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.

As I only build BANS stores to on a sub folder of a wordpress blog these days it has been very interesting to observe the differences compared with the traditional BANS on the root approach to things.

My findings thus far make interesting reading:

Worpdress backed sites generally index faster and in more depth than BANS stores.  Typically just 7 days without any submission via webmaster tools or, in most cases, any backlinks.  Just ping the first post and you’re away.

Wordpress backed sites have vastly superior ranking power with Google and Yahoo.  The majority of my traditional BANS sites have struggled to break through the 100 mark on Google (even with good content) before eventually being deindexed.  With wordpress many sites rank within 100 within two weeks of being indexed and today, I have achieved my first ever no. 1 ranking in Google.  What’s more it’s in a niche so competitive I thought I was mad for trying.

For my mind there is no doubt that Build a Niche Store fronted by Wordpress is the only way forward if you want to build a sucessful niche store business using the BANS script.  Yes it’s harder work as it takes a lot longer to configure wordpress and bans to work properly together, but believe, the results are worth it.  In a way, I’m also glad its tougher because it means fewer competitors which is great news for those of us committed to generating big profits.

Want to know how to make money with Wordpress and BANS?  Check out Marks blog over at thenichestorebuilder.com.  Mark is the man.

One of the most popular wordpress plugins is the all in one seo pack.  I have been using it for a while but noticed that the meta descriptions I created were being ignored by Google.  Usually an indexed page is represented by Google as a snippet.  The snippet is a combinaiton of the meta title and meta description.  The meta description should be no more than 155 characters long and is your opportunity to include sales message to encourage a user to click on your link.  A good meta description is essential if you are going to succeed with Build a Niche Store.

Rather than showing my meta description Google was displaying a random selection of menu items and page text making the snippet look spammy and imo discouraging a potential visitor from clicking my link.  For this reason I had reservations about using wordpress in combination with BANS.

I searched long and hard for a solution to this problem posting requests for help on several forums.  I also asked fellow BANS bloggers and also contacted the plugin author but no one had any suggestions.  Frustrated, I started experimenting with the plugin settings and after two or three weeks of experimentation I have found the solution.

If you use this plugin, and every wordpress user should, and want full control over the Google snippet then you simply turn off the autogenerate descriptions option.  Doing this requires that you enter a meta title and meta description manually but the result of having a meaningful meta description makes the effort worthwhile.  The biggest advantage though is that you make more sales!

Sometimes I’d like to post more often but I refuse to produce content just for the sake of it. I only write when I’ve got something worth saying and I hope that’s appreciated. I have kept away from the BANS forums recently due to the negative rumors that abound. I prefer to keep focused on what I’m doing rather than worry about the latest “BANS is finished” story. Thats not to say I hide my head in the sand but negative stories can consume time more than anything else I know.

Anyway I popped over and found that Kelvin and Adam have released some really classy BANS templates and what’s more they’re free. Dave (Soggy) and Mark (meetmydomains) are working on creating versions that support wordpress integration so to me the futures never seemed better.

If you haven’t checked out the new templates yet make your way over to the BANS forum and check them out.

This is a big lesson learned.  When I first decided to use Hostgator to manage my websites I made a number of inquiries about the likely effect on UK targeted BANS stores being hosted in the US.  Everyone assured me all would be fine (I asked questions in a number of forums).  As things have turned out it is not fine.

If you host BANS stores in the US targeting another country then you must use a local domain rather than a .com or a .net.  Why?  Because you will not get in the local google index.  Say I have golfclubs.com a UK store hosted in the US.  Google will not index it in Google.co.uk only Google.com which means more than 95% of UK searchers will never find your site.

To get around this you must either host your .com in the UK (expensive) or buy a .co.uk domain hosted in the US.  Google will then identify it as a UK site and include it in the UK index (so I have read and am about to test).  Now there is an option in Google Webmaster tools to state which country your site is targeting but in my experience this does not work.  All my UK sites are currently indexed in Google.com and not one in Google.co.uk despite setting this flag more than 8 weeks ago in some cases.

So if you want to be found in a specific variant of Googles index either host in that country or buy the correct domain name for that country.  I hope that’s clear.

Finally, the gap between this and my last post is as a result of a  well earned break.  I don’t like to announce these things before I take a vacation and I had hoped to post whilst I was away but I couldn’t get a wireless connection so in the end I decided to just let it be.