In the last month or so I’ve been building a team in the Phillipines to help run my business.   I did this because I simply couldn’t manage the number of websites I’d created nor build new sites efficiently or quick enough any longer.  I have now trained these guys and suddenly find I have time on my hands to start learning once again.

Most of you will know the importance of getting backlinks to your sites but this can be a royal pain because our niche sites, whilst serving a valuable purpose, hardly have people queing to link to them.  Many swear by blog commenting but I can’t stand leaving my target keywords in my name field it looks horrible.

Imagine my delight when I came across a plugin called Keyword Luv which encourages you to leave your name and keywords in the comment.  Check it out for yourself and leave a comment on my blog to see how it works and then grab yourself a copy and we can all help one another without resorting to spam.

I hope you like it.

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?

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.

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!

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.