BANS Today

Disaster Day - Part 2

Written by mbpage on September 26, 2008

The lack of site updates as been due to my Italian vacation which came at a very opportune time given that I needed to let the dust settle following the deindexing of the majority of my sites by Google.

I look forward to the day that there is a legal challenge to this practice.   If a site is profitable then as far as I’m concerned it adds value to the customers that use it - period.  I find it outrageous that Google can arbitrarily make the decision to deindex a site and hope someone out there has the resources to bring them to account in the future.  As ever it’s the little guy that suffers and it feels like I got fired from my own job!

That said things are not as bad as I feared.  Given that my BANS history is less than 6 months I handn’t really bothered checking stat reports that closely.  The deindexing caused me to look at this and I discovered that 90% of my traffic is coming from Yahoo.  As a result earnings and traffic have largely been unaffected so far.

This was a pretty big revelation to me.  I have a number of keywords now ranking on page 1 in Yahoo and some of my sites are beginning to make decent returns as a result.  When I think I could have multiplied traffic and earnings by a factor of 8 if I could have ranked with Google then it becomes pretty easy to see that BANS can be very very lucrative.  That’s pretty darn exciting.

I will be testing a new strategy over the next couple of months which I hope will satisfy Google and avoid the deindexing problems I’ve suffered.

Watch out for my end of month post because you’re going to be surprised.

Disaster Day

Written by mbpage on September 12, 2008

Well folks its looking like the end of the road for BANS for me.  Today the big G has deindexed virtually every one of my sites.  I can only hope this is a temporary blip but I am not optimistic given what has happened to others.  I’ll take stock over the weekend and make a final decision on Monday but right now things look pretty gloomy.

Build a Niche Store Earnings Update - September

Written by mbpage on September 11, 2008

Well I guess I should apologize for not posting anything worthwhile for the last couple of weeks. I’ve been flat out building my first corporate website for a friends business and despite what I said in an earlier post, I’ve built another 8 or 9 stores.

August was a record month earnings wise coming in at around $800 but I can’t help feel a sense of disappointment. I have invested 5 months of 60 hour weeks in BANS and a measly $800 is not a lot to show for it.

I am in this for the long haul but I grow more nervous with each week that passes having come across a number of reports of de-indexed sites and canceled EPN accounts. The thought of 5 months, and rising, work counting for naught is not a pleasant one.

Putting the negative to one side what happens next? Well I think I’m going to set a target of completing 75 stores by the end of the year. I currently stand at 55 so that could be a big ask but I can put them up pretty quickly now.

The major change I have made this month includes a paid subscription to Terapeak. The jury is out on its value as eBay appear to offer restricted views of the data but it is a bit of an eye opener. I will provide an update on this product once the stores built as a result of the research are a month or two old.

The end of September will mark my first 6 months with BANS and I will go through my basic store building strategy then encompassing everything I have learned to date. This should be a valuable post for anyone new to BANS and a big time saver.

My main objective now is to devise a strategy to start ramping up site visitors. I’m a bit stuck here as I have optimized my site pages, submitted to directories and employed an active link building campaign. What else is there to do? Well content is an obvious one but everything I read says do more link building so rather than content for the site I’m moving to article marketing.

I’m going to use Article Marketer for this purpose. I have had mixed experience of them to date and find their editorial policies as bad, if not worse, than ezinearticles.com but the distribution is excellent and results in many backlinks per article.

I have also decided to get Stompernet’s SEO Course as I still feel I’m missing something in terms of off page activity. I have no proof for this other than unsubstantiated reports of traffic claims and earnings. I know though, that my long term success will be dependent on my keyword ranking in the serps so this is where I will focus much of my attention for the next 3 to 4 months.

PHPBay: Start to Finish Tutorial : eurekadiary.com

Written by mbpage on September 10, 2008

For those of you that may be playing with BANS and Wordpress at the moment here is a great tutorial for tweaking settings on wordpress templates.  It is for  PHPBay stores but the principles are the same.

PHPBay: Start to Finish Tutorial : eurekadiary.com.

Needless to say the demo site has bee shut down which is hardly surprising.  If you’re going to purchase a trademark domain don’t.  If you still want to make sure it has a few other keywords in it at least.  This one would have upset Eddie Bauer big time.

Earnings update coming shortly.