unlimited income – it simply depends on your market, keywords and traffic generation (in my case, almost entirely SEO traffic). Sorry but I find Ken’s defensiveness unbecoming, not that I’d be tempted to pay $299 a year to publish content and have any sort of difficulty to transport my own content to another blogging platform, which is something of an issue with SBI!.

Let’s face it – the only real selling point of SBI! is the pyramid scheme behind it, with the elaborate up and downline plans of making your cheddar.

For me, anyone offering a product they believe in and offer a 100% money back guarantee, is a con artist if they don’t respond to multiple email requests for a refund!

I am sticking with WordPress!

What really annoys me about SBI is the almost cult like feeling the “club” has the SBIers seem to have a fascination with Ken Evoy (very much lie you’d find toward religious leaders) they even have a dedicated section on the forums for reviews so if a bad one is found online other members can hound down like a pack of wolves and leave there positive comments about the system. Which has left most of the reviews on google simply affiliate packed positive only reviews.

I left SBI as I found to expensive and rigid, not forgetting it puts to much emphasis on content creation over backlinking and Adsense.

John

That said, I think that there is one thing WordPress offers that SBI doesn’t: attractive and up-to-date design templates. SBI permits users to upload their own CSS design, so in theory, an SBI site can look however you want. However, if you do not want to mess with code and prefer to use the out-of-the-box SBI design templates, the look is dated and the interface options more limited than WordPress.

SBI has announced that early next year, they will be updating their BlockBuilder with more WordPress-like design options. I am VERY MUCH looking forward to that. I hope that along with the new functionality, they include templates by a variety of professional designers to offer a greater choice in aesthetic.

I hope I never gave the impression that I thought people should avoid SBI, or that it was a poor value – in fact, for the right situation and people, it appears to be very good value. I’ve deliberately kept all links live so people can easily check it out.

However, this article was prompted by a member feeling that the article was shooting down WordPress, not blogging – so even if your article focused was on the benefits of SBI, a casual reader was left with something else. So was I, when I read it.

There’s room for a variety of business models for people starting on the Internet – from the ‘leave it all to someone else to do’ format to ‘do it all by yourself’, and many graduations in between. I think for the person desiring to get online with their business, and wanting to spend less time promoting, SBI works well. For ActiveBlogging, I prefer to give members the tools, and let them work it out themselves, for maximum flexibility. And while I mainly deal with WordPress, the fact is, if a better tool came along, I’d have no problem switching. Invariably, it’s a time versus money tradeoff – and each person picks the level they’re comfortable with.