Build a Niche Store Earnings Update
Written by mbpage on August 11, 2008
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.
Tags: BANS, Build A Niche Store, earnings update, phpbay pro, webmaster tools, wordpressPosted in: Earnings
June Earnings Update
Written by mbpage on July 2, 2008
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…..
Tags: BANS, Build A Niche Store, earnings updatePosted in: Earnings
