About the Author

My name is Kevin Urban, 56 years old and completely computer illiterate before 2004. I worked at a lot of different jobs in my life, starting as a roustabout and rigger on a 250-ton crane in the oil industry back in 1973 in Canada's Arctic. I worked as a carpenter, roofer, truck driver, commercial fisherman, fire fighter and tour guide in the Northwest Territories until it was time to settle down and get married.

In 1986 we moved to Terrace in beautiful British Columbia, the ideal place to live close to nature and at the same time enjoy some of the amenities that city life offers. I bought a carpet cleaning franchise to fulfill my lifelong dream of having my own business.

Cleaning Carpets Was No Fun

We ran this business from 1988 to 2004 and it was a LOT of work. We did everything -- drumming up business, doing the actual work, dealing with customers, ordering supplies, repairing equipment etc. etc. The worst of it was being tied to the phone virtually 24 hours a day. We made a living, but it was tough. There were franchise fees to pay and the supplies seemed to get more expensive every year. The competition from other carpet cleaners was fierce and we were unable to increase the prices we charged for our services due to this competitive environment.

Finally, in early 2004, I had had enough! Our little town, population 18,000 and dependant on the logging industry, was in a severe recession -- businesses were shutting down and people were leaving in droves. It was time for a change.

My Wife Told Me to Get a Real Job

My wife had just bought our first computer (my first reaction to that was go ahead, but I want nothing to do with it!) and I decided to look online for money-making opportunities. I finally stumbled across a website owned by a James Martell who boasted he was making a lot of money from "affiliate marketing". Not knowing a thing about it, I nevertheless became curious and ordered his Affiliate Marketers Handbook online.

Needless to say, my wife told me to get a real job -- and pronto! It took me a lot of convincing to let me give it a try (after all, I really didn't want to work for somebody else after having been self-employed for such a long time). My wife gave me 6 months to replicate James Martell's success and produce an income.

A Tough Start

Well, it took 2 years! My first website was on a very broad subject -- vacations! I wrote the content myself, and looking back I think my writing was horrendous. It took weeks before Google indexed the site, and months later Google decided to kick it out of its index. I still hadn't earned any affiliate commissions from any of the merchants whose links I had placed all over the site. Google AdSense gave me a couple of dollars a day. But now my site was gone! And I couldn't get it back. So I registered a new domain name and re-published the site and this time Google re-indexed the pages.

The Turn-Around

Other sites were built using FrontPage 2000, sites about satellite TV and fitness equipment. I worked on it all through 2005, and by the end of 2006 I was making as much as I had made cleaning carpets! But the "secret" to making big bucks online still eluded me - until one day I came across SBI. I was looking for a different way to build my sites (FrontPage 2000 seemed to produce HTML code that Google didn't particularly like) and as I read through these case studies and had a look at SBI's Action Guide I decided to buy my first SBI site.

6 Successful Sites Produce Revenue

To make a long story short: I now own 6 successful SBI sites in addition to the 13 sites I built using FrontPage and James Martell's methods. Some of my older sites are doing okay, but only my SBI sites consistently make it on page #1 in Google's search engine results for the home page keywords I optimized the sites for (except this one -- it's too NEW). And the SBI sites are pre-selling customers, referring them to merchants and generating commissions, the way it's supposed to work. Some of my sites get 500 visitors a day (that's 15,000 unique visitors per month!) The affiliate commissions and Google AdSense revenue add up to a monthly income that already exceeds that of a friend of my wife, a college teacher with 30 years on the job.

AND, unlike our carpet cleaning business, we DON'T have to answer the phone, we don't have to buy inventory, we don't have to pay franchise fees, we don't deal with any customers. We DO work on the business whenever we want, we get up whenever we want and we put as much effort into the business as we want.

Unlike running a carpet cleaning business in a small town where there's only so much business to be had, the sky is the limit when it comes to affiliate marketing.