On July 12, 2007, Jeremy Banning of La Jolla, California created a site on myABCspace.com for his tiny business, PlaySmoothPiano. Today, more than 30,000 people have visited his site and he continues to receive an average of 8,000 visits per month. Since February of 2007, Banning has produced video tutorials for piano players who are specifically interested in learning how to play jazz piano exactly as they hear it on the albums. With only a camera, a piano, and Windows Movie Maker, he started his business by posting a demo video on YouTube of the piano techniques used in one of his favorite songs.

A classically trained pianist, Banning realized that piano students weren’t getting any idea of the actual techniques used in most blues and jazz songs. “I couldn’t even find the full sheet music—they’d only give you chords and the notes,” Banning said, “so I just decided to learn how to play by ear so other people could learn how to play, too.” Banning realized his ability might be valuable after he taught one of his friends how to play K-C and Jojo’s “All My Life” for his girlfriend. “To this day,” Banning says, “he can still play that song.” After realizing that many other video tutorial programs weren’t much help, he decided to produce his own videos. Today, Banning sends out “tons” of DVDs per month.

Initially, Banning hired a professional Web designer to help him build a site after visitors to his YouTube pages began wanting to find where they could buy his products. The results were unsatisfactory. “I had to pay my Web designer like 100 bucks to make even a small change to my website,” Banning says, adding that it often took these changes a few days to appear. Banning soon discovered myABCspace, and began doing business only from his page there. “With myABCspace, I can just drop in anything I want and it’s updated.”

Banning insists that it’s important to use as many resources that are available on the Internet as possible to experience the greatest success. The majority of the traffic to his myABCspace page continues to come from YouTube, and many other customers are finding his site from MySpace as well. In January, he created a page on Facebook to see if he could get any traffic from there. While he thinks that he might have been able to start his business without the Internet, he acknowledges that doing so would have been much more inefficient and expensive. “With the Internet I can advertise all the time,” Banning says. “I don’t have to be in a store with nine-to-five hours.”

Banning is but one of the thousands of business owners who are experiencing success with myABCspace, the website utility for small business owners offered by America’s Best Companies. “It’s easy,” Banning says. “The Internet’s now my bread and butter.”

• PlaySmoothPiano on myABCspace
• on YouTube