How It All Began
The true story of our experience using Site build It!

Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else. -- James M. Barrie


A year and half into our web based business experiment, and our "Start A Cleaning Business" web site now practically runs on auto pilot. It's a little hard for us to believe sometimes, but we actually succeeded in moving our real life house cleaning business online!


He'd been struggling to build a web site for a couple months. He's a very DIY guy, but I could tell how frustrated he was getting. We'd gotten this idea stuck in our heads and we were going to try selling our own ebook.

I'll never forget when he turned to me one night and told me about this guy called Dr. Ken Evoy who he'd been checking out, who seemed to really know what he was talking about, and that he was seriously considering buying his system called Site Build It!.

I'm sure I was being very supportive when I said, “Spend money on it, you mean?”

Picturing us that night makes me smile. We were so ripe and on the verge of some new thing, we didn't really know what, and also extremely motivated to make our web business idea fly. But there we were, examining SBI!, and seriously pausing before deciding to buy it and let it help push us off that tentative edge into our future.

So here it is, the future. We just sit around answering emails all day, right? Actually, uh...yes!

Sort of. Not all day. We do spend a few hours each morning responding to our customers, and we are currently creating a lot of site-related marketing materials. But that takes, tops, 2 or 3 hours.

Most days you'll find us playing on the computers in the morning, then breaking for a long afternoon siesta, which includes lunch, a walk around our coastal town, and usually, well, we're just too excited about the direction of our lives to resist a bit of shop talk. So siesta time is also for brainstorming ideas about the fun new online niches we're creating. In the evening, we return refreshed to our office, which is becoming more of a word and design playground.

We've got two new web sites in the works. Evan has a notebook full of flowcharts and creative web related projects he's cooking up. I've branched out into full-fledged freelance writing.

I really can't say thank you enough to Dr. Ken Evoy and to Site Build It!. We are so grateful to Dr. Evoy for teaching his simple (i.e., brilliant) system of web writing.



SBI! got us up and running quickly without having to spend either a huge sum of money or a whole lot of time learning web standards and web design. We knew we could develop expertise in these areas over time, but at first we just wanted to see if our ebook would sell.


Where We Were

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons. -- Woody Allen

In 2003, Evan and I moved from Colorado to California. We were starting over in many ways. Evan had developed an entrepreneurial system that never failed to get him working immediately, so when I couldn't get the teaching job I wanted, he invited me to help with his cleaning business.

While driving to and from our jobs, scrubbing floors and countertops or taking a lunch break the conversation often drifted around to our long-term professional and creative goals. Where were we headed? We narrowed it down to two potential futures.

The first was to get serious about the cleaning business, hire crews and manage them. This direction seemed to offer some clear benefits. We had a strong clientele and all the right equipment. It would also be a practical move, since we were skilled at our business and could easily make the leap to expanding services, hiring employees and running crews.

It seemed like a natural progression...except, I'm a writer, and Evan's a composer.

Did we really desire to run a big cleaning company? When it came right down to it...not really! We had enjoyed building our cleaning business, but agreed that it was time for a change in career. Something challenging and creative, where we could use our natural skills and keep building on the entrepreneurial business experience we'd gained.

The other alternative began as more of a vague idea. We wanted to teach other people how to start their own cleaning business, like we had.

From the beginning, it was obvious that we were both a lot more excited about this alternative. It fit us. Evan is hyper-creative, a great problem-solver and thrives on big challenges. I have a Master's degree in writing and years of teaching experience.

Evan had discovered and refined a valuable system that we knew we could teach. But where? Teaching in our town wouldn't be smart. We'd be creating competition for ourselves. We decided that if we choose this direction it would be smarter to write a “how-to” book.

I knew I could write a really great little book on how to start a cleaning business. But what was the likelihood of profiting from a how-to book? Even if we could get it published, marketing books takes a lot of capital, more than we had. And eventually if it did start to sell, how many years would that take? I'd had a few articles published in trade and regional magazines. I knew how competitive the market was for a book like this. It was daunting.




Meantime, we continued to acquire increasingly better cleaning jobs, but while working we could never quite stop discussing the possibilities of the how-to book.

Evan had started talking about this other wacky idea he had, which was to put up a web site and sell our how-to book online. Market it ourselves instead of going through a publishing company. Deep down I knew I wanted to write for a living, not run a cleaning empire. So I started writing.


Our Web Business Begins

The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work. -- Richard Bach

Every evening after cleaning Evan would click and type away at our iMac, muttering to himself and scribbling in a notebook. I'd open my old laptop at the kitchen table and get to work.

Writing every night gave me a real sense of purpose each day. As a former college English instructor I had years of experience in explaining things in writing to my students. Now I felt like I'd been preparing to write the book all along.

Still, I thought it was nuts to think we might actually sell how-to ebooks. Would anybody actually pay for information like this?

When I voiced my anxiety, Evan pointed out that a couple of years prior, even I had purchased a pamphlet online. At the time, I didn't really even used it, but it would sure come in handy now. It was a how-to article that taught writing a “how-to” article!

Evan tried designing our web site, but he was often frustrated. It was taking too long, was too slow and too difficult. He tried for at least two months, but we felt like we were operating without some key piece of information.


The information Dr. Ken Evoy offered seemed to be the key we'd been hoping to find, and after much discussion about “spending money on it,” we downloaded Dr. Evoy's book about writing for the web. Both of us studied it obsessively. It made so much sense.

At this time we clarified our plan. We wanted to move our real life cleaning business online. In other words we wanted to get out of house cleaning and replace that income with income from our ebook. We had faith that if we applied Ken Evoy's advice we could succeed.

Writing the book, “How to Start Your Own Cleaning Business,” took just a few weeks. Evan managed to convert it from a word document into an ebook by cobbling it together using freeware.

But our computer equipment was getting old. It was a struggle. At one point we had to comb through the manuscript on my laptop and hand-remove a certain HTML symbol that was throwing everything off.

For the next three or four months we became completely focused. All we did was clean during the day and work on our growing web business every night. The more we became convinced that we could make this crazy plan work, the more driven we felt.

While I was writing content pages in an effort to bring targeted traffic to our site, Evan was designing the site and learning how to make it work. He'd tried and failed to put up our site for two months, but got it working immediately with Ken Evoy's advice and Site Build It!.

Since all our data is backed up on SBI's server we didn't lose anything when the old iMac finally crashed. The best part was that with sales from our ebook, we were able to buy two new computers.

Did I say “ebook sales?” Yes! It was actually starting to happen. We launched our web site in May 2004, and started getting traffic and selling the ebook right away. I was so excited.

Still, it wasn't as if we could quit house cleaning immediately. Traffic continued to climb, but seven or eight months would go by before sales would register a significant amount of money. According to plan, our web business was growing slowly but steadily.


Phase two of web business begins

You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play.

During the summer and fall of 2004, we moved into the second phase of our e-business. Evan worked at refining the site, and I wrote two additional ebooks.

We added an affiliate who sold a how-to book on commercial cleaning, which allowed us to offer a wider variety of cleaning business ebooks. We had been sending out an ezine (our “clean zine”) once a month, but when we realized that the mailing list had grown significiantly we stepped up the pace and began sending an ezine every week.

In 2005 we revised all three ebooks, including more information and making them better in every way. We were determined to give our customers a valuable product. We added a feature that allows us to offer mentoring.

Evan's teenage son looked over the site and gave us some very surprising and important feedback. He said that it wasn't obvious that we were offering ebooks! Plus, he said he didn't really know what an ebook was, and looking at our site did nothing to explain it to him.

Evan immediately made some adjustments to our site and our conversions went up again. They also improved greatly when we added a large number of affiliates to sell our ebooks for us.

We still felt that we could go further in the customer service area. We loved Dr. Evoy's advice about providing the absolute best in customer service. It's always worked for us in our cleaning business, and we knew it would work online.

We gathered all our cleaning tips together into an 88 page ebook full of cleaning recipes. But instead of selling it, we decided to offer the cleaning tips ebook as a free bonus to every customer.



Things are beginning to get really interesting. We're branching out from a solid base that we built from scratch, an idea that just wouldn't let us go, and a stubborn determination to bring it about.

When you love your work nothing will keep you from succeeding, because you'll work hard and smart. SBI! gave us the tools to get up and going so we could do both those things right from the start.


Thank you, Dr. Ken and SBI!

Learn more about Site Build It! here

Here is the link to our web business: Start Cleaning Business.com