How the Birth of My Son Led to the Digital SLR Guide

Let me say this first: the story that I'm about to share with you isn't packed with adventure, drama and glamour.

It's no rag-to-riches yarn, nor the sort of spellbinding tale that eventually gets made into a major motion picture.

In fact, it's the story of a rather ordinary life.

But one little decision has made it OUT of the ordinary.

The Turning Point

chris and son

Hi - my name is Chris Roberts, and I'm the owner, writer and chief photo nut here at the Digital SLR Guide.

In November 2004 my son was born.

For many months prior to his arrival, I had been kicking around some ideas for a digital camera web site but hadn't yet found a way to make my dream a reality.

The demands of a newborn quickly erased any thoughts I had about starting a site.

As time went on and my son grew older (and demanding in different ways), I came back to the idea of a content-rich web site.

But this time, I had two goals instead of just one.

A Profitable Content Site

My original web site idea was a selfless one: I just wanted to share my knowledge with others — to help them weed through the marketing noise and find the best digital camera.

But when my son was born, my wife and I decided that we would rather have her stay home than pay a stranger to raise our child.

How could we make ends meet on my salary alone? My wife considered going back to work, but we did the math and determined that over half her salary would go toward childcare.

We realized that in order to pay the bills, we'd have to find a second source of income in addition to my salary from work.

I decided it was time to create my digital camera web site — but I also had to find a way for it to be profitable.

My initial financial goal for the site was to make a couple hundred bucks each month to provide us with more financial stability.

Boy, was I in for a big surprise.

A Solution Presents Itself

I was on the hunt for two things: A) some space on the web that would host my site and B) a system for generating income from the site.

My search led me to a lot of interesting (and questionable) promotional offers:

  • Make money on the web in weeks!
  • Find your fortune on the Internet!
  • Watch your bank account grow while you sit in your easy chair!

None of the solutions that I investigated were a good match for the type of site that I wanted to build and many of them didn't sound completely legitimate.

Not wanting to throw away what precious little extra income we had, I continued my search.

Then, on one warm August day in 2005 I hit upon a service that not only promised success on the web, it backed it up with stories from dozens of average folks who had built wildly successful, profitable web sites.

The service was called Site Build It! (SBI!).

Finally convinced that I had found the right place to host my site that would do all that I wanted, I took a deep breath and clicked the SIGN UP button.

The rest - as they say - is history.

Then and Now

What started out as a dream to build my own content site on the web and earn a few extra bucks has turned into something so much more.

Consider this:

  • Over 150,000 people per month visit the Digital SLR Guide
  • Visitors come to the site from about 180 countries
  • These people view over half a million pages per month
  • My monthly newsletter has over 10,000 subscribers
  • A search for "digital SLR" on Google returns this site as the fourth result

My first goal to share my knowldege and help others find the best digital SLR camera has succeeded beyond my most ambitious expectations.

Plus, there's some icing on this cake: the site now generates not hundreds, but thousands of dollars of income each month.

I woke up one day and realized that my little hobby site (which I love working on because I'm passionate about the topic) is now paying our mortgage and utilities.

And here's the real kicker: I only work on the site part-time.

Unlike some other SBI! success stories I haven't quit my day job (yet) to focus on my own home-based business.

Instead, I continue to work 40 hours a week, and devote an hour here and there (often during commutes) to add or update the content.

If I Can Do It...

family vacation

As you can clearly tell, SBI! has provided me with the means to build a content-rich web site that has exceeded my expectations.

It has provided my family with an economic "cushion" — financial padding that lets us take family vacations and have dinners out when times are good and helps us make ends meet when the economy takes a dive.

Most importantly, this web site has brought us peace of mind.

And there's absolutely no way that I could have ever have done it without the tools and resouces available within the SBI! program.

But enough about me — what about you?

  • Would you like to ensure your financial stability during rough economic times?
  • Have you always wanted to be your own boss and work from home?
  • Do you want to work on something that excites you?
  • Would you like to share your knowledge with thousands of people?

SBI! can make ALL of this possible — it takes care of the high-tech Internet mumbo-jumbo behind the scenes — so you just have to show up with a healthy dose of passion, patience and persistence.

Let me explain...

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