What you’ve written has some truth: integrity is essential to all long-term marketing efforts.

I agree that we don’t need SBI to create sites like this. Although for the absolute technophobe who’d like to create a single business website, SBI is a solid enough alternative.

Even if you come on the top of ranking charts but if content is not strong it will result in divergence of your traffic result in a big loss.

Always build content-rich websites that drive traffic and maximize conversion to increase your business.

Track what your visitors are actually looking for and evaluate your services or products accordingly. Go in for easy navigation and simple site structure. Good internet marketing is also necessary for getting traffic. Offer free newsletter related to your industry. Quick and speedy response is always liked by visitors. Provide a multiple option to contact e.g. email, phone number, live chat. Include rss feeds on your site.

I agree that one can get a certain distance down the track with tools like a related posts plugin and/or a good setup of categories.

Search helps as well.

But it still doesn’t turn a weblog into a reference site.

On the other hand, a lot of experts (especially in the marketing area but not only) release high quality information relatively freely on their weblogs - and then resell that information properly packaged as a book. If they made the website into a real reference, they’d have a harder time selling the packaged product, especially if it’s one of those $277-$777-$977-$1977 snow jobs.

Which brings up a point, I didn’t make in the article above: at least Ken Evoy hasn’t raised his prices substantially over the years. He does charge for additional modules but given his guru type following, he does treat his clientele quite fairly. That’s a big plus in his favour. The other advantage to Site Sell is that Evoy reads the reams of internet marketing material spewed out on the internet for you. That’s a huge timesaver as you point out for somebody spending 4 hours/week on their website as a second business.

Anyway, I do think Ken’s main point retains a measure of validity, no matter how we gussy our weblogs up. Weblogs are the equivalent of newspapers (or if better written in, magazines). They date and do not become a lasting reference.

Many of us need to spend more time on the static part of our websites.

Create a static page
There is a siloing plugin I have written about before that just pulls in posts from a category on a static page, or you can just use some PHP
Alternatively use “in series” to define a browsing path with real “sidebar” or call-ous.

Well, you could even just edit a page by hand

I went one stage further a while ago and describe how you can 301 old URLs to a single landing page, and then change the page slog on existing posts before adding them to a silo. A good option for a series of posts that pick up some links on a core topic, but not enough to really stand out in the SERPs.

Also of note, some tools do have usage limits, so for example you use credits with Nichebot.

There are tons of free tools out there, which is why people still write blog posts with junk titles and content and complain about traffic.

If you are aiming to only spend 4hrs a week on your website, limiting keyword research to 1hr isn’t a bad bet. I haven’t owned SBI so I am not sure how limiting this is before you start.