Crafty Success!  It Can Be Yours!

Crafty success? Does that sound good to you? It did to me.

So, the next question was how to achieve it. When the chance to own handmade-craft-ideas.com popped up onto my horizon I just had to snap it up. What swayed me? The fact that it was an SBI! site. Uhhhh? I hear you say. More on that further down the page.


Let's start with a bit of history. No, not the boring stuff, but a bit of background about yours truly and my crafty success.

I have always been crafty, in the nicest sense of the word. And a bit of an entrepreneur. I can remember the lead up to a certain Christmas when I was about 12 years old. My best friend had recently taught me to crochet and I found a pattern for a cute little crocheted puppy. I made one for myself and took him to school to show him off.

He went down well. So well in fact that I took orders to make more for friends and teachers! After making about a dozen of these little puppies I had earned enough money to pay for all my Christmas presents that year.

Hooray for crafty success! I was a crafter and a business woman. Well maybe the second one was being a bit optimistic back then.

Fast forward a few years (well maybe more than a few), through periods of soft toy making, lacemaking, parchment craft, macrame, quilling, attending and selling at craft fairs, designing needlework and writing for national UK needlework magazines to October last year.

Due to health problems I had to leave work and I was bored and lonely at home. I needed a challenge. A chance email propelled me on a course I am still excitedly following.

Right, I promised you earlier that I would come back to those initials SBI! didn't I? What do they stand for? Site BuildIt! A Canadian company run by a wonderful man called Ken Evoy. He sent me an email telling me all about his system of getting a website online.

A website about your own passion and interests. Well I guess I'm not alone in having seen promotional emails before? But this one read a little differently. I could sense integrity and common sense in it, no get rich quick schemes here! So I followed it up and learned a bit about this SBI!. It sounded good, and after a bit of dithering I decided to give it a try.

In hindsight I have to say it was the best decision of my life. I know that sounds corny! But I truly mean it. I filmed the video below, soon after I began my first SBI! site www.needlework-tips-and-techniques.com in October 2006.


Now I wasn't totally new to website building at that stage, I had already built one the hard way, which had been online for a number of years and was just beginning to work its way into Google and Yahoo. But the success I saw with the new site left me gob smacked.

After following the step-by-step Action Guide my SBI! site climbed into the first few pages of the search engines in WEEKS rather than years. Before long I was flooded with visitors, many of which wrote me and said how much they enjoyed the site. I started a newsletter and soon built up a subscriber list of over 300. The site is still growing today and in fact is in the top 1% of all websites according to www.alexa.com

Before long, site number 2 followed, www.the-gluten-free-chef.com and is building nicely.

So when this site became available, hosted by SBI!, I just had to jump in and grab it.

Oh and in case you are wondering I'm not the only person who seems to think this way. Don't miss the Case Studies page or the ILoveSBI videos where others share their excitement.

To see how it all works you may want to spare some time to watch the video version of the action guide. It introduces a way of writing a website that even a novice can follow easily.

Have fun and don't forget to come back and visit me. After all you wouldn't want your crafty success to go to your head would you?

Regards,

Carol


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