BANS Today

Build a Niche Store - Earn thousands per month

Written by mbpage on December 19, 2008

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.

Build a Niche Store Earnings Update - September

Written by mbpage on September 11, 2008

Well I guess I should apologize for not posting anything worthwhile for the last couple of weeks. I’ve been flat out building my first corporate website for a friends business and despite what I said in an earlier post, I’ve built another 8 or 9 stores.

August was a record month earnings wise coming in at around $800 but I can’t help feel a sense of disappointment. I have invested 5 months of 60 hour weeks in BANS and a measly $800 is not a lot to show for it.

I am in this for the long haul but I grow more nervous with each week that passes having come across a number of reports of de-indexed sites and canceled EPN accounts. The thought of 5 months, and rising, work counting for naught is not a pleasant one.

Putting the negative to one side what happens next? Well I think I’m going to set a target of completing 75 stores by the end of the year. I currently stand at 55 so that could be a big ask but I can put them up pretty quickly now.

The major change I have made this month includes a paid subscription to Terapeak. The jury is out on its value as eBay appear to offer restricted views of the data but it is a bit of an eye opener. I will provide an update on this product once the stores built as a result of the research are a month or two old.

The end of September will mark my first 6 months with BANS and I will go through my basic store building strategy then encompassing everything I have learned to date. This should be a valuable post for anyone new to BANS and a big time saver.

My main objective now is to devise a strategy to start ramping up site visitors. I’m a bit stuck here as I have optimized my site pages, submitted to directories and employed an active link building campaign. What else is there to do? Well content is an obvious one but everything I read says do more link building so rather than content for the site I’m moving to article marketing.

I’m going to use Article Marketer for this purpose. I have had mixed experience of them to date and find their editorial policies as bad, if not worse, than ezinearticles.com but the distribution is excellent and results in many backlinks per article.

I have also decided to get Stompernet’s SEO Course as I still feel I’m missing something in terms of off page activity. I have no proof for this other than unsubstantiated reports of traffic claims and earnings. I know though, that my long term success will be dependent on my keyword ranking in the serps so this is where I will focus much of my attention for the next 3 to 4 months.

All in one SEO Pack - Meta Descriptions

Written by mbpage on August 25, 2008

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!

Why KEI Sucks

Written by mbpage on August 15, 2008

When I started to learn search engine optimization one of the suggestions was that you should identify keywords with high KEI.  Is this something you do?  Well perhaps you should reconsider.  KEI is supposed to be a useful indicator of our potential to rank in the serps for a given keyword or keyword phrase yet it has many inherent disadvantages.

Consider this example from my research today “baby”.  Do you think you could rank no. 1 in google for the keyword “baby”?  Not likely, in fact, never in a million years if you’re a one man band yet guess what?  The KEI is 27.98.  I’ve read on many forums that a KEI of more than 1.0 makes a keyword attractive so by those standards this looks a no brainer.

Let’s delve a little deeper though.  If we look at the number of searches we see that there are 159,000 searches a month for the term baby (nice) and the competition is a paltry 901 million!!!!.

So we can see the need to exercise some common sense here.  The competition is way to fierce regardless of the KEI to target this keyword.  What we want is a high number of searches with as low a competition number as we can find.

Take a term like “cat stroller” KEI 27.59, searches 2000 per month, competition 159,000.  In theory this is the kind of term you should be targeting.  From this it is easy to conclude that we need to take all three variables into account when choosing keywords to target.  But there is another problem.

KEI varies according to the data center, keyword program and search engine you obtain the information from - massively.  I targeted a phrase recently where the competition was shown to range from just 400,000 to 7 million, the KEI varied from 0.25 to 75 and the search volume from 2300 per month to 27000 per month depending on where I pulled the data from.

This is the reason KEI sucks and why a good dose of common sense is also needed when evaluating data.  Just try to get the same results I did for the word “Baby” and you’ll see what I mean - you’ve got no chance.

Now I’d love to offer a silver bullet to solve this mess but it simply doesn’t exist.  There is no current solution to this problem and until something comes along we have to rely on common sense and gut feel.  Hardly scientific, but hey, that’s part of the challenge.

In summary then KEI is a useful indicator but no more than that.  You still need to take account of search volume and competition, take the figures with a pinch of salt and test your results.

US Hosting UK Sites (update)

Written by mbpage on July 11, 2008

In my post US Hosting UK Sites I discussed my realisation that my .com and .net domains targeting the UK were not being indexed in the UK and the plans I had to turn things around. I am pleased to say that these have been successful. The solution was similar to that outlined in my post on .info domains.

If you read that post you will know I use HostGator because of the exceptional value for money they provide compared to the cost of UK hosting. The disadvantage of this is that any domain with the exception of a .co.uk will not easily (if ever) find it’s way into the google.co.uk index. With Googles webmaster tools also failing to sort this out their are only two solutions.

Host country specific sites in the country you are targeting (not as easy as it sounds because in the UK the leading hosting company’s servers are located in Germany) and often expensive e.g. £9.95 per month per domain.

A much better and much cheaper solution is to use HostGator and just buy country specific domains. I bought .co.uk for my UK stores via Godaddy. Moved my existing stores and redirected the old domains as outlined in my previous post and low and behold they appeared between 2-5 days later in the google.co.uk index where they need to be.