Build a Niche Store Earnings Update

Written by mbpage on June 2, 2008

Well I’m not going to break any records but I think May ended up pretty good. The best was save till last as my utility vehicle site, which is only two weeks old stormed in with its first sale generating $80 and 31 May ended up my highest earning day of my short 2 month BANS career.

It was a mixed bag of a month. I now have 27 BANS stores and this month 15 made sales. Disturbingly last months top earner failed to make a single sale. After the initial store building burst I have now settled in to the routine of building one or tow new stores a week. This is likely to be one per week for June as I am also building a couple of wordpress adense sites at the moment following Courtney Tuttle’s Keyboard Sniper strategy. His articles on this topic are probably the best I have read on the net.

Forgive me while I digress a moment but in 4 weeks I have put together a debt site targeting a keyword that has competition of 5.5 million (that was a mistake as my initial research showed competition of 795000 which is still way more than the 30,000 or less recommended by so many). For that keyword I am currently ranked 120 and rising and using Courtney’s model I am confident of a front page listing later this year. The site is already profitable as promotion costs have been zero and earnings for May $10 which has more than paid for the domain cost of $5. I expect the site to do about $50 per day when it hits the front page of Google.

Back to Build a Niche Store. I have a couple of completely hopeless sites - only a couple of visitors in a month and with a bit more experience I can now identify the reason for this as poor keyword selection and a too general niche. To be more specific I built a store selling watches. I now believe for it to make sales I need to use long tail keywords like “Discount Omega Watches For Sale.” Easy to do but search volume is virtually zero for that term and there is still too much competition. Now I could succeed with this store by building a couple of hundred pages targeting very specific low volume keyword terms but the amount of effort required and time investment simply isn’t worth while. The time is better spent optimizing the more successful stores and building new sites. I’m not going to flog a dead horse. If it picks up on its own I will re-evaluate though.

Here’s the full approx earnings break down:

Utility Vehicles $81
Figurines $50
Fishing Gear $26
Watersports $13
Bikes $12
Collectibes $10
Motorcycles $10
Hobbies $9
Audio Equipmnet $6
Gardens $3
Binoculars £2.50
Boats $2
Guitars $1
Lighting $1
Computers 50c

I have invested a lot time this month researching link building. This off page seo technique is the key to success with Build a Niche Store and I now beleive that 50 percent of my time each day should be spent link building. I use two main techniques for this at the moment. Directory Submissions and Article Marketing and I’ll write separately about this as part of the BANS Secrets Series.

I did explore other techniques that used auto link building software and create directories on BANS stores and I am testing one of these. The software is awesome (bit of a pig to configure) works really and builds automatic link directories. The problem is it all looks a bit out of date and whilst (despite what many say) putting a directory on your site still works and is a great idea, most webmasters now appear to have nothing but appathy or contempt for this techniqe and consider your attempts to contact them as spam. I figure if I distribute an article that gets picked up by a few hundred sites this actually takes less time, is more focused and builds one way rather than recipricol links.

I do seem to have verbal diarrhea this morning so before I shoot off on another tangent let’s end it there for today. In summary then April Earnings were $85 May earnings $240. Visitors up, click throughs up, keyword rankings moving up. Everything is moving in the right direction for many stores. Will I top it in June? Maybe not and you might wonder why that is. Well my Coach site (my top earner last month) has made no sales in May - it seems to have been sand boxed but I have also read that many BANS stores do well in their first month and then spend a couple of months in the wilderness before storming back later. We’ll see how true this is over the next couple of months.

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