An interesting lesson today.  I have been developing a number of sites using phpBAY Pro as an alternative to BANS.  This morning I noticed none of the sites were displaying auctions.  I assumed a problem with the feed from eBay but no, BANS sites are all up and running.

I thought a visit to the phpBay forum may shed some light but, interestingly, this is offline as well.  My conclusion at this stage is that Wade’s server has gone down and as a result the phpBay license is not validating and therefore returning no listings.

This is a cautionary note and I will investigate further but I really don’t like the thought that this plugin is validated via a third party before pulling the feed of a different third party.  As things stand I cannot generate any revenue from my phpBAY sites at the busiest time of the year and I cannot find out what is going on.  Another eventful day in the life of an internet marketer.

For those of you that may be playing with BANS and Wordpress at the moment here is a great tutorial for tweaking settings on wordpress templates.  It is for  PHPBay stores but the principles are the same.

PHPBay: Start to Finish Tutorial : eurekadiary.com.

Needless to say the demo site has bee shut down which is hardly surprising.  If you’re going to purchase a trademark domain don’t.  If you still want to make sure it has a few other keywords in it at least.  This one would have upset Eddie Bauer big time.

Earnings update coming shortly.

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.