Build a Niche Store Update - It All Gets Too Much!
Written by mbpage on April 30, 2008
Wow, I can’t believe it’s so long since my last post. I’ve been working so hard I’ve lost all track of time. My BANS store tally now stands at 25! I’ve got my eyes on more domains and I have set a target to reach 75 stores by the end of the year. Right now this post is acting as a brake to enable me to think about what I have learned and the mistakes I’ve made on my journey so far.
Since my last post I’ve been catching some very interesting views on BANS over at BloggerUnleased. Really interesting stuff and very different from Marks approach at thenichestorebuilder. Which is the better method? Well, that’s an interesting question and what I will say is that there are many ways to skin a cat. You will learn a lot from both of these guys so I recommend taking there RSS feeds through Google Reader to keep an eye on what they are up to. I have also run through Marks entire BANS Empire series again and found it made more sense this time. I also grasped a couple of concepts that blew straight past me the first time which shows the benefit of practice and experience.
My biggest learning point so far has to be niche selection and keyword selection which I’m finally getting my head around. You can enter a saturated market if you can find high demand low competition keywords and rank well for those phrases. Probably half of my stores have been built on high demand and high competition keywords so it isn’t too surprising sales have been low. As I add additional categories and pages for more longtail keywords I expect traffic to rise.
I am very aware that I need to do more to generate traffic as I’ll go broke waiting to rank in the SERPS. Because of the success contacts I know have had with BANS I hoped to be doing a bit better than I am in terms of earnings and I guess I just haven’t found a great niche yet so I am considering nichebot and another niche tool to see if they can help me get great focus on markets with potential.
As for traffic generation for existing stores I’m going to work on putting up USfreeads next week 2-4 per store so that should keep me busy! For the first week since I started I will not be putting up a new store (unless I change my mind of course - lol).
I still have concerns with the Ebay Partner Network. Yesterday my stats showed a big jump nearly all attributed to one store which, until that point, had only had a dozen or so hits. Sorry guys but I’m not buying that there were 500 hits to that store yesterday.
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One Response to “Build a Niche Store Update - It All Gets Too Much!”
25!
Wow.
Good going.
I have only got 2 off the ground at the moment and am probably doing far too much reading on the whole subject rather than getting a good bulk of stores “out there” to test the waters.
One is based on a domain name that I had laying around and the other is based on a current item that is “out of stock” in the UK, hence I am dropping links to the site here there and everywhere hoping to drive some traffic there.
Content is king I think though, so I will be adding that over time when I get a chance.
Good luck with your sites - I will be keeping an eye on your progress!
By Tao on Apr 30, 2008