SBI - Why People Fail?

Oh, I laughed SO hard.

... but my laughter did not last long. Intelligence is not the only thing I need to get through SBI!

The above picture is from the SiteBuildIt! course material called Why People Fail. There is also another material that goes through the biggest mistakes people make while on SBI! I was surprised to find out that the biggest mistake of them all was not to get past first 5 modules of the course. There are 10 modules in the course and over 40% of the people don't get to the module 5.

But sure enough, after couple of hours studying I knew myself why that is the case. I was feeling completely overwhelmed! There is just so much material. Videos and pages contain link after link that you can follow, and the forums contain years and years of posts. If you follow all the links you will be gone for days!

I always like to read all material of the courses that I attend to, but I need to make an exception now. Fortunately the course came with a checklist that helps me find out when I have gotten enough out of the modules to proceed.

I also made some rules for myself:

1. Only follow links from videos if they are relevant right now
2. Don't follow links to the forum while watching the videos
3. Use the checklist - when you've checked all boxes for the day/module, the day is done - no more reading 
4. Only go to the forum when you have specific information to find or problem to solve

Still, by the middle of the module two I was weeping. I had just tried BrainStormIt! for the first time and it either gave me errors or omitted the keywords that I wanted to get info from. Every successful search subtracted from my search credits (I had 25 to start with). If they run out, I'll have to buy new ones.

I am not a person who gets easily overwhelmed by courses or information. And I am definitely not a person that cries if a software does not co-operate with me. After all, for over 10 years my work have been to solve problems and write software. I have written software more complex than any of these SEO tools. I have fixed bugs in them. I have solved other people's problems using them.

I was weeping since the buy credits made it impossible for me to find out the correct way to use to tool by just trying it out. I was weeping since I knew what a swamp of information I'd need to wallow through to find out what was wrong. I was weeping since I had just paid to get nearly 500 garbage keywords into my keyword list that I'd need to sort out later - item by item. I was weeping since I was tired after watching and reading the course materials for over 4 hours straight.

After using 45 minutes reading support page after another I gave up and wrote a post to the forum. Next morning the answer was there waiting for me and I'm ready to go again. Yay! After all, there was a check box in the checklist that said: "I will reach humps along the way and beat them". And I checked that box.

Right now, even after these little obstacles, I am so glad I joined this course. I should have done it already earlier. SBI! is a solid no-nonsense course that I believe will work if one is ready to work for it. 

The only problem I see this far is that its creator believes in OVER-delivering content. While that is a great strategy to make your site popular and get people to return there time after time, it is not maybe the best strategy for learning new things. I'd rather see a course that contains just the key points and action steps. It annoys me that there are so many SomethingIt!-tools and 3-letter abbreviations made up just for this course. But I believe this course will help me reach my targets and that is what really matters.

I wish resilience for all the people who are taking this same course right now! We CAN do it!