Like you, I love my SBI website

by Barbara Helynn Heard, LMP
(Seattle, WA, USA)

freeing a stuck shoulder

Aloha Elad, Unlike you and many others who use SBI to create financially successful online businesses, I created my site to support my own previously established massage therapy business. Like you, I love my SBI website, and I truly appreciate the SBI platform and the folks who created and maintain it.

I practice and teach Mana Lomi®, a wonderful form of lomilomi or Hawaiian massage. I absolutely love my work!!!! I have my own massage practice and I organize and teach massage classes. In other words, I'm my own boss. Of course, this gives me both lots of AUTONOMY and lots of RESPONSIBILITY. I often work from dawn to midnight, but I love everything I do, and like you I also have time to play.

Before I began creating my own website I promoted my massage classes on the website of my friend and colleague who also taught Hawaiian massage. At my friend's request, I had designed her website on paper, provided those plans to her webmaster and then communicated specifications for updates and changes to her webmaster. This was a very educational but highly FRUSTRATING experience! Using email I would describe the changes I wanted to the webmaster and she would implement them. We exchanged endless numbers of emails trying to get it right. The end results were generally OK, but never exactly what I really wanted.

In November of 2009 I decided to professionally separate my business from my friend/colleague's business. At that time I had several classes scheduled which I needed to promote online. I was determined to get my own website up PRONTO!!!

I purchased the SBI program and for about a week spent every free second studying their online instruction material. I was on fire and I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning. Ten days after purchasing the program my site was launched with 8 or 10 pages, enough to provide a basic web presence and to communicate with my potential students. I was delighted with this speedy achievement!!!

Before launching my site, I had no technical experience with coding a website. I was a website newbie. I did however have 10 years of experience from my younger years programming on mainframe computers. My high aptitude for pattern recognition makes learning languages, including computer languages, relatively easy for me. None the less, after quitting my computer job in 1995 I had ZERO interest in doing anything with computers other than email and web browsing. What a wonderful surprise it has been for me in the past couple of years to again enjoy the analytical thought process involved with creating on computers!! There's a thrill to it.

A few months after launching my site I became frustrated with the limitations of the navigation options the SBI templates offer; I wanted roll down menus. Marvelous SBI coaches helped me manifest my vision. I paid a couple hundred dollars for their help and I now have a site whose look and feel pleases me. In order to implement this change, I did have to transition to uploading my own HTML.

Here's my site: www.lomilomi-massage.org

I don't earn thousands of dollars from my site as you do from yours. For one thing, I don't have Google ads on my site, nor any affiliate relationships. More importantly, the purpose of my site is not to be a money maker itself, but to allow me to express myself and to communicate with my potential students. My site is doing well. I now have 68 pages and close to 100 unique visitors to my site daily, and the numbers continue to climb. Students find me via my website.

I love my SBI site! It is definitely a work of art!! Creating and maintaining my site brings together many unique and creative parts of myself including: the massage therapist and teacher, the artist, the writer, and finally the technical problem solver.

My SBI site opens doors in my life by allowing me to be an independent teacher of massage continuing education classes at a time when most other massage continuing ed teachers teach under the umbrella and control of various professional massage associations. Hoorah for my independence!!

Aloha,
Barbara Helynn Heard

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