In January 2006 I gave a 90-minute Power Point presentation to explain blogging to a group of about 60 speakers in Las Vegas. By that time I was earning a decent sustainable living from blogging (a few thousand dollars a month). I predicted that blogs would be everywhere within a few years. That wasn’t a difficult prediction to make since Technorati was reporting such phenomenal growth month after month with no end in sight. You didn’t have to be particularly prescient to see that blogging and other social media had bright futures. But I doubt many people in the room believed me.

They believe me now.

Fast forward a few years, and social media has exploded. Now I can scarcely find people who haven’t at least heard of blogging, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Unfortunately there’s a downside to such a rapid technological and social change. Part of that downside is that people approach social media with some misguided expectations that aren’t based in reality. In this article I’d like to offer some suggestions and analogies to help steer people away from such erroneous thinking.

The major mistake people make is that they assume they’re entitled to free speech when it comes to participating in online communities such as blogs, forums, Facebook, Twitter, and so on.

Entitlement

In the USA and many other countries, free speech is a protected right. Well, that’s certainly debatable these days, but let’s be idealists for the moment.

There are some legal limitations on free speech (criminal behavior, slander/libel, copyright laws, Patriot Act, etc). Some countries, such as China, restrict free speech more than others. I live in the USA, and we Americans are accustomed to a wide latitude when it comes to free speech.

It isn’t surprising that this sense of entitlement to free speech should be carried onto the Internet. In general I’m all for that. I’ve especially enjoyed having the opportunity to interact with people around the world.

Free Speech and Contract Law

Free speech protection, however, does not extend to private homes or businesses. You may have the right to say what you like in a public forum, but you don’t have the right to enter a private home or business and do that. In such situations your right to free speech is subject to the discretion of the owner of that private forum.

Contract law may apply in many cases as well. With some limitations it’s perfectly legal for a contract to limit the right of free speech. This is because you have the ability to enter into a contract that restricts your right to free speech.

I’ve signed many business deals over the years that restrict my free speech rights. Many business contracts include a non-disclosure clause, whereby I agree that I won’t disclose certain financial or other protected info that another business shares with me. This is very common in business.

It’s likely you’ve entered into many contracts over the years that restrict your right to free speech. For example, if you ever sign up for an online service and agreed to their Terms of Service, they usually define pretty clearly what restrictions you’re agreeing to.

Free Speech Online

For many of the online sites where you may think free speech is protected, you’re required to contractually agree to limit your free speech rights. You actually don’t have the same right to free speech that you would in a truly public forum.

This is true of Facebook, Twitter, and pretty much all the major social media sites I’m aware of. Review their Terms of Service and see for yourself.

In most cases the restrictions are reasonable and maybe even necessary for maintaining a quality service. It depends on who’s running the service.

While it may seem that you’re entitled to free speech just the same as you would in a public forum, in actuality you waived that right when you joined the service. That was a condition of your registration.

Some online services are quite liberal when it comes to restricting your free speech rights, while others are more restrictive.

The Catch-All Clause

Many online services also include some kind of catch-all clause which basically gives them the right to censor you however they see fit.

For example, Twitter’s Terms of Service includes the following sentence: “We reserve the right at all times (but will not have an obligation) to remove or refuse to distribute any Content on the Services and to terminate users or reclaim usernames.” So according to those terms, they can nuke your account and content whenever they want.

Since I’m a Twitter user myself, Twitter could disable my account and delete all my Tweets on a whim. They have the right to do that because I agreed to their Terms of Service. Now if they actually went around doing this sort of thing, it would likely generate some bad PR for them, but because I agreed to their ToS, I don’t see that I’d have a strong legal case if I tried to fight them on it. The legal reality is probably more complicated than what I’m expressing here, but as far as I can tell, I do have a valid contract with Twitter where I willfully agreed to restrict my free speech rights when it comes to using their service.

Consequently, I know that when I post updates to my Twitter account, I have no entitlement to free speech. I’ve signed away that right in exchange for the privilege of using their service. And yes, it is a privilege. Tweeting is not a guaranteed right under the law.

I include a catch-all clause for the discussion forums on my website as well. It says, “The owners of Personal Development for Smart People Forums reserve the right to remove, edit, move or close any thread for any reason.” In addition to that, you also have to agree to follow our forum etiquette rules. You can’t post messages in our forums unless you agree to our Terms of Service.

So in order to post your own messages on my website, you must also waive your right to free speech. If you think you can post whatever you’d like with impunity, you’re sorely mistaken.

This certainly isn’t unique to my website — not by a long shot. The phrasing I use came standard with the forum software I installed. A simple Google search can verify that thousands of other forums use similar phrasing.

The Reality of Private Forums

Why do so many online communities restrict free speech? Isn’t the expansion of free speech the whole point?

This isn’t some draconian conspiracy. It’s largely a matter of business realities. Creating and managing a highly social website isn’t free. If someone is going to go to the trouble to host and maintain such a community, especially one that may become very popular, they want to make sure they have enough control over the management of the site to fulfill their reasons for building the community in the first place. Unbridled free speech can easily degrade the quality of a community and run afoul of the site owner’s agenda.

If they were legally prevented from restricting free speech, fewer people and businesses would host such online communities. I for one would not host an online community under those conditions.

While it’s nice that government played a major role in funding the underlying Internet infrastructure that makes online communities possible, they don’t directly subsidize online communities like mine. I have to pay my site’s expenses. This includes my $350 monthly web hosting fee.

Computing power costs money. Bandwidth costs money. Site management, including installing security updates and performing basic maintenance activities, takes time. The forum software I use costs money; I pay an annual license fee to use it. Maintaining an online community certainly isn’t free on my end. Even if I use free software and find free hosting, I still have to invest my time. And someone else would still be paying for it somewhere down the line.

Allowing unbridled free speech on my website would be a very bad idea. It’s easy enough to predict what would happen because I know what our moderators deal with on a daily basis, and I’ve seen what happens to other forums that have done that. Within a few months, the site would be overrun by spammers and marketers looking to promote their wares. Flame wars would flare up on a daily basis, and threads beyond a certain length would be quickly derailed by juvenile comments and trolling by drama addicts. The quality of discussions would go down the drain, especially when it came to sensitive personal topics. I’d take one look at the mess and quickly pull the plug. Our forums would not be able to fulfill their purpose under such conditions, which is for conscious growth-oriented people to come together to help each other solve problems and improve their lives.

Although our community has more than 25,000 registered members and more than 407,000 messages posted, the core community of regular daily visitors is actually much smaller. Our top contributor has more than 10,785 posts herself (2.6% of the total). On any given day, the number of registered members who visit the site is around 400 people total. So the core community isn’t nearly as big as the casual visitors. This is pretty common when it comes to online forums and social media sites in general. The hardcore users make up only a small percentage of the total community.

Managing our community requires a staff of volunteer moderators. These moderators aren’t paid for their work. The forums don’t generate enough income to justify it, especially since I removed all the Adsense ads last year. If the quality of the community was too low, we’d have a really hard time recruiting decent moderators, which would lead to a downward spiral. So if we slacked off a little, the community could quickly go from bad to worse as our moderators concluded, “This just ain’t worth my time.” By maintaining high community standards, our moderators can see that their efforts help keep the community as a whole running smoothly, and that intrinsic reward is very important to maintaining community integrity as a whole.

Many of the most active members of our online community have been with us for years. I’ve met many of them in person, including several of our volunteer moderators. Consequently, our community doesn’t much resemble an open public forum. I’d say it’s closer to a really large family reunion with lots of drop-by visitors.

The Site Owner’s Agenda

Amazon wants to sell products. They allow you to post product reviews because someone at Amazon decided that allowing lots of people to do this would increase their sales. Do you honestly think they’d let any of us post reviews if it hurt their sales or cut into their market share to do so? They have some free speech restrictions to prevent people from doing too much damage to their sales, like posting non-Amazon links in reviews. It’s their site, so they make the rules about what you can and can’t post in a review.

The owners of Facebook have an agenda too. Investors have poured a lot of money into the site, so I’m sure they want to see it turn a profit. Consequently, you’ll see ads on your Facebook pages. Facebook makes money from those ads.

And as for Twitter… well, I don’t think Twitter’s owners have even figured what Twitter’s agenda is yet.

Some people seem to think that my primary motivation for starting and maintaining an online community was financial, as if being an entrepreneur means that all of one’s actions are driven by a profit motive. Now that’s a laugh and a half. If I really cared that much about money, I’d never have launched our forums in the first place, and even if I did, I’d have quickly realized my mistake and would have dropped them within a few months. Our forums aren’t profitable. They hog a lot of computing resources, requiring me to pay for a much faster server than I’d need for my blog alone. The forums usually cost more to run than they generate in revenue. On top of that, I’m not counting the value of the time Erin and I invest in administration. If we had to pay someone else to handle the admin, we’d lose more money on it, even if we could hire someone for less than minimum wage.

This isn’t the first time I’ve hosted an online community, so this didn’t surprise me. I used to host a popular forum for game developers, and I’ve been active in online communities since the early 90s. My game developer forum wasn’t profitable either, but I kept it going for a while because I enjoyed the communal interaction. So I knew full well when I started my personal development forums that they weren’t likely to be very profitable. Fortunately my blog generates more than enough revenue to subsidize the forums. But if I ever sold the site to someone who sought to maximize revenue from it, they would most definitely either ax the forums, flood them with third-party ads, or make some other changes to financially justify the community’s existence.

The main reason I maintain a discussion forum is that I like having like-minded people over to hang out. Just as I frequently invite people to my home, I also invite people to my online home to hang out together and talk about life. As I see it, paying for the upkeep of the forums is similar to providing snacks for my house guests.

If you have issues with the site owner’s agenda, don’t pay a visit to their virtual home. And don’t make the naive mistake of assuming their agenda is to help you assert your right to free speech.

Common Courtesy

When people approach online communities with the erroneous belief that they’re entitled to unbridled free speech, this misjudgment often leads to inappropriate behavior.

For example, sometimes people will register for my forums and try to trash talk me.

I don’t mind a bit of friendly ribbing now and then, and I’m all for intelligent debate, but if people come to my website and try to treat me, my wife, my friends, my business associates, or other members of my community with disrespect, they get banned very quickly.

Try going around to various privately owned forums and trash talk the site owner and his/her family. See how long it takes before your account is nuked. Sure, some people will allow you to do that. Some people don’t care. Some don’t pay attention. Some will get into it with you because they like the drama. But quite often you’ll end up having your account disabled. Ostensibly it’s for violating their Terms of Service. But in reality, you got banned for behaving like a jerk in someone else’s home. And when you find yourself bounced to the curb, see how much anyone cares to hear your protests that you were simply exercising your right to free speech. I’m sure the crickets will enjoy listening to your well-formed arguments.

You Are an Invited Guest

Here’s an attitude I suggest you adopt when it comes to participating in online communities. When you visit someone else’s online community, you’re a guest in the owner’s online home. Behave accordingly. Your participation there is a privilege subject to their owner’s discretion.

For example, StevePavlina.com is my own private website. In case that wasn’t obvious, take note of the URL. Notice that the URL is NOT personal-development-free-for-all-subsidized-by-steve-pavlina-who-will-bend-over-and-take-it-up-the-ass-from-anyone.com.

For some reason, certain people seem to confuse those two URLs quite often.

Technically Pavlina LLC owns StevePavlina.com, and technically an LLC is a separate legal entity from a person. Lawyers, accountants, and IRS agents get off on that sort of thing. But based on the company name you can probably guess who owns 100% of Pavlina LLC… and you’d be right.

Some people seem to have a really hard time with the whole notion of privately owned online communities. The idea that they don’t have the right to free speech everywhere online really messes with their heads. They visit their favorite online communities expecting that they’re entitled to rant and rave about anything they wish, even after they just legally agreed that everything they post is subject to the site owner’s discretion.

From time to time, visitors come to our forums and post something disrespectful toward me, Erin, our friends, or our community members. Naturally they get banned rather quickly.

Some visitors act really immature and annoy our members. Banned. Some visitors try to use our forums to promote the latest pyramid scheme. Banned. Some people think it’s fun to derail other people’s threads. Banned. And some people try to participate without ever having seen The Princess Bride. Banned and sent to Count Rugen for rehabilitation.

Most of the time, I’m not the one doing the banning. We have a team of more than a dozen moderators who do a great job of enforcing the community rules. But if I happen to be the first to notice a problem, I’m happy to take care of it myself. It’s my home, so I’m ultimately responsible when problems arise.

Sometimes people who’ve been banned will go to another online community such as someone else’s blog or another online forum and rant about what happened. “I can’t believe it. All I did was go to Steve Pavlina’s website and insinuate that he was a loser for being into self-help, and he banned me. What a jerk!”

Sometimes someone else who had a similar experience will chime in and commiserate. “Yeah, he banned me too. And all I did was call him a Satan spawn for being married to a psychic medium. Can you believe that? He’s censoring people!”

No, actually I banned you for being a moron. Well, it might not have been me personally, but I’ll gladly take credit for it. And if I was the one who handled it, most likely I did it without guilt or remorse. As everyone knows, the Dread Pirate Roberts never takes prisoners.

Do I censor people? Technically yes. But I don’t like the word censorship in this case — not because it’s too strong but because it’s too mild. I’m not just censoring people. I’m kicking them out of my home and telling them not to come back. I’m not saying, “I don’t like what you’re saying, so I’m going to cut you off.” I’m actually saying, “GET THE HELL OUT, BITCH! AND TAKE YOUR NASTY CHEESE PUFFS WITH YOU!”

Is that clear enough?

So my critics in this area are a bit off base, not because they’ve accused me of something I didn’t do but because they didn’t accuse me of enough.

If you’re going to come into my private online home and behave like a jerk in my presence, I will show you the door every time. And after you’re gone, I’ll return to my other guests and refill the snack bowls.

Who Makes The Rules?

Ostensibly when someone is banned from an online community, it’s because they violated the Terms of Service and/or community rules. But the deeper and more accurate reason is that the site owner has ultimately decided they don’t want you there.

After all, who wrote the rules in the first place? Quite often the site owner did. At the very least they approved someone else’s boilerplate text. Where did those rules come from? They came from the owner’s sense of what behaviors they’re willing to accept in their online community.

Who wrote the formal rules for my online community? I did. I solicited a lot of input from others, but the final decisions were mine to make. Where did those rules come from? They’re based on what sorts of behavior I’m willing to accept from people in my online home. If I’m not willing to tolerate certain behavior in my online home, and if I can articulate it reasonably well, I add it to our community rules, and it becomes part of our Terms of Service. But the unwritten rule is that every member who participates in this community does so at my personal discretion, especially given the catch-all in the ToS. Most people seem to have no problem with this, especially those that have had a lot of experience participating in other online communities.

Now generally speaking, if you want to build a cool community, it’s wise to be fair and reasonable. If you behave abusively toward your own community, you’ll have bigger problems to deal with. I happen to think our current community rules are quite fair and reasonable given the nature of the subjects we discuss. Again, it’s like having people over at your house. If you host a good party, people will enjoy hanging out there, and everyone is happy. If you’re an ogre, you’ll scare everyone away, and your parties will suck. The point of throwing the party is to bring people together to socialize. Maintaining a good social atmosphere requires maintaining a careful balance between freedom and good manners.

How would you react if you were hosting a party at your home for your friends, family, and community members, and someone waltzes in and starts treating your guests rudely or otherwise behaving like an obnoxious buffoon? Would you continue to welcome this person into your home, or would you show them the door right quick?

In general, this is the unspoken truth about how online communities are managed. The idea that you have free speech is a delusion. Your participation is subject to the site owner’s consent. Even if the community has written rules and does its best to uphold them fairly, who makes the rules? In most cases the site owner makes the rules.

Online Abuse

If people want to rant and rave about me in their own homes or on other websites I don’t own, more power to them. I really don’t mind that. Some bloggers commit libel by posting ridiculously false info, and sometimes we end up with a version of the telephone game where information loses accuracy as it spreads around. But as I see it, such things are a natural consequence of my chosen lifestyle. This can get a bit weird sometimes, but after 5 years of blogging, I’m used to it. It’s easy enough for me to tune out someone who rants about me somewhere else. No one is forcing me to go look at it. Whether I choose to read stuff like that or not depends on how masochistic I’m feeling.

That said, I have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to being abused in my own home, whether online or offline. I’m simply unwilling to enter into an abusive relationship with anyone. If I catch you peeing in my yard, I will hose you.

When someone posts trash talk on my own website, it’s like they rang my doorbell and left a pile of crap on my doormat. It smells bad, and it’s a waste of my time to deal with it.

Do you have to become my close personal friend or agree with everything I say to participate in my website’s online community? Heck no, I’m not that strict. But if you pay me a visit online or offline, I do require that you treat me, my wife, and our other guests with basic courtesy, politeness, and respect. Treat me online as you would if you were a guest in my home. Just as I open my website to others, I often open my home to a variety of guests as well. I love hanging out with many different kinds of people, as long as they behave with a modicum of human decency.

Now if at some point you think that I’m behaving oddly or that my manners are a bit lacking, you’re always free to leave. No one is forcing you to sit there and listen to me. It’s my home after all, and if you’re going to hang around in my living room 24/7, you’re bound to catch me at my worst at some point, so try not to be too shocked when that happens. But rest assured that when I visit your home, I’m going to be respectful of your space.

Am I trying to build a cult of supporters? No, I’m actually stricter than a cultist would be. I’ve turned away people who might have had the potential to become good and loyal cult members, but I just didn’t want them in my home because they acted too stalker-like. I want to hang out with interesting people who enjoy intelligent discussion, and I want to maintain a persistent place where people like that can come together. I have no interest in surrounding myself with mindless minions.

Misunderstandings arise when people make erroneous assumptions about how online communities really work and why people run them. This really isn’t rocket science. Can you grasp the analogy of virtual communities being equivalent to someone’s online home, regardless of how big they appear to be? Does this make sense to you? Does this help shed light on some of the problems you may have encountered in the past?

Quality Criticism

Isn’t it a community owner’s obligation to be receptive to criticism?

I’d say that’s entirely up to the owner.

I do think it’s reasonable to be open to critical feedback. A bit of constructive criticism now and then is good for growth. It keeps people honest and grounded.

If I’m going to listen to criticism, however, I want it to be of high quality. I don’t want to waste my time listening to drivel. In my case the best quality criticism almost always comes from people who know me pretty well. They’ve met me in person. They’ve met Erin. They know me on a personal level beyond my public persona as a blogger.

I’m not nearly as receptive to criticism from people who wander in off the street (virtual or otherwise) and who’ve never had so much as a single one-on-one conversation with me. Such criticism is almost always of such low quality as to be useless. Too often such people base their criticisms on one or more inaccurate assumptions and build a house of cards on top of it. It’s totally inactionable; they might as well be talking about someone else. In this area I think Erin has it worse than I do. She gets some pretty wacky criticism from people who begin with, “Erin, since you’ve obviously sold your soul to the devil, you may not be receptive to what I have to say, but please hear me out anyway…”

There’s a difference between offering genuinely helpful constructive feedback to someone you know, coming from a place of respect and wanting to be helpful, vs. cluelessly ranting because you want to vent or you like drama. I do my best to listen to respectful, actionable criticism because it’s in my own best interest and the interest of my community to do so. But it isn’t a good use of my time to wade through unreasonable criticism, and I don’t welcome unreasonable critics into my home to hang out with me either.

Communities within Communities

On some sites we see communities within communities. For example, I have a Facebook page which is maxed out on friends. The friend limit is 5,000. Someone else owns and manages the monstrous beast that is Facebook, and all members, including me, are subject to their Terms of Service.

Beyond that, anyone of the 5,000 Facebook members who want to post messages on my Facebook page are subject to my unwritten Terms of Service.

Imagine that the larger community is an apartment complex, subject to the terms of whoever owns that complex. All residents and guests of residents must follow that owner’s rules. But within that complex, each unit is additionally subject to the individual resident’s terms.

I regard my Facebook page as my online apartment. It’s another fun place to hang out online. If people visit my apartment and try to trash the place, I kick them out and unfriend them. It goes without saying that if you go to a friend’s apartment and behave like a jerk, they won’t be your friend for long.

When I visit a friend’s Facebook page, I consider myself a guest in their online apartment. We all live in the same complex, and it’s fun to pop over to other people’s units and see what they’re up to. But I know that if I go to my friends’ apartments and graffiti up the place while they’re gone, I’m going to lose those friends rather quickly.

I suggest you adopt a similar mindset when interacting in online sub-communities. It will save you a lot of grief.

I think if you have your own Facebook page or something similar, especially if you have a lot of active friends, you’ll have a reasonably good idea of what it’s like to manage a larger online community. How would you react if people came to your community and started posting trash talk about you? How would you feel if they started disrespecting your friends right in front of you? I imagine you’d send such people packing right quick. And I seriously doubt you’d be swayed by their protests of free speech entitlement.

So just to be abundantly clear, in most cases you are not entitled to unbridled free speech when you participate in online communities. You are a guest of the site owner — and possibly of the virtual renter as well. Behave as you would if you were a guest in someone else’s home, and you’re likely to be welcomed as a friend. Give the site owner a reason to dislike you, and you’re likely to be booted to the curb.

Online Fairness

Is this whole situation unfair? Maybe it is unfair.

I think the concept of fairness stems from a misguided sense of entitlement. You may be entitled to the right of fair treatment under the law (but realistically you can’t even count on that anywhere on earth that I know of), but you certainly aren’t entitled to fair treatment in someone’s private home, whether online or offline. When you enter a private residence or online community, you’re subject to the rules of the Lord or Lady of the place. Whatever level of fairness you may experience is at their discretion. Fairness is a privilege that humans may choose to bestow upon each other, not a right that you’re automatically entitled to.

I imagine that most homeowners like to consider themselves fair people, but their implementation of fairness is a very personal decision. You have no special entitlement to be treated fairly by others. Some laws may apply under certain situations, but generally speaking, whoever owns the house makes the rules.

If you go through life thinking you’re entitled to fair treatment by people who barely know you, well, let’s just say that you’re in for a rude awakening. The real world doesn’t work that way. Give it another decade or two, and reality will hopefully straighten out your belief system.

I’m not saying you have to like this situation, but I’d encourage you to accept it for what it is. If you have a hard time accepting it, you may have picked the wrong planet on which to incarnate.

You may now commence with the Steve-bashing… as long as you do it off-site and don’t tell me about it.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

I ordered the original Kindle in January, but I was informed it was backordered and wouldn’t ship for 2 months. A month or so later, Amazon informed me that they were about to release the Kindle 2, so they automatically upgraded my order for free, and I received the Kindle 2 shortly thereafter.

I’ve had a few months to play with it now, and overall I like it a lot.

Electronic Ink

The Kindle doesn’t use an LCD screen. It uses a special technology called electronic ink. This involves shifting around physical particles to form each pixel instead of turning on tiny lights. This means that the Kindle isn’t back-lit, so you won’t be able to read it in the dark without another light source. In practice this isn’t a big deal because it’s no different than reading a print book.

I thought the e-ink was pretty amazing when I first saw it. The text is very crisp and easy on the eyes. When my Kindle arrived in the mail, I noticed there was some text printed on the screen. I assumed it was one of those plastic stick-on sheets to protect the screen from scratches during shipping, as you often find on electronic devices. However, when I tried to peel off the sticker, I discovered there was no sticker, and I got confused. Was this a piece of plastic I had to snap off somehow to get to the real screen underneath?  It took me a while to figure out that the device was already turned on and displaying a welcome message. The text was so unlike what I’ve seen on an LCD screen that I didn’t realize it was being displayed by the device itself.

The wow factor lasted about 15 minutes, and soon I paged through the Kindle manual, which is included on the device when you buy it. The manual works like a tutorial since it encourages you to try out features as you go along. I read the whole thing because I read a lot and expected to use the device a lot, so I wanted to familiarize myself with all the specs and diagrams.

Page Turning

The Kindle 1 received many complaints about the page turning buttons, which were too easy to bump by accident. The Kindle 2 solves this problem definitively by making the buttons hinge from the outside in, so you have to press them on the inside edge. That’s easy to do intentionally but hard to do accidentally.

I like that there are duplicate “Next Page” buttons on the left and right sides of the Kindle. This makes it easy to keep reading while holding the book in either hand.

My #1 gripe with the Kindle 2 is the slow page turning. It’s faster than the Kindle 1, and it only takes about a second, but those seconds add up when you’re seeing only a couple paragraphs per screen.

The slow page turning means I can’t really PhotoRead books on my Kindle. I can still use many of the PhotoReading techniques, but not all of them. Some aspects are just too tedious because of the slowness of the device. However, if they can speed this up a lot in future versions, then it would be practical to PhotoRead with the Kindle.

If your reading speed is average or close to average, then the Kindle 2 page turning should be just fine.

Cool Features

You can change the text size very easily. I only use the two smallest sizes. Even at those sizes, you’re only seeing 2-3 paragraphs at a time. At the largest size, you’ll see about 50-60 words per screen (not much longer than a Twitter tweet).

The search feature is very fast. You can search through individual books or across all the books in your collection. I wish I could instantly search through all the print books on my bookshelf since that would be incredibly useful. As I add more books to my Kindle, the search feature will become more valuable.

Battery life is excellent. I’m very impressed with that aspect. The battery drains faster with the wireless turned on, but it can last for a couple weeks if you keep the wireless off and just turn it on when you need it. It only takes about 15 seconds for the wireless connection to boot up once you enable it, so I usually leave it turned off. Even so, you’ll still get many hours of use with the wireless turned on.

I like the innovative power cord and USB port which share the same jack and cable. The cable has an attachment on the end to turn it from a USB connection to a regular power plug. There’s a charging indicator light that is yellow while the Kindle is charging and turns green when it’s fully charged. Unfortunately since I’m colorblind, I can’t tell the difference between those colors. That lame design decision makes this feature worthless for me and the millions of people who see colors like I do. Fortunately it doesn’t matter much because the device only takes hours to charge completely, and the long battery life means I don’t have to charge it more than once every few weeks, even if I’m using it a lot. My iPod tells me on the display when it’s fully charged.

I love the wireless connection to Amazon.com’s online store. It’s really nice shopping for books this way, especially since I’m used to buying items from them. You really can purchase and download books in less than 60 seconds. The first book I bought took 35 seconds to receive. And the best part was that I bought it from my backyard. The Kindle accesses a 3G wireless network directly from the device, just like a cell phone, so you can shop for books from just about anywhere — no need for a WiFi connection.

When shopping online you can access essentially the same info about a book that you can get at Amazon.com, including the reviews that people have posted. The downside is that you can’t see as much info on the screen at any one time, so it takes longer to page through lengthy text. I like to scan through multiple reviews very quickly, and that’s harder to do on the Kindle.

You can make annotations throughout any book you read, and then you can review the annotations later. I haven’t used this feature much, but it could come in handy if I read a book with a lot of sections I want to highlight, such as for posting a book review.

Amazon backs up your purchases as well as your annotations, so you can download them again later if you buy a new Kindle-compatible device. I like that all the books I buy for my Kindle can be accessed indefinitely as long as I have a device that can read them. Some people might not like being locked into a proprietary system though since you can’t read Kindle books on other ebook readers. Personally this doesn’t bother me since Amazon is the only online bookstore I patronize anyway, other than buying ebooks now and then. I’d probably be very concerned right now if I were one of their competitors.

You can subscribe to magazines and blogs on the Kindle for a small fee. Each blog is 99 cents per month, and you can get a free 14-day trial. The latest content is automatically downloaded to your Kindle via the blog’s RSS feed. But not all blogs are available because the blog publisher must explicitly submit their blog to Kindle and agree to Amazon’s long list of terms. There were about 1000 blogs listed last time I checked, but I haven’t checked for months, so there are probably a lot more by now. Personally I don’t use this feature at all, but that’s probably because I don’t regularly read any blogs other than Erin’s. I also thought the selection of blogs on the Kindle was pretty weak.

Despite several requests I’ve received from readers to make my blog available on the Kindle, I won’t be doing so anytime soon because Amazon’s Terms of Service for bloggers are too draconian for me. I might make a little extra money from the subscriptions, but it isn’t worth the headache to change the way I blog just to satisfy their requirements. Many other bloggers will balk at those terms as well, so I think the availability of the most popular blogs on the Kindle will be rather limited if they stick to their current terms. But perhaps they’re deliberately trying to start out slow so they don’t get overwhelmed with submissions. Personally I think it would be to Amazon’s advantage to lighten up their terms and not be so controlling. It seems silly to hold blogs to a different standard than the books they sell.

Sometimes the Kindle version of books don’t include everything the print version does. Recently I read the book Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer on my Kindle. I received the book in less than 20 seconds after ordering it directly from the device. Yesterday I was in a local bookstore and happened to see the hardcover version on the shelf. I thumbed through it and noticed it included several pages of photos on glossy paper. I didn’t receive any of those photos with the Kindle version. I don’t see why the photos weren’t included. They were all in black and white anyway, and the Kindle is capable of showing photos in 16-color grayscale, which would have been adequate to display the ones from the book. Incidentally, this was an excellent book — highly recommended if you’re curious about the future of robotics and unmanned combat. Did you know there are now thousands of robots now on active combat duty in the Middle East, many of which are armed?

Experimental Features

The Kindle also includes some experimental features.

Text-to-speech allows you to have your Kindle read any text to you. The Kindle comes with built-in speakers as well as a headphone jack. You can choose from male and female voices and different reading speeds. This is a nice touch, but personally I never use it. The Kindle is a bit too bulky to make a good portable listening device, so I’d rather listen to audio programs on my iPod. Nevertheless, this could be a useful feature under certain circumstances. For example, if you’re going on a long road trip and reading in the car makes you carsick, you can listen to your books on the road and then continue reading normally once you arrive at your destination. Same goes for plane travel. You can also set your Kindle down on the counter and have it read your latest book to you while you make dinner.

You can play MP3s from your Kindle, uploading them via USB. I haven’t tried this because I’d rather use my iPod for audio.

You can surf the web in a limited fashion, much like you would on a cell phone. I was able to check my Gmail account with it, but it’s pretty tedious due to the slow speed. The web browsing feature crashed on me a few times as well. I like that they included this feature, and I found it useful during a trip to L.A. when I didn’t bring my laptop, but realistically I’d only use it in a pinch if I had nothing else available.

Using the Kindle – My Personal Experience

So far I really like my Kindle, and it has quickly become one of my favorite gadgets. But I’d still like to see the technology improve, especially the overall speed of the device.

The Kindle reminds me of the pads from Star Trek: The Next Generation. When I use the thing, I feel like Wesley Crusher reviewing engineering schematics in Ten Forward. I mean that in a good way. I know this tech is still evolving, but I already get the sense that we’re on the cusp of a major transformation. I feel I’m witnessing the future of reading when I use my Kindle. As I sit in my office right now, I’m staring at hundreds of print books on my bookshelves and thinking, your days are numbered. And that includes my own book (which by the way does have a Kindle version and is currently in the top 1% of Kindle books by sales rank).

By far my favorite aspect of using the Kindle is the shareware marketing element coupled with the instant gratification. When I go to a bookstore, I like to browse books on the shelf. I’ll often read a chapter right there in the store to decide whether the book is worth my time and money. But many times they don’t carry the book I want, or they have a weak selection on the topic that interests me. And then I may have to wait in line to buy, especially during the holiday season. When I shop online, I get a bigger selection and better prices, but I have to wait days for my order to arrive. Even with the Amazon Prime program, which gives me free two-day shipping on every order for $79 per year, I still have to wait two days or pay extra for overnight shipping. That’s too long if I find a book I want on a Saturday morning and would like to read the whole book that weekend. I’m used to finishing books within a day or two after I buy them.

With my Kindle I get the best of both worlds. I can shop online with a vast selection since almost 300,000 books are now available on Kindle. When I find a book I like, I can instantly download a free sample chapter and start reading immediately. Then if I like it, I can buy the full book right away, usually for $9.99 or less. This whole process is superb. It’s not perfect — I still love to be able to thumb through the entire book like I can in a bookstore — but it’s a huge step in the right direction.

The Kindle also eliminates the hassle of shelving print books in my home. Erin and I own hundreds of books, and they take up a lot of space. I can donate the ones I don’t need to keep, but I still want many of them available for reference. The Kindle makes this very easy because it can hold up to 1500 books on the device itself.

I think it would be especially cool if Amazon gave you the Kindle version when you bought the physical version of a book too. It would also be nice to get Kindle versions of the print books I’ve already bought from Amazon over the years. They certainly have that info in their database. I understand if they can’t do this for free, but maybe they could offer a deep discount on the Kindle price for books they can verify that you already own, like 99 cents or so. If I could instantly Kindle-ize all the Amazon books I’ve bought over the years for 99 cents each, I’d very likely do it. But $10 each is a bit too much. This problem of digital rights management isn’t specific to Kindle — you see it with music, movies, and software too — but I think Amazon is in a good position to offer better solutions so you don’t have to keep buying the same content in different media forms.

For someone like me who buys dozens of books each year (despite being sent so many for free), the Kindle is likely to save me money in the long run, even with the $359 price tag. Most Kindle books are $9.99. For the types of books I frequently buy, I probably save about $5 per book on average, so with 72 books I recoup my Kindle investment. The money isn’t a big deal to me, but I point this out because I know that some people would consider this a pricey gadget. The price may be offset partially or completely if you buy a lot of books.

My kids got curious about my Kindle when they saw me reading it. Since it doesn’t look like a book, I think they regard it as something of a toy, like a Nintendo DS. My daughter Emily (age 9) keeps calling it a kettle. I showed her how it works, but she didn’t seem to care much. She loves to read as well, so I may have her read a book on the Kindle to see if she likes it. If some of her favorite authors are available on Kindle, she may quite enjoy it. This would save us from having to store all the books she buys.

Kindle DX

This summer Amazon is releasing their new Kindle DX, which is currently available for pre-order. Compared to the Kindle 2, the Kindle DX is significantly larger (10.4″ x 7.2″ x 0.38″). It has a bigger screen (9.7″ diagonal compared to the 6″ Kindle 2 screen). It has more memory (4GB, enough to hold 3500 books compared to the 1500 books on the Kindle 2). And it costs more ($489 vs. $359 for the Kindle 2). It also has some new features like native PDF support.

At 10.2 ounces, the weight of the Kindle 2 is just right, roughly comparable to a paperback book. The Kindle DX weights 18.9 ounces, so that’s more than a pound and 85% heavier than the Kindle 2. By comparison, however, the last Harry Potter book in hardcover weighs 41.2 ounces, so the Kindle DX is less than half of that. Even so, the heavier weight may mean more wrist strain if you like the device with one hand at an angle like I do.

I’m not sure if I’ll get a Kindle DX. I’d probably get one only if Erin and the kids end up taking an interest in my Kindle 2, and we end up competing for who gets to use it. Then I might buy a Kindle DX, so we have a couple devices to share between us. This would allow us to share all the books bought across both devices if we link them to the same Amazon account. At present I’m quite happy with my Kindle 2 though, and I’m glad I bought it. I hope that in time the price will come down, so these devices can be accessible to a lot more people, including those who don’t read as often.

I would not want to be the owner of a brick and mortar bookstore right now.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

Rebecca used Site Build It! to create her website. Since many people are curious about what kind of real-world results can be achieved with Site Build It!, I asked her if she’d be willing to share specific traffic and income figures from her business’ first year online, and thankfully she agreed. I think you’ll find her results encouraging.

If you aren’t familiar with lucid dreaming, a lucid dream is a dream where you become consciously aware that you’re dreaming. With practice you can learn to do all sorts of amazing things in lucid dreams — fly like Superman, wield a light saber, jump around like Trinity in The Matrix, create dream characters out of thin air, move objects by thought, defeat the Kobayashi Maru, and lots more. Erin and I are both experienced lucid dreamers.

Enjoy the interview…

1. Why did you create World of Lucid Dreaming?

I wanted to get out of the rat race. When I left school I fell into the financial sector and before long, I found myself working a stressful city Editor job. I told myself it was worth it because it stretched my mind and the money would go a long way. By my mid-20s I came to realize that life isn’t about creating stress and drama, so I emigrated to the tranquil shores of New Zealand with my Kiwi partner.

I knew straight away I wasn’t going to rejoin the rat race here in Auckland. So I decided to become self employed, trading on my writing skills. It was a much better lifestyle working for myself, but the income was sporadic. When the credit crisis turned the industry upside down, it put the nail in the coffin for my investment writing. I decided to find a new niche.

That’s when I heard about Site Build It and discovered I could build a profitable online business based on my own life experience, no matter how little technical knowledge I possessed. And so World of Lucid Dreaming was born from my desire to be financially secure on my own terms, to work a job I am passionate about, and to be free from corporate slavery.

2. Can you share some stats on how your site is doing in terms of traffic and income generation? How did these figures change over time?

My site went live in June 2008 with 20 or so content pages and averaged 76 visitors per day. By July, it was time to start monetizing that traffic. I added my first two income streams: Google AdSense (which I would later drop for more lucrative affiliate partners) and Mind Sync (a seller of MP3s which puts your brain in an optimum state for lucid dreaming). I made $60 that first month. That may not seem like much but to me it meant my website was a viable income generator. Site Build It worked!

After that, World of Lucid Dreaming grew quickly. Site Build It warned me about “the hump” – but it never came. I did everything by the book: writing quality articles, putting my own personality into the site, building an online presence, and all the rest. It helped that I loved every minute – I was creating something new and unique and if I did it right, I would never have to work for anyone else again. I couldn’t ask for much more motivation.

By early 2009, Alexa had ranked my website in the top 0.3% globally. My average daily visitors had climbed to 750 (more than 20,000 hits per month). That’s some snowball effect in just over six months. SBI showed me how to monetize those visitors and in the month of January my monthly income topped $1,000 – a landmark event for me. I knew that if I could earn $1k from my website, I could earn $2k, $3k, or $4k a month. Even if I maxed out the potential for World of Lucid Dreaming, I could create another website in exactly the same way. I was delighted.

[SP: These are excellent results, Rebecca, and you have every reason to be optimistic about future growth. By comparison it took a year for StevePavlina.com to pass $1K per month in revenue, with Google Adsense being the main source of income. One year later it hit $41K in one month. That was obviously an exciting year.

Once you get the hang of traffic building and monetization, rapid growth is possible. The key is to be consistent and keep doing what's working, while continuing to experiment to test new ideas.]

3. What specific strategies do you use to generate income from your website? Which ones have been the most effective for you?

I currently make all of my income through affiliate programs. Once I find a good value product – usually one that directly aids lucid dreaming – I test it out and write a review on my website. I use my unique affiliate link so I earn money when people decide to buy it through my site. Sometimes I can offer special discounted prices which adds further value to my readers. I raise interest in these product reviews by posting banner ads around the rest of the site. I’ve even begun designing my own graphics which is fun – the creative process never ends for me!

I’m signed up with about a dozen affiliate programs for World of Lucid Dreaming. These include brainwave entrainment recordings, “how to” books and videos, and natural herbs to increase awareness and dream recall. My first e-book (Lucid Fiction) is underway and should be selling on site by July. I also plan to distribute this via affiliate marketplaces like ClickBank, so that other webmasters can do the selling and help me reach a wider audience.

My best selling products are brainwave entrainment MP3s created by affiliate partners. Binaural beats and hypnosis really helped my early quest for lucid dreaming and these MP3s have numerous other applications as well. Through my affiliate partners, you can buy MP3s for deep meditation, astral projection, out of body experiences, ESP, remote viewing, chakra healing, manifestation, and so much more. The seller tracks all links from my site for up to 90 days, so I earn profits from any future sales too.

Crucially, I don’t stock or sell any tangible goods myself. An online business is about making money with minimal ongoing costs. A traditional business might have to fund staff salaries, growing office space, wholesale goods, storage, packaging, posting, and resolving customer queries. In contrast, an online business like mine can generate high margin profits simply by recommending products and taking away a commission. Once I publish a product recommendation, the profits come in on autopilot, earning me passive income 24/7.

[SP: I discovered that a similar strategy works well for me too. Today most of my income is from sales commissions from product recommendations. When you have high traffic and can generate many sales for your partners, you can also negotiate custom deals for higher commissions and better terms, especially if your partners have strong back-end sales and don't need to see a high profit on the first sale.]

4. Why did you use Site Build It! to create your business? What has it done for you?

I chose Site Build It because it takes away the scary technical bits about website building, and leaves me in charge of the creative stuff. Before World of Lucid Dreaming began, words like RSS, pings, trackbacks and SEO meant nothing to me. The idea of starting an online business was all too overwhelming and not worth the risks associated with technical failure.

Site Build It virtually eliminated all that risk, because it told me exactly what to do, day by day, in order to build a profitable website. First I used the brainstorming tool to find a profitable niche, based on a number of my own passions and life experiences. Then I planed my site structure, researching article ideas with the optimum keywords. Then I designed my custom template with SBI’s point-and-click tools (although I would later get a re-design by Cre8ve Media). After that, I learned how to write for the web, how to pre-sell, how to create value, how to monetize visitors, and many more tricks for success.

I could go on about Site Build It for ages! Suffice to say that if you’re thinking about starting a website or blog – and you don’t already have the extensive knowledge required to succeed in online business – then make this a serious consideration. During the 10-day course I learned everything I needed to know in order to succeed. SBI simplified the whole process and even outsourced the most technical bits for me, like submitting my site to Search Engines, or pinging them when I posted a new article. And since I was committed to the project, it guaranteed my success. So Site Build It is not merely a blogging platform like WordPress or Blogger. It’s a complete guide to successful online business. (And it caters to internet dummies!)

5. Why did you select lucid dreaming as your site’s main focus? What related topics does your site address?

I discovered lucid dreaming when I was 14 and have been consciously exploring my dreams ever since. But I wasn’t what you’d call a natural lucid dreamer – I had to go through a process of learning, making lots of mistakes along the way. And that gave me tremendous insight. So now I know what rookie mistakes people make and how to avoid them. I know the coolest things to try in your first lucid dreams. I know what reality checks work better than others. I understand the potential of lucid dreaming and how it can affect our lives. That is my edge: inside knowledge – and passion.

So when Site Build It told me to write a list of all my hobbies, interests and areas of expertise, lucid dreaming was pretty high up. I also considered making a site about stock market investing as well as numerous travel related sites. I plugged all these potentials into Site Build It and each niche idea was given a score, based on the extent of my knowledge, passion, popularity and monetization potential.

Lucid dreaming came out top – and from then on I knew I couldn’t go wrong with it. Most bloggers don’t even consider this kind of concept examination, they just pick a topic that “feels right” and start writing. Unfortunately, not all niches are a good idea; they may be oversaturated or too obscure. Lucid dreaming is perfect for me because I am very enthusiastic about it and the concept is timeless – meaning people will still be searching for “how to lucid dream” in 5, 10, or 20 years’ time.

What’s more, the concept of lucid dreaming stems from a host of other subjects. I can write on a range of subjects while staying true to my niche, including human consciousness, dreams, psychology, self awareness, altered states of consciousness, meditation, astral projection, out of body experiences, dream yoga and Tibetan philosophies. While I fulfilled my original site plan some months ago, I am still struck by new article ideas all the time. It’s a wonderful topic of exploration.

[SP: It's awesome to create an online business based on something you're passionate about because then you have even more reasons to "play." For example, I can now justify my crazy growth experiments as research.

You raised a key point when you mentioned timeless content. If you focus on creating timeless content, your archives will retain their value. If you create mostly time-bound content, your archives become obsolete as they age. It's best to create assets that won't depreciate.

It's great that you picked a niche that gives you room to grow horizontally. You can also go vertical by producing your own books, home study courses, DVDs, teleseminars, webinars, and even live events, should you so desire.]

6. What are some key lessons you learned during your first year of running World of Lucid Dreaming?

The single most important lesson that World of Lucid Dreaming has taught me is this: anything is possible. I never dreamed that I could earn a living this way – I always thought that real money came from a stressful office job and you couldn’t have one without the other. While this thought was always niggling at the back of my mind, I stayed true to the lessons of Site Build It. I kept moving forward, delighted by the little things that showed my site was becoming a success. Too many people give up on SBI because they get bored or lose motivation. I couldn’t let that happen to me. And now that I’m earning my living from it, doing something I love every day, I have gained proof that you CAN have your cake and eat it.

I learned many new skills through Site Build It, like writing for the internet – something my job as an Editor never taught me. It’s a completely different way of relating to people. And it’s actually very easy. The ground rule is: Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS). If you read my site you’ll see I’m hardly Shakespeare. I just write like I’m talking to a friend, and that’s all. SBI has a free e-book called Make Your Content Pre-Sell which explains this technique in detail. I think this is also what makes my site accessible to a broad audience – I have everyone from teenagers and retirees writing to me, and they all “get it”.

I also learned that I am not Wikipedia. I started out writing generic factual articles, indistinguishable from hundreds of other “how to” web pages. So I sat down with the SBI e-book on writing for the web, and I began injecting my own personality into my words, introducing real life experiences. It really brought the site to life, helping me connect with my readers better.

[SP: Something I learned in Toastmasters was the adage, "Make a point; tell a story." It's best if the stories are your own. This helps you create content that appeals to both left-brained and right-brained readers. Some people just want the straight-up information; others prefer to extract their own insights from stories.]

7. What have been the major contributing factors in making your online business successful?

Traffic, traffic, traffic! Without people landing on my website, it would be nothing. No-one would benefit from the value I’m creating, and in turn I wouldn’t benefit from their custom. It would be a 100% failure.

Thankfully, I learned how to generate plenty of free traffic through SBI’s techniques. I dabbled with Google AdWords (pay per click advertising) but without becoming a PPC guru, I had no hope. It was better to focus my efforts on free traffic techniques and that is where all of my website traffic comes from today.

I should add that you need to pick a high demand concept to begin with. Traffic doesn’t materialize out of nowhere; people have to be looking for you in the first place. Lucid dreaming has that strong demand, and catches the imagination of quite a broad spectrum of people. When I tell someone they can become self aware in their dreams – so that everything looks and feels as real as waking life – most people respond with “Really?? How!?”

That leads to the second advantage of my site concept. Everyone thinks lucid dreaming sounds awesome, but not many people can actually do it. I can tackle that with a “how to” approach on site and teach people what they want to know in order to improve their lives. Having that practical element encourages people to return to my site and learn the next step. It also opens plenty of doors for monetization.

Motivation is also a major contributor to success. I’m the type of person who has a great idea and gets really excited about it, but then gets bored because it takes too long to finish. I can’t tell you how many novels I’ve started writing and left off at chapter four! And so the concept of Site Build It is to give you a step-by-step framework without feeling overloaded, which is an enormous advantage. I could never give up when I had the next day’s instructions right in front of me. Ultimately, Site Build It made the difference between a barren two-page blog that I would delete a few months later, and a profitable online business that has changed my life.

8. What is some of the most popular content on your website? What value does it offer people?

Many people are keen to learn about brainwave entrainment and how it can help them improve their lives. I have several articles explaining how binaural beats work and reviewing my favorite CDs/MP3s. My readers trust my opinion because I only recommend products that have actually helped me achieve lucidity. I also make a lot of sales of other entrainment tracks like astral projection and meditation MP3s. This is excellent because practicing one often helps the other. People who meditate regularly (i.e. enter altered states of awareness on demand) improve their ability to relax deeply, visualize dream scenes, communicate with their inner voice, and question their self awareness. It’s ideal practice for lucid dreaming.

Another popular page is lucid dreaming techniques. These are all scientifically established methods of dream control, so I create value by explaining what works best for me and why. I also present the techniques in a user-friendly way – with no technical jargon or esoteric interpretations of the dream world. I haven’t found a free collection of lucid dreaming techniques like this anywhere else on the net. To get this kind of insight, you’d have to surf several different sites or buy a book on lucid dreaming. I give this all away for free to build further credibility with my readers.

[SP: This is a great example of creating value. Making ideas accessible can be a powerful benefit.]

9. You also have a second website called Improve Vision Naturally. Can you tell us about that site and how it’s been developing with traffic and monetization?

I was so excited about the success of World of Lucid Dreaming, I launched my second website, Improve Vision Naturally, in November 2008. I made it using all the principles of Site Build It, planning my site structure in advance, using effective pre-selling techniques, and putting my own personal experience into the site. I had been doing eye exercises to cure my nearsightedness earlier that year, so I already had a monetization strategy in mind – to sell the 30-day vision training course, Rebuild Your Vision.

The first month averaged 55 visitors per day and generated my first trickle of income – $32! Like World of Lucid Dreaming, it proved early on I had a concept that worked. Today, just over six months old, it generates $500 per month from one-off sales of Rebuild Your Vision and recurring monthly sales of Ocu Plus Formula eye vitamins. This website has so much potential but scaling up two websites at a time is proving a little too much for me. So I’ve decided to focus all my energies on World of Lucid Dreaming. In the meantime, Improve Vision Naturally continues to be an ongoing passive income earner.

[SP: The nice thing about having an online business is that it can generate income month after month even if it just sits there. There's no rule that says you have to work on it full-time.]

10. What are your expectations for the road ahead as online entrepreneur?

I want to advance both my websites as far as possible, creating value by translating my personal experiences and passing on the lessons I’ve learned. Now that I have taken the Site Build It concept and replicated it twice, I feel confident about my future earning potential in online business. I have ideas for my next infosite and am really excited by that. In time, I hope to have a fleet of SBI sites to my name, each delivering their individual income streams on autopilot. This will leave me free to pursue all the goals I want to in life, without worrying about having a steady 9 to 5 job or where that’s taking me.

[SP: Sounds like an awesome plan, Rebecca. There's no substitute for directing the course of your own life. :)]

11. What advice would you give to others who’d like to create their own online businesses?

Educate yourself in online business. Building a profitable website is not something you can do going in blind. So many people start a blog with the best intentions but when the traffic (or income) doesn’t appear, they let it fall by the wayside. If you want to start your own income generating website, I totally recommend Site Build It. You will learn everything you need to know to earn your living from it. In fact, if you follow the instructions and are motivated to keep going, I believe you can’t fail.

Lastly, check your personal beliefs about income generation. Most of my friends don’t know how I earn my living nowadays and if I told them I don’t think they’d believe me. It’s that kind of limiting belief that could break your spirit and make you give up before you’ve even started. Becoming self employed and earning a steady income from the internet is not an impossible dream. You just need to know how to succeed – and that’s exactly what Site Build It taught me.

[SP: As you discovered, some people have huge misconceptions about making money online. For example, people often get stuck fussing over the minor costs involved, trying to go as cheap as possible, but those who are succeeding think of those costs as no-brainer investments because they earn back many times more than what they spend. Perhaps the best advice is to learn from those who are already succeeding and ignore the opinions of those who've never done it.]

Thanks so much for agreeing to this interview, Rebecca. I’m sure many readers will find your success inspiring. I certainly do!

SP: If you want to learn more about lucid dreaming, World of Lucid Dreaming is an outstanding place to visit. The site is filled with great articles and tips to help you learn this amazing skill.

I also highly recommend using Site Build It! for building an online business. Rebecca certainly isn’t alone in achieving positive results with it. SBI is a great service that provides all the education, tools, and support you need to create a profitable online business. Watch the free video tour to learn how it works.

Where would you be today if you’d worked on your goals during the past year like Rebecca has done? Where do you want to be a year from now? It’s never too late to get started.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

This is the ultimate in hand-holding. By the time you complete the course, you’ll be able to have an online business that’s already up and running. Your job is to show up for the classes and complete the lessons as they’re assigned.

Helping you focus on taking action

For years SBI has been offering their do-it-yourself package that helps you create and launch your own online business. I reviewed that service last year and gave it a big thumbs up. Hundreds of people have signed up for SBI as a result of my recommendation, and some of my local friends in Las Vegas are now building their own SBI sites as well. It’s been exciting to see new SBI businesses popping up everywhere.

I’ve received lots of great feedback about SBI, but during the past year, I’ve noticed one common problem that still holds some people back from succeeding with it — namely their own lack of focus.

As we all know, some people just aren’t very disciplined and have trouble maintaining momentum on their own. They enthusiastically sign up, go through a few days of the do-it-yourself instruction, and then get caught up and distracted and let it fall by the wayside. This is self-sabotage to be sure, but unfortunately it’s a fairly common problem.

This problem isn’t unique to SBI by any means. Lots of well-intentioned people eagerly sign up for things and fail to follow through to completion on their own. The question is: Are you really good at following through to completion, or do you have a hard time completing projects on your own?

Teach it to me vs. do it yourself

SBI’s eLearing course addresses this problem. It’s a great choice for people who prefer to be taught by a live instructor, those with tight schedules, and those who have a hard time maintaining momentum without help. With this course you’ll have more accountability to stick with the schedule and keep up with the class in order to get your online business launched.

SBI’s eLearning course teaches you what you need to do and gives you the tools and guidance to get it done. You’ll learn right along with other students who are taking the course with you.

This is a real college-level course you’ll be taking. This course is already taught at more than 25 colleges and learning institutions around the world. The advantage you’ll have is that you can complete the whole course from the comfort of your own home. You just need access to a computer with an Internet connection.

Just to be extra clear, you really can graduate from this class with a functional, up-and-running online business of your own. You’ll own your own domain name too, so if you ever want to transfer off of the SBI platform at some point down the road, you’re always free to do so.

SBI is geared for people who are not super-advanced Internet experts. If you know how to send email and use a search engine like Google, that’s about all you need to know to get started. You do NOT have to understand things like RSS feeds, HTML, CSS, trackbacks, SEO, page rank, social bookmarking, tagging, contextual advertising, online marketing, and so on. SBI makes it much easier. They’ll either teach you what you need to know, or they’ll provide automated tools to handle it for you.

Take note that SBI isn’t merely a web host. If you only want to put up a blog to use as your personal journal, I’d advise against using SBI. It’s not the right tool for that, and you’ll end up paying extra for bells and whistles you don’t need. SBI is for people who want to build a profitable online business that makes real money. Anyone can start a blog, but how many of them are earning enough for their owners to live off?

What’s included?

SBI eLearning includes all of the following:

• A one-year Site Build It subscription, which normally sells for $299
• Extra reference materials and resources
• Enhanced Action Guide videos with some interactivity (great for visual learners)
• Access to a qualified instructor who has already gone through the process of building an SBI site

In this course you will learn how to choose the focus for your site, how to conduct keyword research, how to pick a strong domain name, how to design an income-generating website, how to generate multiple streams of income, how to build a community around your site, how to drive traffic, and how to continue developing your website for sustainable long-term income.

All SBI eLearning classses are recorded, so if you ever miss a live class, you can still access the recording to quickly catch up. You don’t have to worry about missing anything.

Each class is limited to 12 students at a time. This is a very hands-on environment where your instructor gets to know you and your business goals and can therefore offer more personalized guidance.

The course includes 10 live sessions that are 2 hours each, so that’s 20 hours of online instruction.

If you’d like to see the complete 12-week curriculum all laid out for you, you’ll find it here.

Your eLearning instructor

In order to become an eLearning instructor, your teacher must have also taught an offline SBI course at a college or university. So you’ll be working with an experienced teacher, not just an Internet jockey.

This is a hands-on class where you learn by doing. Your instructor will monitor your progress to make sure you’re keeping up and taking action to get your online business launched.

Your instructor will assign homework, so you’ll need to complete this before the next live session in order to keep up with the class. However, the pacing is slow and steady, so you won’t be overloaded with a ton of busywork. Your assignments will contribute directly to building your own business.

How much homework is assigned? Expect about a 1:1 ratio between classroom time and homework time each week. So for 2 hours of live instruction, you can expect about 2 hours of homework.

You’ll also be given quizzes to make sure you understand the material and can apply it to your business successfully.

In addition to having the opportunity to ask questions during class, you can also contact your instructor between classes and expect a reply within 24 hours. Your instructor is there to help guide you to succeed.

You’ll be able to connect with your classmates for some friendly mutual accountability. After the course you can take advantage of a special alumni networking group, so you can keep in touch with your fellow students if you so desire. And you’ll also have access to the regular SBI forums and support staff to help you grow and improve your new business over time.

Course schedule

SBI eLearing is a 12-week online course. As long as you have an Internet connection, you can access it from anywhere in the world.

The courses are taught in real-time, so you will have regular weekly appointments at set times. Currently there are 5 different times offered, so it’s flexible enough to work with all time zones.

In my time zone (Pacific time), I can see that there are SBI eLearning courses now being offered at 4am, 7am, 10:30am, 4pm, and 7pm — and on different days of the week too. There’s even a weekend class. I doubt it will be a problem to find something that matches your schedule.

New courses begin often, so you won’t have to wait long for the next start date. When I last checked the next available course was starting only 10 days from now.

eLearning tuition – introductory pricing

Fortunately since this is an online class, it’s very affordable. The regular tuition is $798, but they’re currently offering a $200 discount, so it’s only $598 total at this time.

This price includes a one-year Site Build It subsciption, which is normally $299 by itself. So the incremental cost for the whole 12-week course is only $299.

If you already own an SBI subscription, then you can sign up for SBI eLearning and only pay the incremental $299 cost for the whole course. The eLearning sign-up form will ask you if you already own SBI.

Please note that is an introductory price. I’ve been told that the prices will increase sometime in 2009, but exactly when that will happen hasn’t been determined yet. So don’t put it off if you want to get the best possible deal.

SBI eLearning is backed by a money-back guarantee. You can complete the first week as a free trial, and if you find it isn’t right for you, you can drop out and get a full refund.

Even if you decide not to continue using SBI as your hosting platform long-term, I think you’ll gain a tremendous head start by completing this course.

If you’ve already built a profitable, high-traffic website and are very web savvy, this course will be too basic for you. You don’t need it. But if you’ve never done this before, or if you’re stuck somewhere along the way (like if you’ve launched a site that struggles to draw traffic and makes very little money), then this course will offer you a great education to get you moving in the right direction.

Stop frakkin’ it up!

Speaking from my own experience, most people are just really, really clueless when it comes to building websites that actually make money. The worst part is that they don’t know what they don’t know.

In 2006 I wrote the article How to Make Money From Your Blog. It explains what it takes to build a high-content, income-generating website.

After posting that article, which became extremely popular in the blogosphere (and still is to this day), I then I had the privilege of watching countless people frak it up badly when they tried to do it on their own. This included watching people churn out bottom-of-the-barrel drivel and call it content, hideously suboptimal monetization schemes, counter-productive SEO attempts, copycat bloggers who recycle other people’s content, and tons more mistakes that made me nauseous.

I stopped sharing specific income figures from my blog because I grew tired of people butchering my advice and then “crediting” me for their results. Some people would complain that my advice didn’t work when in reality they practically did the opposite of everything I wrote in that article, especially with respect to the companion piece How to Build a High-Traffic Website.

Obviously you can make money online. Lots of people do. Erin and I each earn six figures a year from our websites, and it’s easy to maintain. But as I’ve written previously, 99 out of 100 people who make the attempt will surely frak it up. It’s not because they’re stupid. They just don’t have the web savvy necessary to pull it off on their own. They’re capable, but they need serious help and proper guidance. They can’t apply my advice properly because their own intuition keeps betraying them, causing them to make mistakes they don’t even notice.

Perhaps the main problem is that there are lots of things that are counter-intuitive when it comes to building a successful online business. For people who are just starting on this path, the intuitive thing to do is quite often the wrong thing to do. So they end up spinning their wheels without making substantial forward progress, and six months later, they’re still struggling to attract 50 visitors a day.

I was pretty excited last year when I started recommending SBI because I could see it would help people stop frakkin’ things up. It definitely went a long way toward accomplishing that. But some people are unfortunately still frakkin’ it up, not because they’re making mistakes but because they just aren’t very good at working solo and maintaining the necessary momentum.

SBI does a great job of helping people do the right things. It prevents you from making serious mistakes that will kill your traffic. For starters SBI carefully guides you through a process to pick the right focus for your site — one that can actually draw traffic and generate income. Many people have told me that SBI’s tools made it clear that their original ideas would be nearly impossible to monetize successfully, so they dodged a serious problem right there by selecting a more profitable niche.

At this point I’m very optimistic about SBI eLearning because this it will help people stay on track and moving forward. It adds accountability to actually get your site up and running.

Personally I wouldn’t sign up for something like SBI eLearning because I’d be concerned that it would slow me down. I’m very much a self-starter, and I don’t favor classroom-style teaching. But I’m a guy who graduated college with two degrees in three semesters. I don’t need a teacher telling me what to do. I’m much faster at learning solo. I also love learning things for which there are virtually no teachers, such as polyphasic sleep.

But I absolutely understand that most people aren’t like me. Most people would really benefit from having that teacher to guide them. Some people need that extra accountability to make it to the end.

SBI eLearning is an awesome fit for people who aren’t obsessive content-creating machines like I am. This course gives you a more gentle and practical way to get your online business up and running.

Questions?

If you have specific questions about SBI eLearning or the standard Site Build-It package, please submit them via their questions form. Your question will be answered by an actual SBI customer who has used the service.

* * *

I appreciate that Ken Evoy and the SBI team are seriously committed to results. They really go all-out to ensure that their customers succeed. If you’ve ever visited the SBI forums, I’m sure you’ve seen what a motivator Ken is. He’s a huge SBI evangelist who’s always encouraging people to stick to their plans and take action. He has set up his life in such a way that his success and other people’s success are pointing in the same direction. In order for Ken to achieve his goals, he has to make sure SBI’s customers are achieving their goals.

I know from experience that building a successful online business can be challenging, especially in the beginning where you must put in the time before you can harvest the results. That’s how life works though. You have to sow before you can reap. At least with SBI eLearning, you have that extra built-in accountability to make sure you get your sowing done and your business launched — without getting waylaid by distractions.

Please visit the SBI eLearning page to learn more about it, and sign up for a course if you’d like to get your online business up and running. I think it’s a great new service, and I’m excited to see what new businesses will be launched as a result.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

This offer is good until midnight on Sunday, May 10th, 2009, so take advantage of it while it lasts. This is a great deal for couples, since you and your partner can build your own online businesses together, giving you two chances to succeed instead of just one. Additionally, parents have given Site Build It to their children and vice-versa, as well as friends to friends.

Also, SBI recently launched a new service called SBI eLearning. This is a 12-week online course with a trained instructor that guides you through the process of creating and launching your own online business. By the time you complete the course, your business is already up and running. This is great for people who prefer more hands-on instruction with someone who can guide them through the process.

My next blog post will be a detailed review of SBI eLearning, but in the meantime you can go to their website to learn more about it.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

Paraliminals are personal development audio programs designed to condition your mind for enhanced results, such as greater productivity, positive behavioral changes, better health, and so on.

What’s unique about Paraliminals is that they deliver simultaneous but distinct messages to your left and right ears. One message is tailored to your left brain, the other to your right brain. No subliminal messages are used, so you can hear exactly what’s being said. The messages are of course very positive and uplifting. It feels good to listen to them.

Listening to a Paraliminal is a very relaxing experience, much like a guided meditation session. Paraliminals are recorded with special Holosync technology that uses binaural beats to put your mind into a relaxed and receptive state. This is one reason I recommend Paraliminals so highly — they never fail to put me into a deep state of relaxation.

I’ve been listening to Paraliminals regularly for almost 3 years now. My last listening session was last night before going to bed.

I wrote a detailed Paraliminals review a while back, so please check it out if you want to learn more about them. I own the entire Paraliminals collection, and I didn’t write my review until I’d listened to most of the Paraliminals multiple times. I still feel just as good about recommending Paraliminals today as I did at the time I wrote my original review… except that now I’m even more impressed by the long-term usefulness of this collection. The quality is just outstanding.

The Peak Performance Paraliminal CD includes two different sessions. The first session is 25 minutes, and the second is 23 minutes. The first session focuses on boosting your motivation, and the second session encourages you to take action from a place of passion and commitment. I was informed that the free download includes only the second session.

Take note that this isn’t a promotional recording — it’s the same material they sell on the Peak Performance CD for $29.95.

Given my roots as a shareware game developer, I’m delighted to see Learning Strategies embracing the try-before-you buy model. Obviously I love giving away content for free.

Download the free Paraliminal and give it a listen. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

If you like the free Paraliminal and decide to buy the whole Paraliminals collection as a result, be aware that I receive a commission on those sales. As a general rule, when I find good products to recommend, I almost always negotiate a profit sharing deal with the publisher or join their existing affiliate program. This enables me to generate a sustainable income while continuing to offer a vast amount of free content to people around the world. It also makes it possible for me keep this site free of all third-party advertising. I evaluate a LOT of products every year, and I only recommend the very best ones I find.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

Q: Out of curiosity, do you think my web traffic went up, down, or no change since I started blogging about polyamory and open relationships?

After I posted this question, dozens of replies came in on my Twitter and Facebook accounts, with the vast majority predicting that traffic went up. They were correct.

A: Blog page views are up 14% since I began blogging on polyamory. Forum traffic is up 28%. More readers, tons more discussion. People are curious.

The highest daily spikes occurred in early January after I posted my first article on this topic… and again after Erin and I posted our podcast on Loving Relationships. Overall traffic remained elevated after those spikes.

Since StevePavlina.com’s baseline traffic is high (millions of page views per month), it takes a lot of new visitors (tens of thousands at least) to generate a noticeable spike percentage-wise. Anything short of an Oprah appearance just doesn’t make much difference.

In absolute terms, I’m expecting an increase of roughly one million page views this month.

Our discussion forums have seen a significant increase in new posts about relationship topics, polyamorous or otherwise. We also have several new poly-experienced members who’ve been discussing their polyamorous relationships and sharing advice with other members. I’ve been participating in such discussions as well.

Due to this traffic increase, I’ll probably have to upgrade our web server soon. Forum members have been reporting sporadic “server busy” messages for the past few weeks. Synchronistically, my web host just announced a new line of hosting solutions that should be ideal for our needs. Nice timing.

Many people are sending me private emails and Facebook messages to tell me about their interest in polyamory and their desire to learn more about it, but they don’t feel comfortable discussing it publicly. I can understand that. Being poly-curious in a non-poly world creates some special challenges.

Some poly-curious people clearly have a hard time accepting their true feelings about relationships, so their thoughts are still mixed with shame, guilt, and fear. I can understand that as well.

Did I opt to write about polyamory just because it was controversial and therefore might bring in more web traffic? No. Page views aren’t my digital self-esteem. I don’t pick topics simply because they’re controversial. Creating drama isn’t my intent.

I’m writing about polyamory and open relationships because this is what I’m most passionate about right now. I know that when I share my passion with others, explaining what I’m learning along the way, people find value in it. As I work through my own blocks and issues, I’m able to help others become aware of similar issues operating in their own lives. This work is very rewarding to be sure, but not because it’s sometimes controversial.

Generating some controversy is unavoidable due to the nature of my work. Sometimes the socially accepted solutions just don’t work for me, so I have to look elsewhere. When I share insights and solutions that differ greatly from what most of us are raised to believe, people need time to react to it. But eventually the initial reaction fades, and afterwards most people are able to take such topics seriously and consider them more deeply.

I could predict that this topic would generate some controversy at first, but I was anxious to get past that part with minimal fuss, so we can progress to a deeper, more serious exploration of it.

I figured that the people who couldn’t handle this topic would get upset, take their parting shots, and leave. I can then assume that those who remain are genuinely curious to learn more. I want to write for people who really care to read what I’m able to share. I have no desire to entertain those who are merely looking for a drama fix. If I wanted to create digital entertainment, I’d have remained a computer game developer.

I’m glad to see that so many people are genuinely interested in learning more about relationship alternatives, even if they aren’t able to come out publicly. I’ll do my best to keep sharing what I’m learning from my personal exploration as openly and honestly as I can.

I completely understand if you can’t express any public support for what I’m doing. That’s perfectly okay. But I do appreciate the private support that tells me you really want to learn more about this. It’s good to know that my work is causing people to re-examine their own relationships much more consciously.

My goal isn’t to make you polyamorous. My goal is to help you take a closer look at your relationships, to figure out what you truly want, to fully accept what you want, and then to bring your desires into your life. It doesn’t matter if your relationship model looks completely different than mine. Your happiness and fulfillment is what matters.

If you’re a blogger, you’ll likely find that your very best material comes from sharing your true passion with others, even if you think people will reject you for it. If you can be open and honest in sharing your heart’s desires, you’ll likely find that many others feel the same as you do, and they will be curious to hear what you have to say. They may not be ready to admit it publicly yet, but you can still show them that it’s okay to be who they are.

By loving and accepting yourself as you are, you show others how to love and accept themselves.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

This is an extra optional bonus where you can get a second Site Build It! subscription for a friend or relative (or even yourself) for FREE instead of the regular $299 price.

This offer is only good until midnight on December 25th, 2008 (Update — this offer has been extended to January 5th, 2009), so if you want to take advantage of it, now is the time to look into this and make a decision.

SBI sometimes runs other promos like getting a second subscription for $100, but this one is their most generous and popular promo of the year by far. The last time they did this was in 2007.

This is a great deal for couples, since you and your partner can build your own online businesses together, giving yourselves two chances to succeed instead of just one. Additionally, parents have given Site Build It! to their children and vice-versa, as well as friends to friends.

What Is Site Build It?

SBI is a very popular service that helps you build an income-generating website. It includes the education and tools you need as well as hosting for your site.

Be sure to read my full review of Site Build It if you’re interested in learning how to make money online.

Personally I don’t use SBI… simply because I don’t need it. I spent years developing the skills to deliver value to people over the Internet, and I learned how to generate abundant income from my work as well — without having to do anything scammy or dishonest.

For example, whenever someone signs up for SBI, I earn a commission from the referral. I think this is a very fair way to generate income. It enables me to create and deliver tons of free content (800+ free articles to date), and I’m able to help people start new online businesses without having to personally tutor them (which would be untenable).

The funny thing is every time I make a post like this, a few people express concern that I’ve turned to the dark side or something because I’m recommending a service where I earn a commission. My typical response is to assume such people are either complete idiots… or halfway through a juice feast. As you might guess, I’m not a fan of the something-for-nothing mindset. Despite the fact that I give so much away for free, I still want my work to be financially sustainable. All that raw organic produce I eat isn’t cheap.

I used to try to teach people how to earn income from blogging, but for most people the learning curve is just too steep. You can definitely succeed this way — obviously many people have — but you must be dedicated to mastering the creative side, the technical side, and the marketing side. And you’d better have the ability to crank out lots of lots of high-quality content.

SBI is a better approach for people who prefer to focus most of their energies on the creative side, to let someone else handle the technical side, and to get help with the marketing side. With SBI you can generate income from a static website, so you don’t have to post fresh content every day or every week like you might do with a blog. It’s an easier, gentler model for online business than the typical blogging model.

Generally I find that the people who don’t like SBI are the technical wizard types. I think SBI bothers many of them because it automates the technical aspects of building and running an income-generating website. Such people mistakenly assume that technical prowess is the key to making money online. But all too often, they sit on the sidelines ruminating about their impressive but not yet implemented ideas. Meanwhile, people with little or no technical skill go sign up for SBI, and within months they’re making money.

This really irks the technical types to no end. They figure that since they’re so smart, they should be able to make money online, and (in a somewhat elitist fashion), the non-technical types should have a much harder time with it. But the truth is that when you’re dealing with a content-based website, you can often provide more value to people with your creativity and your writing skills than with your technical knowledge and programming skills.

StevePavlina.com isn’t exactly a technical marvel. I have the technical skills to create a much snazzier site if I wanted to. But the value is in the content, so that’s what I focus on. Remember that I used to design and program computer games for many years. But I do much better financially by leveraging my writing and communications skills than I ever did by harnessing my programming talent.

You see… the real value is in the content you create. The underlying technology doesn’t matter so much… as long as it gets the job done. When the technology really works, you usually don’t even notice it.

Creating and Delivering Value

I love that SBI is committed to providing real value with their service. They provide the education and the technical infrastructure you need to build a successful online business. Their business model is rooted in your continued success, so you’ll keep renewing year after year.

Moreover, SBI teaches you how to CREATE and DELIVER genuine value as well. You’ll learn to build websites that provides beneficial and useful content for your visitors.

When you use SBI, you still have to CREATE the value, but SBI will give you the tools to DELIVER that value and to generate INCOME from it. This greatly simplifies things. If you can handle creative work but dislike dealing with technical details — if you can come up with cool content ideas but get stuck on the “how to” implementation part — then SBI would be a great fit for you.

Centering your business around CREATING and DELIVERING value works really well. If you can focus on CREATING and DELIVERING value, whether you use SBI or not, the money will follow. I’ve been doing my best to hold this mindset for several years, and it works well even during a major recession. Suffice it to say I’m in no need of a government bailout.

Getting Started

If Site Build It! sounds interesting to you, a good place to start is to watch their video tour.

Then you may want to read my full review.

After that you may want to poke around the SBI website.

And finally I recommend you read my Site Build It! Walkthrough.

I’ve written tons about this service already, so the above articles will give you a solid overview of the service.

If you have any questions about SBI though, please submit them via their questions form. Your questions will be answered by an actual SBI customer.

Once you get a good cash flow going with your SBI site, you can either keep it and enjoy the ongoing passive income stream… or sell it and cash out. Personally I’m not into flipping websites, but many people enjoy building and flipping income-generating websites for profit. Some people built several SBI sites this year and then sold them for a nice profit. Apparently it works much better than flipping houses these days.

Just remember that the holiday two-for-one bonus offer is only good until midnight on December 25th, 2008, so you have about 10 days left to decide if you want to take advantage of it. (Update — this offer has been extended to January 5th, 2009.)

If you signed up for SBI when I wrote about it earlier this year and used their service to build your site, most likely you’re already enjoying a positive cash flow from your site. But just in case you didn’t have the foresight to do that, here it is again.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

Erin just joined Facebook this afternoon. If you have a Facebook account, please send her a friend request. She has 121 Facebook friends so far (after we posted about it to our Twitter accounts), and she’s looking to add more. Her Facebook page is at:

Erin Pavlina – Facebook

My Facebook Experience

My Facebook page is here:

Steve Pavlina – Facebook

I’ve been using Facebook for a few months now. I currently have 1,907 Facebook friends. I’ve been a fairly active user ever since I joined. I get new friend requests, comments, and emails there every day.

Overall I’m glad I joined Facebook. It takes extra time to keep up with it, and it can easily become a time sink if you aren’t judicious in how you use it. However, I’ve found it a good way to meet people with compatible interests.

I set things up so that whenever I update my Twitter status, it updates my Facebook status automatically. Also, if I make a new blog post, the link is automatically posted to my Twitter and Facebook accounts too. Facebook has an app that anyone can add to their account to do this. To set this up with Twitter, I used Twitterfeed. You only have to set these up once, and after that it’s all completely automated. Nice!

There are four primary ways I use Facebook now:

1. Broadcast medium. I use Facebook as a broadcast medium via the auto-updates that appear when I post anything to my blog or my Twitter account. This is fully automated. This brings more readers to my blog posts. It gives people an extra outlet to keep up with my work.
2. Gathering feedback. Facebook is another place where I receive general feedback (via comments posted on my Wall and Facebook email) as well as specific feedback about my Twitter updates and blog updates. Most of this feedback is pretty general (”great post”), but some of it has been helpful. The Facebook feedback is usually short and snappy, so it gives me a quick vibe on people’s reactions to a post. The feedback I get via email and the forums is usually much longer.
3. Making new connections. I’ve met some pretty cool people on Facebook. This includes new friends (people I now keep in touch with regularly) as well as new business contacts. I’ve received a few interview requests and speaking invites via Facebook too. Facebook has been more beneficial as a business tool than Linkedin. My Linkedin account generates mostly spam and inappropriate requests and has been largely useless. Between the two, Facebook wins hands down for business networking.
4. Maintaining existing connections. Some people prefer keeping in touch with me via Facebook instead of using regular email or phones. Some of my existing connections have strengthened with people who happen to be on Facebook. I think this is because my Facebook friends see my updates more frequently (vs. if they just subscribe to my blog feed or newsletter), so they think about me more often as a result.

The downside is that I can’t respond to all the feedback I get on Facebook, including the emails people send and the comments they post on my Wall. It’s just too much to keep up with it all. A few times people got upset when I didn’t reply to their questions, but I have to triage. However, I think most people understand that when you have nearly 2K Facebook friends, you can’t be equally responsive to everyone. If people think I can do that, their expectations are totally unrealistic.

Another thing I don’t have time for is getting involved with all the Facebook apps. Most of them are way too cutesy for me. I really don’t need people sending me virtual candies and such. Don’t get me wrong — I appreciate the sentiment behind it — but I just don’t have time for that sort of thing. I almost always decline requests that require me to add new apps to my account. If you want to send me extra love, just hold the intention in your thoughts, and I’ll receive it. No need to send me virtual snacks via Facebook.

I also decline all Facebook cause invites. People send me new ones every day. Again, it’s not that I don’t care about the fate of whales or polar bears. It’s just that I don’t have time to get involved in five new causes every day. I have to be more focused than that.

Spam hasn’t been a big problem for me on Facebook. When people start spamming me with too much junk (some Internet marketers have done this), I just unfriend them. Problem solved. If you spam me, I can guarantee you won’t be my friend for long. If you send me a message that says, “I know this looks like spam, but…” you’ll be unfriended before I read the rest of your message. I have zero tolerance for anything that looks like spam.

I normally accept all initial friend requests. The limit is currently 5,000 friends, so my account still has room for about 3K more friends. I thought about creating a separate fan page, but for now that seems unnecessary, and I don’t see what it would accomplish. Maybe if I hit the friend limit, I can consider it.

There is a lot of stuff in Facebook that is awfully cutesy and which seems totally pointless to me, so I simply ignore that stuff. When I stick with my core reason for using Facebook, which is to cultivate new compatible connections, it does fulfill that purpose quite well. Many people find me on Facebook because they see I’m friends with one of their friends. This has a rippling effect of expanding my Facebook network in interesting directions. For example, I frequently get new friend requests from other raw foodists because I’m friends with lots of other raw foodists there.

Twitter

I’ve been using Twitter a bit longer than Facebook. I currently have 2,409 followers there, and I’ve posted 479 updates. On average I gain roughly one new Twitter follower per hour.

One thing that helped boost my follower join rate was adding my Twitter page to my signature in our discussion forums. If you regularly participate in any online forums, I highly recommend you do the same. Your signature links will appear on every post you’ve ever made (assuming the forum software is decent). People who find your old forum posts (such as via search engines) may start following you on Twitter if they like what you posted. This way your old posts are working for you. Be sure to also link your forum signature to your Facebook page if you want more Facebook friends.

Overall I like Twitter. I wish I adopted it earlier, since I’d have a lot more followers by now. Many bloggers who started using Twitter earlier have way more followers than I do.

Using Twitter doesn’t require much time at all if you’re disciplined, especially since my blog posts are automatically announced there. I have it set to announce Erin’s blog posts to my Twitter account as well. If I get a quick thought I want to share, it takes 30-60 seconds to post it on Twitter.

I use Twitter mainly as a broadcast medium. I don’t reply to all the questions and comments people send me there — that wouldn’t be a good use of my time. As with Facebook, a few people get upset when I don’t reply to them. I do reply to some people there, but replying to everyone who contacts me there is totally unrealistic.

People often send me cool links via Twitter, and I’ll occasionally re-tweet them or share them in our forums. Earlier today I shared a link to a heart-warming Youtube video (16:23) that someone sent me via Twitter this morning. If I get too busy, I don’t even look at the links people send me. I can’t keep up with all the links people email me either. If you send me a link, the odds are less than 50-50 that I’ll even look at it.

Even on Twitter I get a lot of people asking me to help them with certain causes. I appreciate the seriousness of some of these requests, but it’s just too much for me to get involved with this sort of thing. I do what I can now and then, but I can’t get behind every cause that crosses my plate.

While I don’t do a lot of out-linking from my blog posts — I feel it would add way too much clutter to the archives if I did — I often share cool links via Twitter. Those links may not be seen by as many people, but I think it’s a good compromise. I prefer to use my blog for sharing original content. If I want to pass on a link or share something timely, Twitter works well for that.

One of my favorite things to do on Twitter is to share interesting, inspiring, and/or challenging quotes. Sometimes I’ll tweet a famous quote I come across. Other times I’ll post a sentence or two from my book or my blog that I think people will find stimulating. I get some cool feedback on these quotes, so I think people like them. Again, all of these tweets are automatically posted to my Facebook account too.

Online Socializing

The downside of adding Facebook and Twitter to my life is that it increased the flow of new connections coming into my life. At first this was great, but soon I started feeling over-socialized. I was forming more new connections than I could sustainably manage. Adding these new contacts is easy. Maintaining ongoing relationships with all of them is impossible.

In lieu of spending even more time answering emails and such, my most practical option was to raise my standards for the type of online socializing I would do. Otherwise I could spend all day on this stuff and never get any real work done.

Consequently, I’ve become much pickier about which connections and conversations I’ll get involved with personally vs. keeping my distance. This applies to my regular email as well as to forum discussions, Facebook feedback and emails, and Twitter responses.

This wasn’t easy to do. There were many people I felt deserved a response, so I constantly have to remind myself not to follow up on anything that doesn’t pass my pre-qual tests. I don’t always succeed, but I’m gradually getting better.

I admit I feel a bit guilty about all the stuff I have to let slide. But I can’t justify spending all day answering one-on-one feedback when I have more impactful things to do.

Even though I’ve added Twitter and Facebook to my life, I’m actually doing less online socializing than I used to. The reason is that the extra incoming communication made me more aware that it isn’t a good use of my time to over-socialize online. I quickly realized that in order to stay productive, I had to be more selective than ever.

Consequently, I’ve been letting some online-only friendships fall by the wayside if the compatibility connection just isn’t there. I’m letting a lot of emails go unanswered these days. In fact, many of them are now going unread. I used to read every email I received, but no longer. If people send me lengthy emails about their life stories and how my work has helped them, I used to love reading that stuff, but I can’t justify spending time on that anymore. It steals too much attention from other things. It’s unfortunate that some people will spend hours writing these long messages that will go unread. I’m grateful for the intent behind them, but I must be more careful in how I use my time. If I take the time to read those emails, I have to do less of something else.

Incidentally, if you’re considering sending me a long email in the near future, please don’t. I probably won’t have time to read it. I do appreciate the intent, however.

A big problem with online socializing is that it can become a crutch that crowds out face-to-face connections. I’d rather meet new people face-to-face as opposed to sitting in front of my computer typing emails. So I’m intentionally withdrawing from a lot of online socializing in order to free up more time for face-to-face interaction. I’m dropping the quantity, so I can raise the quality.

Ironically, the net benefit of adding Facebook and Twitter to my life is that they caused me to back off from online socializing and to become much more selective with socializing in general. The upside is that these services help me cast a wide net, so I have new potential connections coming into my life every day. Then I sift through the contents of that net with a pair of tweezers. I look for strong compatibilities, and when I find them, I follow up to see if there’s the potential for a deeper connection to be made. Sometimes this results in new friendships or business contacts, and other times it just fizzles.

Dealing with Rejection — When You’re the Rejecter

What I dislike most is that this approach requires me to “reject” more people than ever, usually by ignoring them or blowing them off. I still feel a bit guilty about this. But obviously this isn’t going away if I’m going to keep doing what I do. It will very likely continue to get worse.

Still, there’s an ongoing incongruity between my feelings and my reality that I haven’t yet resolved, and I dislike that very much. For years now I’ve been receiving more feedback than I can possibly respond to. And now I’ve ramped that up to an even greater level. Now I can’t even read it all. Logically I know that it’s unrealistic for me or anyone else to expect I can personally follow up with everyone who contacts me. So why do I still feel like everyone deserves a personal response? Why do I feel like I should do my best to maintain every online relationship I have, even though that’s totally impractical these days?

It feels rude to ignore people who take the time to keep in touch with me, especially those who genuinely want to connect or who offer encouragement and support. I think it’s very nice that such people take the time to email me. So how can I respond by ignoring them?

Something is messed up with my beliefs here. I’m looking at this situation from a disempowering perspective. I can see the truth logically, but I’m not feeling it emotionally. My heart just isn’t onboard with my brain’s solution. Some part of me is resisting the idea that possibly for the rest of my life, I’m always going to have to blow off people who reach out to connect with me. This includes saying no most of the time to people who ask for help (and need it).

When I switched to a 100% raw vegan diet this year, something strange happened to me energetically. There are lots of ways to describe it, but one way to explain it is that I used to have an imbalance where my power chakra was a lot more energetic than my heart and third-eye chakras. This year that imbalance has totally flip-flopped. In plain English, this means that my emotions and intuition keep bringing problems to my attention that at present, I lack the ability to solve in a way I feel good about. So I have a lot of motivation and drive to do certain things that I’m simply not able to do to my satisfaction. My solutions often make me feel worse than the problems they’re intended to solve.

This new imbalance has been causing me problems for several months now. On multiple occasions, I’ve acted on some of these heart-centered impulses, but the results weren’t so good. I’ve gone out of my way to help people in a few situations, but the results left me feeling empty and disappointed. This relates to some offline problems I’ve been tackling lately, i.e. stuff I’d never blog about due to the importance of protecting people’s privacy.

This Facebook/Twitter expansion seems like it might be another manifestation of this imbalance. Originally I felt motivated to join these services as a way to reach out and connect with more people. It certainly had that effect. But the side effect is that I now must reject more people than ever, which is the opposite of what I wanted. So yeah, you could say it’s a solution of a sort, but it’s not a solution that makes me feel totally good.

Ultimately in order to resolve these issues, I need to correct the energetic imbalances I’m experiencing. That may take some time though. It’s like whenever I take some kind of action now, I can feel the rippling consequences of it so deeply that I end up focusing too much on the negative side and not enough on the positive. It’s like my emotions and intuitive abilities have become over-energized and don’t know when to shut up.

On the many occasions when I have to blow people off, I wish they wouldn’t think their disappointment so loudly… cuz I can hear it, you know. It’s like constantly having one of those Obi Wan moments after Alderaan got Death Starred.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

Leo Babauta asked really good questions, so I gave them a lot of thought. This interview is very long — nearly 7,000 words — about the length of a typical book chapter. I promise you it isn’t fluff though. I did my best to answer each question with depth and honesty, so I think you’ll find that this interview is filled with thought-provoking ideas.

Our interview covers a wide variety of topics, including passion, dealing with criticism, avoiding communication overwhelm, daily routine, staying motivated, and more. Some of the questions are especially relevant for bloggers.

It’s ironic that the interview title labels me a “Blogging God” while the final question is about humility. What are you trying to do to me, Leo?

Blog World Expo

Last weekend I attended Blog World Expo here in Las Vegas. It was my first time attending, and I had a blast! I can’t post a full review, but it was definitely worthwhile. I thought it was a little heavy on the promotion and monetization side — I’d have preferred to see the emphasis shift to the content side — but I definitely learned a few things.

I met Dave Taylor while I was there, and I offered to speak at Blog World Expo next year, so we’ll see what happens with that. At first I resisted speaking at blogging conferences because blogging is my medium, not my message. But lately I’ve softened on that stance because I obviously can’t escape being branded as a blogger, and I think I can do some genuine good if I focus on helping bloggers in the area of creative self-expression (which I believe is the core essence behind building substantial traffic). Not long ago I gave a 90-minute presentation called “Creating Compelling Content” to a group of speakers, and that could easily be adapted to blogging.

At one point I was sitting in Jay Berkowitz’ session on monetization, and partway through I see a pic of StevePavlina.com on the screen. He was using it as a monetization example in his Power Point presentation. That was a fun surprise. I waved to him and ended up making a small contribution to the session. He recorded the whole session, and I think it may appear as a podcast on his site.

I had an especially good time talking to JB Glossinger from MorningCoach.com. He has the #1 self-help podcast on iTunes and was one of the conference speakers. We met up at one of the parties and ended up talking for hours, until the hotel staff moved in to clean the hotel ballroom and had to nudge us out. Then we talked some more. I really like his mindset toward personal growth — very open and authentic. I’ve already listened to a couple of his podcasts, and I recommend you give him a listen. He’s recorded over 400 of them!

Another speaker at the conference was Gary Rosenzweig, an old friend and fellow game developer from my pre-blogging days. I first met him at a shareware conference and hadn’t seen him for five years. I enjoying catching up with him and seeing how our career paths had developed in different ways. I moved into blogging, and he got involved in creating online videos. Small world!

Facebook Page

I recently joined Facebook after learning about it at Blog World Expo last weekend. As I mentioned on Twitter, I’m happy to befriend anyone who asks, so if you’d like to befriend me, you can find my profile here: Steve Pavlina – Facebook.

I’ve added more than 200 new Facebook friends this week already (mainly from tweeting about it), so it will be fun to see what happens after announcing it here. I was told the current friend limit is 5,000.

Thanks so much to Shama Hyder and Mari Smith for helping to educate me on using Facebook. I’m still a total newbie at it, but at least I’ve managed to get a few things working properly.

Facebook reminds me of BBSing during the early 90s. If you’re too young (or not geeky enough) to remember what a BBS is, it stands for Bulletin Board System. Local BBSes provided dial-up access via modem. Once you were dialed in, you could create a profile, chat online with people, play games, send messages, and more. Erin and I actually met on a Los Angeles BBS called Dreamscape in 1994. Dreamscape used popular BBS software called Major BBS, and it featured 24 dial-in lines. Using Facebook is like deja vu for me. Sure the technology is more advanced and the community is gigantic, but the underlying operating principle is the same.

While it’s certainly possible to overdo online socializing and use it as a way to procrastinate, I hold a more positive opinion of it. Many of my online social connections have led to offline friendships. I’ve found that when I maintain a robust social life online, it enhances my offline social life too. So you may even catch me doing live chats on Facebook now and then. I enjoy connecting with all kinds of people.

No doubt some people will question how Facebook could help me with my business. The truth is that I don’t really care. My modus operandi is to pursue growth experiences and mold my business around that, not the other way around. So all I’m looking for on Facebook is to make new connections that can lead to interesting growth experiences. I don’t center my life around a profit motive.

Book Sales – Top 200

My new book Personal Development for Smart People is off to a good start. Its Amazon sales rank broke the top 200 today (currently at 146). I expect it will break the top 100 either this week or next. I just announced its release in my newsletter this morning, and Hay House will announce it in their newsletters next week. Their list is 20x the size of mine.

The book already has three Amazon reviews posted, all of them 5 stars. That’s certainly nice to see. I’ve been receiving a lot of positive feedback from readers via email, often from people who are only partway through it.

If you’d like to read a free sample chapter, you can get the Intro and Chapter 1 as a PDF. If you like that chapter, rest assured the book gets significantly better from there. Personally my favorite chapters are Chapter 3 and 6.

I suspect sales will be stronger in October, since it will be a while before the 400+ bloggers who requested a review copy have a chance to read it and post their reviews. Only about 2% of them have posted reviews so far.

Free Bonus With Your Book Order

I forgot to mention that if you order my book this month, you’ll receive several free bonuses. I think you’ll agree these are truly awesome. Their combined value is so incredibly high that I can’t possibly put a price on them.

Some authors try to convince you to buy their books by tossing in a bunch of crappy e-books you’ll never read. But obviously such a scheme is unworthy of a “smart person” such as yourself.

So I had to come up with something much more beneficial to you, something that would complement the book and add some serious value to it.

It took a lot of effort to develop these bonuses, but I think you’ll agree they make this offer absolutely irresistible.

Here’s what you’ll receive:

Bonus #1: Love and Gratitude

You’ll receive my unconditional love for helping to support my work (or is that conditional love?). Every day I take a moment to cast out love energy to everyone who’s read my book. The sooner you read the book, the more love energy you receive. In addition to the free love bonus, I also send out feelings of deep gratitude, so that’s like a bonus on top of a bonus.

But wait — there’s more!!!

Bonus #2: Heightened Awareness

This book will significantly increase your awareness. Even if you don’t do any of the exercises, I guarantee this book will change the way you think about your life — for the better. You’ll be able to amaze your friends and family with your newfound enlightenment.

And that’s not all!!!

Bonus #3: Pass It On Value

After you read the book, you can pass it on to someone you think would benefit from it. Then it becomes a powerful gift you can bestow upon another human being. I don’t earn any money when this happens, but who cares? These ideas are meant to be shared.

Hold on — we’re not done yet!!!

Bonus #4: Free Consultation

I can’t believe I’m including this, but here goes… With your order I’ll include one free astral consultation. Just go to sleep tonight and come visit me on the astral plane, and I’ll personally consult with you for free. Best of all, since there’s no time in the astral realms, you can take as long as you want! Just make sure you’re fully lucid; otherwise you may not remember any of it.

Still not convinced — it gets better!!!

Place your order within the next 10 minutes, and I’ll double your bonuses! That’s right — double! You’ll get double the love and gratitude! Double the awareness! Double the pass it on value! And double the consultations!

This offer is absolutely unprecedented!!! You’d better act now before I regain my sanity!

Operators are standing by…

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.