Well another month flies by!  Life continues to be most interesting in niche store building circles.  Google really hates BANS now and I mean really.  I created two blogs (with little content admittedly) which were indexed quickly, ranked very well compared to BANS vanilla stores but have since been deindexed.

This proves beyond doubt to me that there is no point wasting time and effort setting up niche stores using Build a Niche Store if you want to rank well in Google.  That is not to say you can’t make good money elsewhere.

This months income was another record coming in at what would have been $2600.  Unfortunately the £ took a major battering against the dollar depreciating 25% in a week which has meant adjusted earnings of approx $2000.  I’m deilighted with this though and now have some great keywords ranking high in Yahoo and improving all the time as I continue link building.

A couple of my no hope older sites have also started to earn after doing nothing for 6 months.  I think this reflects the fact that the keyword competition was very strong e.g. home gym equipment but I now have a couple of top ten keyword rankings for gym related terms which are starting to get some traffic.  This surprised me as I had more or less written the sites off.

I am confident that Yahoo earnings will continue to rise.  I still have probably 20 sites or so that don’t rank well currently but are moving up the order with regular link building.  I don’t spend long on this probably an hour a day, so it will take some time yet.

So good old Yahoo is paying the bills but I am not happy at being reliant on this one search engine.  As I said Google hates BANS and I really have no idea what it takes to get ranked with Live.  All my sites are indexed (many just a couple of pages) but nothing I do seems to make a difference.  I treat all the sites the same yet I have one recent addition that is fully indexed, ranked for keywords and performing well.  It’s a shame I have no idea why.

So back to Google.  To make big money, in my opinion you have to rank well in Google.  For this reason I have abadoned BANS and all  my new sites are developed with Wordpress, Revolution Themes and a mixture of PHPbay, popshops and other monetization tools.  I wish I’d made the transition sooner but then I was still learning and still am.

The big difference is that I have had to bite the bullet and focus much more on content.  The problem with this strategy is that it is much more time consuming and there is a limit to the number of sites you can run.  I reckon 5.  This is a far cry from my 75 BANS stores. 

 Indeed I have only just launched one of the new style sites.  I have another in development but it will be another week before it is ready to launch.  These sites are not sales focused yet and until I have 20 pages or so indexed I will not be adding any monetization.  As I add content I wil l begin to add stores so each site will, over time, become a super site on a theme and have the equivalent of 10-20 BANS stores.

Because the stores are themed e.g sports they can serve multiple niches in one place.  Easier to maintain but requiring a different link building strategy as there is a need to deep link to the store pages.  The aim is two fold to get traffic from people interested in the content and to get traffic from people wanting to buy.  It therefore has dual appeal and will hopefully, in time, form the foundation for an authority site.

So there you have it.  A record month, hopefully another record month to come (first couple of days look good) and a radical change in strategy.

For this reason the focus of the blog will change to cater to a wider niche store building audience.  Hopefully I will retain my existing readers.  One day, when I’m making 10k per month I’ll put it all together in an ebook and it will be a lot better than most of the crap out there given some of my recent purchases!

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?

The lack of site updates as been due to my Italian vacation which came at a very opportune time given that I needed to let the dust settle following the deindexing of the majority of my sites by Google.

I look forward to the day that there is a legal challenge to this practice.   If a site is profitable then as far as I’m concerned it adds value to the customers that use it – period.  I find it outrageous that Google can arbitrarily make the decision to deindex a site and hope someone out there has the resources to bring them to account in the future.  As ever it’s the little guy that suffers and it feels like I got fired from my own job!

That said things are not as bad as I feared.  Given that my BANS history is less than 6 months I handn’t really bothered checking stat reports that closely.  The deindexing caused me to look at this and I discovered that 90% of my traffic is coming from Yahoo.  As a result earnings and traffic have largely been unaffected so far.

This was a pretty big revelation to me.  I have a number of keywords now ranking on page 1 in Yahoo and some of my sites are beginning to make decent returns as a result.  When I think I could have multiplied traffic and earnings by a factor of 8 if I could have ranked with Google then it becomes pretty easy to see that BANS can be very very lucrative.  That’s pretty darn exciting.

I will be testing a new strategy over the next couple of months which I hope will satisfy Google and avoid the deindexing problems I’ve suffered.

Watch out for my end of month post because you’re going to be surprised.

Well folks its looking like the end of the road for BANS for me.  Today the big G has deindexed virtually every one of my sites.  I can only hope this is a temporary blip but I am not optimistic given what has happened to others.  I’ll take stock over the weekend and make a final decision on Monday but right now things look pretty gloomy.

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.