PhpBay | BANS Today

October Earnings Update

Written by mbpage on November 4, 2008

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!