Well this month has had it all.  The trauma of a visit by the evil deindexing Googlebot which wreaked as much havoc as a DDOS attack.  An Italian vacation and a record month for earnings.

I could continue to harp on about the unfair treatment Google is meeting out to BANS users, but as many have written before, Google declared war on thin affiliate sites and all we can do is adapt.  The frustration for me came about because having decided to make a commitment to internet marketing at the beginning of the year I built a large number of sites to start the domain aging process.   Yes these were pretty thin sites but they were put there to test demand.  Give them 9-12 months, look at the results and then develop the profitable ones into sites with more authority.  A classic marketing strategy you may notice.  Test, find what works and then develop the most profitable niches further.

This had proven a great strategy as I will demonstrate later.  Well with Google now refusing to give a site time to develop ( I had 7 sites indexed and then deindexed that were less than 1 month old) a change in tack is required.  I had been migrating more and more towards wordpress prior to the deindexing incident and this setback means I will never develop another store with BANS on the root of a domain.  I encourage all of you to do the same.

I really do like wordpress and with plugins such as Phpbay, Popshops and others available the ease with which additional monetization strategies can be added is really cool.   The best way to get to grips with Wordpress is to set up a simple blog.  I acutally started this blog for that very reason and the experience has proved invaluable.  Remember, I knew nothing about websites, internet marketing or SEO at the beginning of the year.

With that in mind, drum roll please, I can say my earnings for this month more than doubled and I blitzed my way through the $2000 barrier.  What a welcome surprise that was $0 to £2000 in 6 months and I know I’ve only started to scratch the surface in terms of my knowledge.  So what made the difference?  Quite simply Yahoo.

A typical BANS store starts out like this.  Site gets indexed by Google, first 6-8 weeks sales come via Google then these earnings start to drop off.  There is a period of 4-8 weeks with low sales.  Arround the 4 month mark sites indexed by Yahoo start to generate increased traffic and from the 5 month mark Yahoo begins to dominate.  That’s what my stats show as happening.  In fact, 90% of my traffic and sales come as a result of searches in Yahoo – not what I was expecting.  What about MSN/Live you may ask?  Well as best as I can tell I get no traffic and I’m not ranked for keywords although all my sites are indexed.

There is another distinction that should be made and that is that throughout the period I have continued to add backlinks to each of the sites which has obviously propelled me up the Yahoo rankings.  I have 30 or so keywords that have top 10 Yahoo rankings many of these occupying positions 1-3.

Well it continue?  Who knows.  I have seen a remarkable increase in the number of ACRUS since the transition to EPN (I had 7 yesterday alone) and with the payment structure being revised I do expect ACRU earnings to fall.  As the next batch of sites built start to mature in Yahoo I think this should be enough to compensate.

So is it the end of the line for Build a Niche Store?  My answer is a resounding no.  It is however, the end of the line for thin affiliate sites (if you want to rank in Google anyway) and time to think Wordpress.  The challenge this brings is that it isn’t as easy to test as it used to be.   What I am keen to avoid is spending 2 weeks building a site only to find out it makes no money.  With BANS I could build 20 in that time frame and cull the failures at the end of a 12 month period (that was the plan).  Can you do that in Worpress?  What do you think?

Another month gone already!  Well with my vacation last week we’re now well in to August as well.  July was my fourth month developing BANS websites.  I chose not to build many new sites as there is always a danger of leaving existing stores in a declining state.  Indeed last week I designed an audit sheet to review all my stores to make sure they were optimized in so far as possible given my experience to date.  It was an eye opening experience as it will take me the next 10 days to get them all up to the same spec!  What about you?  Do you move on to new stores too quickly?  I put this down as a lesson learned.  I can’t complain about under performing stores when I haven’t done everything I can to optimize them.

I mentioned last month that my Coach store had performed significantly better in June having made no sales at all the previous month.  Well that trend has continued and several of my earlier stores have started to come back.  There is a lot of comment that this is the way things work with Google but until you see it happening for yourself you are always skeptical.  That said, it may be due to the fact that my stores have now started to rank quite well in Yahoo.

The area I’m struggling is with MSN Live.  According to my stats I do not rank for any keywords in Live and I have checked with three different ranking tools.  Armed with this information I registered with Live webmaster tools and submitted all my sites through this mechanism.  I’ll give an update next month on the results.  Any other suggestions for getting a good ranking with MSN Live guys?

Despite all this July was a record month for earnings although still much less than I would like to see given the amount of hours invested.   I closed out with earnings of $680.

So what about August?  Given that we’re 10 days in it looks set to be very similar to July.  I don’t anticipate building many new stores and any I build are likely to be Wordpress based using PHPbay Pro.  There is a possibility of one BANS site using wordpress as I want to go through Mark’s series over at the Niche Store Builder but I do have a lot to do.

Another month has passed and I have been using BANS now for 3 months.  Store building has continued and I now have a total of 34 stores.  I have another 10 domains or so to develop and a couple of stores to covert to .co.uk domains (as discussed in earlier posts).

This month has been my best yet and I have earned $600 in income from my Build a Niche Store Empire.   On the surface this appears a great result but there a lot of undercurrents which cause me some concern.  My first half dozen stores made few if any sales this month and despite much link building have slipped down the rankings and indeed show few if any backlinks in Google.  Everything I have read suggests they come back but non the less it is disconcerting.    In theory there is a Page Rank update this month so this could help.

Google also appears to be looking for content more and more and I am of the belief that 200-300 words are needed on each page of my sites.  This is a big task but I will test before I make a commitment to roll out this strategy over all my sites.

This month I need to reveiw all my stores.  Check keywords, optimization, server logs and continue link building. In amongst that lot I need to build another 4 or 5 stores and continue my experiments with Wordpress.  It’s going to be pretty busy.  I’m also hoping to crack $1000 but I think that could be a step to far at this stage and it might take a couple more months.  Still you’ve got to have a goal.

Earnings Summary

Total earnings $600

34 Stores – 26 made sales 8 did not – 5 of those 8 stores where the first I built (4 of the 5 performed well in their first month)

Actually there are too many stores for a more detailed breakdown but the bulk of the earnings came from 9 of the 34 stores the majority of these offering items that cost in excess of $1,000.

Also notable this month was the return of the ACRU.  I had 1 in April, 0 in May and 10 in June.  Looks like eBay has fixed the tracking problems.

Until next month…..

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.

One of the most important aspects to building BANS stores is establishing a routine.  You can just stick up a store and leave it there, but, truth be told you’re unlikely to make any decent money.  As of today I have 17 stores either in Phase 1 or Phase 2 Development (see previous posts for definition).  These have been developed in 4 weeks so I’m moving pretty fast although I do this pretty much full time.

Moving so quickly I have had to develop a routine which goes something like this:

• Update BANS today Blog

• Spend 1 hour per day per store on a maximum of 4 stores in Phase 2 Development.  Tasks include optimizing pages, creating new pages, adding graphics, checking logs, identifying keywords, creating content, writing content for supporting blogs, creating ads, building  backlinks etc.

• Spend 1 hour per day browsing the BANS forum and reading BANS related blogs (see my blogroll links) although I use Google Reader for this purpose as you can just subscribe to the RSS Feed.  Side note – if you don’t have an RSS feed for your own blog learn how to set one up immediately.  Google Reader is a brilliant tool.   Learning new stuff is crucial and this has been invaluable to me in acclerating my progress.  Yesterday, for example, I learned that all sites should have a privacy policy and how to easily add one to your store – thanks again to Rochelle.  Writing that has reminded me to post a request in the BANS forum that this be automatically included in the next release.
• On an adhoc basis Jot down ideas for new stores and carry out research on suitability for new stores.  I have identified at least 10 additional stores this way and it takes away the pain of concentrated research which I dislike.

Earnings Update

So have I broken the bank?  Well I’ve already reported some numbers but today I’ll give exact figures by broad niche.  My first store went live a couple of days before the release of BANS 3.0 EPN and the changes caused set me back a couple of days although I purchased BANS 18 March according to my receipt.  I said yesterday that my one month anniversary was approaching but it had actually passed so as an act of compromise  I’m going to give my one month update today.

So here we go (nos are rounded):

Womens Fashion $48.00
Outdoor Sport $14.00
Electrical $5.00
Garden $5.00
Crystal $4.00
Fishing $4.00
Fitness $3.00
Audio $1.50
Gardening $0.50

Giving a total to date of $85.00

I have 6 sites yet to make a sale and a couple of others yet to generate any traffic.  My biggest disappointment is a store in the home appliance area which after nearly a month has had 209 click thrus to ebay but no sales.

So I don’t know what your expectations are for earnings after one month but I am pretty pleased.  I have done very little to drive traffic at this stage all of these sales have come from SERPS.  As I start promotions under Phase 2 I hope to see these numbers start to increase