SBI day 3 took more than one calendar day for me. On SBI! day 2, I brainstormed - used the awesome Brainstorm It! tool and chose my topic.

Day 3 is all about creating a site blueprint. On this day I did what is referred to as lateral brainstorming. I used the Brainstorm It! tool again but this time set it to lateral brainstorm. On day 2 I did a vertical brainstorm that returned keyword results that contained my main keyword term. A lateral brainstorm examines the top 20 Google sites for your site concept and returns keyword results that are related to your site concept but do not contain your keyword term.

At the end of all this brainstorming I had a lot of material. Again I had to weed out the unrelated stuff. But it was harder this time because Site Build It does not provide a concrete outline of how many keywords should remain. At the end of Day 2 I had 300 keywords in my database. There can be a maximum of 1000. At the end of Day 3 I am close that number which seems like too many. Is my site concept too broad? That is a question that I am still grappling with.

I completed a site blueprint. This is a flow chart of your main keyword broken down into seven to 15 sections which will constitute my Tier 2 pages or what is better known as the table of contents for my site. Each of these tier 2 pages are then broken down into 7 to 15 tier 3 pages which is the meat of the site. Taking the time to outline the site in such detail before even starting to build the site is eye opening. The best part - I will never have a day where I won’t know what to write about (a common problem for bloggers). At least for a long time.

Again, my site concept is rather broad - so I have a lot of material. While SBI! does a good job of giving you guidelines to make sure that your idea is not too narrow (not enough material to build a site) there is not much guidance to help you decide if your idea is too wide.

At this point I am at Day 5 and am still revisiting Day 3, which SBI encourages you to do if you are unsure. I plan to plow forward and not wallow in “analysis paralysis” but I will take the rest of the day and into tomorrow to think about the site logically. How would a visitor to this site perceive it?

SBI does put monetization last - and it is examined in more depth on Day 4. But at this point I think it is useful to think a bit like the adsense bot - which I do plan to use on my new site eventually. I want to make sure that the adsense bot will deliver highly targeted ads to my readers. So, if my concept is too wide and covers too many topics then the bot will be confused and adsense won’t do well for me. This line of thinking may help me narrow down my topic.

If you would like to follow along with me as I make my way through the SBI Action Guide here are some links to the SBI! Video Action Guide and the SBI! Action Guide in pdf format. These resources are free.

I will be back tomorrow with SBI! Day 4. Read about SBI! Days 1 and 2 here:
Site Build It Review Day 1
Site Build It Review Day 2