I have heard from other BANS owners and affiliate marketers that their revenue doubles and even triples over the next two months. But, it takes effort and careful planning to see those numbers. Here are a few tips that I have received and am working on to triple my revenue over the next few months.

• Updating content- I’m making sure that my store content is fresh with the latest products and product reviews that people will be searching for.
• Expanding Stores- Adding two more stores focused on specific holiday gifts that are supposed to be popular this buying season.
• Creating Christmas specific and keyword rich blogs- I don’t want to change my sites because they rank well for my keywords. Instead, I’m creating traffic blogs that drive traffic to those sites. They all have keywords related to Christmas shopping and my product focus.
• Finding other affiliate deals- Not everyone wants to buy from eBay, I’m supplementing the eBay auctions with related affiliate promotions/banners/content.

The window for you to really make some money this season is closing quickly. If you have not purchased Build A Niche Store, I highly recommend it. It is totally worth the $99 investment and you will surely make that back in the first month you have your store or stores up.

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As far as the non-BANS, I’ve been working on several sites including one for Rodrigo “Minotauro” Nogueira, he’s the UFC Heavyweight Champ! He’s opened a new gym here in Dallas called Octagon MMA., you can see it at http://www.OctagonMMA.com. That was a huge, yet fun project.

As far as BANS goes, I’ve really scaled down my sites and focus over the last 3 months. When I bought Build A Niche Store back in May, I immediately put up about 8 stores. That was a mistake, never do that.

Since then, I’ve scaled back to active participation in 3 stores. Two are fully developed with full content and making around $150 per month on average. The third is just ramping up so I have not promoted it yet.

EARNINGS REPORT

October - $429

September- $385

Keep in mind that the bulk of this income is coming from 2 sites. All of the income reported is from EPN, no other affiliate programs.

On an interesting note, I spent ZERO time on BANS in October and it was my biggest month YTD. I spent around 10 hours in September. Just been busy on other projects.

So, making money with Build A Niche Store can an IS being done. It’s all based on setting up your store correctly and then let eBay do the rest. I spent no time on these sites over the last month ands a half and they still make me enough money to pay my truck note!

If you have not started with BANS, you need to. It can really change your financial position for the better.

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The typical new BANS owner thinks it’s something that you can just install and poof you can quit your day job. Oh, how untrue. The new user normally installs BANS and then immediately goes to check their EPN account to see if someone bought something. Then they check it an hour later and an hour after that. They think that the default BANS installation is some sort of money magic.

The reality is that they put the cart ahead of the horse! BANS is just a piece of affiliate software. It pulls eBay listings and displays them on a page. This in no way can drive a Web site. Listings do not drive visitors to your site!

However content does. Content is your horse. Content is why people visit your Web site. Content is what the search engines need in order to rank your site. Content is what brings people to the listings on your site.

That is why it is so critical not to put the cart (BANS) ahead of the horse (content).

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• Realize niche research is niche research. You don’t need to buy a domain. You don’t need to setup a store or a blog. You simply need to find out what the market is like for the niche and some basic information on the subject.
• Don’t do what’s been done. Most of the obvious niche ideas that seem like a great opportunity usually were at one point. But, the problem is saturation. An obvious niche is generally obvious for others, chances are you are not going to be the first and only person working a niche. To make money, you need to be different.
• Plan out your business. You need to complete your research and analyze your competition before you ever invest any time in content creation or buying a domain name. You need to get a list of possible link partners, forums, do-follow blogs related to your content.
• Write, write and write some more. Before you ever buy your domain name and setup hosting, write your content. Always, always write your content first. You should have at minimum 10 400 word articles ready to go before you buy the domain name. Also, you should have your store page content written before that page goes live. Never, never launch a store page that doesn’t have at least 250 words of unique content.

That’s basically it. I find my successful niche markets make it through this process and are worth the domain and hosting expense.

The niche ideas that don’t make it through the process are the ones that would have likely failed anyway. If I’m not interested enough to generate good content, people sure will not be interested enough to visit the site.

This process saves me frustration, money and time. It also helps me focus on seeing a niche store through from concept to completion.

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To answer that, one thing has to be made known. People buy on eBay for price and availability. I have to ask… Would I have generated that many sales if those items were full price? The obvious answer is no. Clearly people buy on eBay over full price retailers because of the discounts they get off literally the same merchandise.

So, the quick answer is no. You are not losing money going with BANS because chances are those sales would not have happened if they were confronted against full retail prices.

However, the long answer is not that cut and dry. I still think that snooty buyers are somewhat turned off by eBay. They don’t want to buy someone’s hand-me-down or a second hand item. They are willing to pay online retail to get that fresh out of the box item. So, for them it is critical that you give them an out. You have to give them an area of your site that is full dedicated to the snooty. The snooty zone.

In the snooty zone you will have all of your direct CJ, Amazon, Linkshare links to the items you feature on your site. That way they can click and be shot over to a retailer that they may feel more comfortable buying from.

So the point is, cover your basis. Use BANS for the thrifty shopper looking for a deal. Use your regular affiliate links for your snooty shopper.

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One of the first mistakes I made was overusing their keyword tools. True, their keyword tools provide you with a ton of information, but is it the right information for you to use in a PPC campaign? The problem you will find is that most of their tools do not include action words in them. Words like, “buy”, “discount”, “for sale” or other words the signify the searcher is wanting to purchase. And, that is what I call a budget killer.

For example early on when I first started. I had a site that sold used campers. So, I created a keyword list that had about 200 keywords in it. But, one of those keywords was “used campers”. I launched the campaign around 6am and then went to go play golf for the afternoon. I got home around 2pm and checked my AdWords account. To my excitement I saw that I had over 200 clicks, but it cost me about $50. This PPC traffic caused my EPN clicks to exceed 900 for that day. Surely out of 900 clicks someone would have to buy something?

Wrong, zero sales the next day, the day after that and the day after that. All that PPC traffic did nothing for my earnings. Why? Simple. It’s not targeted. Chances are all those people were just mining for research, not buying.

So, now I’m a ton smarter when it comes to PPC. With all of my campaigns I include an action word. Since making this change and eliminating generalized keywords, I seen an increase in my PPC clicks go from 1% to 15%, my quality scores have gone way up, minimum bids have gone way down. But, most importantly I’ve seen more conversions on a much lower PPC budget.

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Perfect example. Earlier this summer, I planted about $300 worth of summer flowers and new shrubs in the flower bed out front of my house. Granted I’m in Texas, so it gets really hot. Flowers can not make it alone here in the Texas heat. I have two options. I can either let the flowers die and give up my investment. Or, I can water those flowers and put a little daily effort in to see them live and be able to enjoy the beauty all summer long.

And there we have it. Someone e-mailed me for help several weeks back. I spent about 4 hours over the phone helping this person get their store up and running. Literally two days later, I get a notification from ClickBank that this person has requested a refund on their BANS store. They quit, after tow days they quit. Why? Because they were looking at BANS like it was a store and not a business. They were looking at BANS like it were some automated system that just deposits money into their bank account.

BANS is not that. It’s a business tool. A tool that you can grow a successful internet business around. But, it’s all based on you and your effort to help make your business grow.

How It’s Done

One of the most critical steps to any business is contacts. A business needs good contacts to grow and sustain repeating business. I’m kind of old school, so I use an old fashion method of getting my sites to stick to people I meet. And that is with business cards. In or digital world, the art of the business card is quickly becoming lost. Business cards are still very powerful and they do work. I drop them everywhere and give them out to everyone.

When I’m on the driving range or playing golf, I will literally strike up a conversation with a guy and then at the end slip him my business card promoting my golf related BANS business.

IT WORKS. Word of mouth and the old school method of building relationships offline still work.

Cheapest Way Possible

I’m pretty cheap and I don’t like to spend money. So, how do you get business cards without breaking the bank? Simple, VistaPrint offers FREE business cards. You just pay the shipping and handling. I’ve use this service and the quality is just awesome, especially for something free. You get 250 for free. I’m not sure how long they will continue to offer these free business cards, but they have been doing it for years. So, it can easily factor into your BANS marketing plans.

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The easiest choice is to toss in the towel and start fresh with a new domain and do things right. Cutt your losses and move on.

The other route is to rebuild and salvage the domain. If this is the route you decide to go, be prepared to make a ton of effort.

The first thing you will need to do is get Google’s trust back. The only way you can do this is by creating a site that people will actually get something out of. Meaning heavy on content, low on ads & revenue. Personally, I’m not putting any ads on my sites that I am rebuilding.

The best way to reclaim your site is to first move your BANS store into a subdirectory called store.

Then, install Wordpress in the root of your site. Then, create a post right after you install it. Make sure the post is keyword optimized and not spammy.

From there, your whole life is about content. Every single day you will need to create a new piece of content.

And that is game number 1 that you can play while in the Google Sandbox. It’s called the content game.

I personally use http://developers.evrsoft.com/seotool/ to help me with my content writing. It’s an SEO tool that help you get your keyword density right. Last tip, your blog posts will need to be 300-450 words long.

Told you this was going to be an investment of time & effort. Good Luck!

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