One of the best ways to keep up to date with BANS developments and comments is to set up a google news and google blog feed and have it fed to google reader.

In so doing any time build a nice store is mentioned you get an alert and can check out what’s up. I can’t tell you how much I have learned by doing this.

As an example I came across a blog post this morning which lead me to this bans site http://www.blu-ray-auctions.com/. The site was created in Jan of 2008 and interested me because the author has done next to nothing with it yet it is still indexed by google.

Ask yourself, what is unique about this store compared to the vast majority of BANS stores out there? That’s right, it has no product listings on the front page?

I’ve got to be honest and admit that with one exception, all of my deindexed BANS stores had products on the front page. Could it be that the reason google has removed sites from the index is as simple as having home page listings. It couldn’t be that simple could it?

Here is a post I drafted in July but never published.  In some respects it’s not finished but I thought it would make interesting reading – especially the last couple of paragraphs.

I have been reading in the forum and in many blogs that a lot of guys out there are only making a few dollars per month from their BANS stores and to use Rochelle’s words feel in a “rut”. I have to be honest and say I am not surprised. This comment is not intended to be harsh but reflects the fact that the web grows more competitive every day.

Let me provide an example. A few years back the hottest product you could buy was Google Cash. An authoritive guide on making money with Adwords. It’s still a great intro but in those days you could make money by creating an ad, linking to an affiliate sales page and picking up a commission. The author made thousands and thousands of dollars by linking to eBays sign up page when they launched in Germany for example. Not only is that opportunity long gone but you are no longer allowed to use the term eBay in adwords campaigns this being reserved for eBay themselves.

Things change and now you need, squeeze pages, your own landing page, email capture, follow up procedures and more to be successful. Witness the recent launch for John Reese’s Traffic Secrets 2.0 for example.

What’s this got to do with BANS? Well in most cases, the effort you put forward is commensurate with the amount of money you make. Not long ago you could make money by putting up a generic store front, creating a few categories promoting products and away you’d go. There are now hundreds of thousands of BANS stores, not to mention hundreds of thousands of other affiliate style stores such as the excellent Datafeedr. The competition is growing exponentially and creating minimal bans skeleton stores just wont cut it.

I think most people who purchase the Build a Niche Store script have no concept of the amount of work involved in creating a fully fledged store. I didn’t – and building a great store isn’t even enough. You need to learn, understand, practice and apply SEO techniques as well. Building the initial store is probably 20% of the work. Leave it there and you will only make, at most, 20% of the potential money. It’s probably more like 5% to be honest. Without a fully fledged SEO campaign, on and off page, you’re screwed.

I say screwed because what will happen is new stores will ride high(ish) in Googles index for up to the first six weeks after which they will fall back through the rankings. Without an SEO campaign stores slide into oblivion and dry up. My own Coach Designer Store made approx $60 in the first month of its life and then made no sales at all for the next two months (this despite an SEO campaign). It has only just started to rise in the rankings again this month and looks likely to earn about $50. I think this site has the potential to make $250-$300 per month so there is still much to do.

I am still submitting it to directories (SubmitEdge and DigiXmas) and link building but I still have article marketing, social bookmarking (using tools such as Bookmarking Demon), forum comments, blog comments at my disposal which I haven’t implemented yet.

I have in the region of 35 stores and each store could keep me busy for one day per week at least,  and that’s a full time day, not a couple of hours when I get back from work.

What I’m saying here is that the time commitment to succeed and make thousands per month is significant. If you work full time and build niche stores in the evening it’s going to take a couple of years or longer before you can give up the day job. I’ve pretty much built niche stores full time since the end of March and I’m making about $600 per month at the moment. If I extrapolate that I have already invested more time building stores than someone with a full time job is likely to be capable of in the next 2 years.   Now I do expect my earnings to increase significantly over the next 6 months, not through adding more stores although I try to add a couple a month, but as of the ongoing investment in SEO of those existing stores.

My intention in writing this lengthy post is to demonstrate what it takes to succeed. It isn’t hard but it is time intensive and it requires commitment and a trust in yourself that you are doing the right thing. The BANS forum is a great place to learn and there are some really great blogs (such as this one lol) passing on some great tips, strategies and advice.

The goal of becoming a day job killer is one of life’s greatest prizes if it takes you 5 years is it worth it? If you knew that in 5 years time you could be your own boss and work the hours of your choosing would you put forth the effort? Darn right you would. That’s what this is all about and whilst there are no guarantees it is better to commit to the journey than to think about what might have been.

Well we’re just a week shy of Christmas and so far this month my sites have generated $5250. Is this niche store business worth it? I think the answer is obvious. The game has changed a lot since September and BANS is highly vulnerable to being deindexed by Google. I currently develop new sites using phpBay pro but I still experiment with BANS.

My objective in publishing this article is to demonstrate that the work I’d done and the effort I have put in has paid off.  If I can do it then so can you. Let me state again for the record that I only started with BANS at the end of March and had no knowledge of keyword research or seo.  I had no knowledge of code (still don’t really) link building, article marketing  etc. etc. I was a true novice and still consider myself to be one.

So how did I get to where I am today?  By being willing to learn and being willing to fail.  I was also prepared to invest in tools and services to help me accomplish more in the same amount of time.  I reinvest 25% of my income each month and have done since day 1 when it was more like 100%.

I think I can safely say I will make $6,000 this month which is 10 times more than I earnt in July this despite the fact most of my sites were removed from the Google index.  Just imagine what could have been achieved over the next couple of years if I could have kept them in the index.  It’s mind boggling.

Happy Christmas.

Well Wordpress 2.7 is with us already and the user interface has been massively overhauled.  It’ll take a bit of getting used to but at the moment my initial reaction is favorable.

The biggest improvement by far is the ability to upload images independently of a post which has always driven me nuts.   Ok so that may not be the biggest improvement but I love it.  Everything seems more intuitive.  You can access the main functions/tools with fewer clicks and the overall look and feel is modern and professional.  Amazing for a system that is FREE.

I have only installed it on this blog at the moment whilst testing.  Don’t jump in to early and upgrade all your installations as you can never be sure what stops working.  One of the plugins that this site used does not currently work and requires an upgrade.  Take your time to test each installation and don’t forget to back up to you can downgrade if necessary.

I was interested to read of Mark’s (thenichestorebuilder.com) experience of trying to block search engines from spidering a new site.  I had the same thing happen on a wordpress blog a month or so back but I actually want to write about the reverse.

I recently put up a new site and successfully blocked spiders.  However, when I disabled the wordpress privacy function the site absolutely refused to index.  Google came along every day but no indexing.  Eventually I had to submit the site to webmaster tools to run some diagnostics.  These stated access was being blocked by robots.txt.

I updated robots.txt then sitemap errors were reported.  This was interesting because according to Google the sitemap contained url errors.  These were caused due to a change in permalink structure.  I’d made this change a couple of days after putting up the site (but remember search engines were blocked).  The sitemap had also been rebuilt several times and when viewing it live there were no errors.

I resubmitted the sitemap, turned off all the plugins still no difference.  Yesterday I did two things (which was a mistake).  I changed the default template and turned off adsense.  What do you know I get up this morning and the index process has started.

Now I don’t know if it was adsense or the template that was causing the problem.  It took me about 3 weeks to get this far and I can’t pinpoint the problem.  Still as indexing has only spanned two pages I’m going to change the default template back and see what happens.  Watch this space.

I just posted this comment on Marks blog but I thought it was worth of inclusion on this site as well.   Many people are to trying to get to the root cause for BANS stores being deindexed by Google – myself included.  If it helps the debate this is what I know.

I had 36 stores deindexed all of which are BANS 3.0.  I had no earlier stores because V3 was out at the time I bought the script.

Most of the stores I built in March & April are still indexed.  Everything subsequently built is gone with one exception which is the spammiest domain name ever, has no content, but earns $200 per month.  Unlike most of my stores which earn via Yahoo this one makes money via Google (go figure).

These stores had different templates.  Some were yours, some were Soggy’s some were BANS.

Most, but not all, made use of Jonathan Legers 3 Way Links Service.

Most, but not all, were registerd with webmaster tools.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that it is virtually impossible to improve ranking.  On the few occasions I’ve made it in to the top 10 the site has quickly fallen back through the serps.

I have also had two wordpress fronted BANS stores in the UK deindexed.  Anything on .co.uk domain seems to get severely treated within 4 weeks.

There seems to be no way to get sites back in the index.  I stripped a deindexed domain, installed wordpress and just write blog posts (6 weeks now).  No ads, no products just info.  Googlebot visits daily but is not reindexing the site.

I can see that Soggy is suggesting the evidence points to it being the product display layout and this is interesting.  Nearly all my stores use layout 4 or 5 but I do have a layout 1 store that has been deindexed and that was the third store I ever built.

I’d love to be able to add more but I see little commonality.

What have been your experiences?  Join the debate.