Building A Travel-Related Business Site
An SBI! Review, Update #1
I've been dealing with a hump of a different kind.
It was a big one -- 5895 meters tall, to be precise!
Hi Ken,
I haven't posted on the SBI! forums for over three months, so I thought I better send a sign of life!
You know how you always talk about the "humps" that all small e-business owners have to overcome... those challenges that we all encounter when we first start out, right?
Well, I've been dealing with a hump of a different kind. It was a big one -- 5895 meters tall, to be precise!
The photo shows me on the top of Mount Kilimanjaro and the lady on the right is my mother. She is 64 years old and she had been dreaming about climbing Kilimanjaro for over 40 years.
I found out about my mother's dream on her 48th birthday and it took me another 15 years to talk her into giving it a shot!
Thanks to SBI!, I could make her dream come true.
Freedom to Climb
My SBI! business allowed me to spend four weeks with her last year, climbing mountains in the Alps.
This is something I had not been able to do since I moved to Australia. Because of the seasonal nature of the industry I used to work in, employees could only take their annual leave between November and April. Not the time to go mountain climbing in Europe.
It was during that vacation that my mother finally gained the necessary confidence to fulfill her dream. She then turned around to me and said, "Ok. Let's do it."
So I started planning and organising for our future climbing challenge. And fretting.
Fewer than 60% of the people attempting to summit Mount Kilimanjaro are successful. People die every year in the process of trying. Since I felt responsible for making her set out on this adventure, I also felt responsible for getting her to the top, and back down, safely, and for the whole experience to live up to her dreams.
Countless hours of research later I knew that the one and only challenge on Kili is the altitude, and that to properly prepare for that takes many weeks - weeks that people with jobs don't have. Hence the low success rates...
But mom is retired, and I have SBI!. So taking three months off is easy!
Not only did my mother summit Mount Kilimanjaro without problems, due to our excellent preparation she enjoyed every minute of it, including a cigarette at the top!
Also, we didn't have to fly home after that climb like everybody else did. After traveling all that distance, we also had a good look around Tanzania and it was a fantastic trip all the way! Both of us would go back and do it all over again tomorrow.
Business on Auto-Pilot
I spent three months away from home on this trip, and it was not the only trip I did this year. Which job allows you to spend that much time traveling?
If it wasn't for SBI!, there is no way in the world I could have made a dream happen for my mother.
And now for the clincher:
I spent those three months more or less off the Net.
Yes, there were computers and internet cafes where we went. In some places.
There was electricity. Some times.
The trick was finding both at the same time...
I didn't know there was a world financial crisis.
When I did get a chance to access a computer, I checked my emails to see if any readers had run into problems with my ebook. (They hadn't. The autoresponders and FAQ pages I put in place seem to have taken care of most issues.)
I checked nothing else. I just found out that August and September were my two best months ever. October is showing no signs of slowing down.
So apparently the whole world is in the throes of a massive economic downturn, yet my business performs beautifully without me, growing merrily all the time.
It's exactly as you keep saying... once an SBI! site is "over the hump," it gathers speed and momentum on its own, like a big snowball rolling downhill.
SBI! rocks!
Birgit "B" Bradtke
http://www.outback-australia-travel-secrets.com/
http://www.KimberleyAustralia.com
Try it. Simply follow the Action Guide. 
No strings. Better, actually...