Random Thoughts

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It’s been a while since I updated you on what’s happening with my niche stores.  This is story with some twists and turns so follow along!

So…after my expiration from the Ebay Partner Network, I needed to quickly find a way to replace the income from EPN.  I was already signed up with Popshops.com and decided to switch all the stores over to other merchants and see how it would go.  Unfortunately this just wasn’t working very well for my niches as Ebay was perhaps the best match.

So what did I do?  I sold my websites! I sold 12 websites and received a fraction of what they were worth because of the uncertainty with EPN.

Then I moved on and signed up for PPC-Coach which was a great move.  There’s so much information there that you will quickly learn about PPC.  The Coach himself is available to help you, but there’s also a forum with MANY people earning some pretty big money and they’re more than willing to help.  I can’t recommend PPC-Coach enough.

So things were going along well with PPC-Coach, I was learning a lot and was making a little bit of money and pretty happy with my decision to join.  Then one evening I was sitting in Starbucks with my wife.  I had my laptop there and she was doing a crossword puzzle when I decided to check my email.  So guess what was in my inbox?  An email from Ebay Partner Network!  So I opened it up and couldn’t believe my eyes.  “Sorry for the delay in answering…”.  It turns out that I have been reinstated by EPN and it was a glitch that got me booted off.

So this was great news.  Back to BANS sites, except one problem.  I didn’t own any BANS sites anymore because I had sold them just days earlier!  It took 1 month for EPN to get back to me and I had really forgotten about EPN and moved on.  So needless to say, the past few days I have been very business building some BANS/Wordpress niche sites.  So far I have 2 high quality sites up, but will be starting one more next week.  I believe that I can get my earnings back up to a respectable level in a short period of time now since I know what works and what does not.  Three websites will be enough for now since I plan to add plenty of content to them.

So, life is interesting…

If you haven’t read my post from last week, I was terminated by EPN for “low quality traffic”.  Who really knows what that means and I’m not exactly going to spend a lot of time figuring it out.  At first I was somewhat devastated by the whole thing, but then I just decided to get over it and move on.

I signed up for Popshops and went to work converting all my BANS stores over to accept Popshops feeds.  With help from Soggy’s blog, this was no problem.  Unfortunately with my niches. Popshops has turned out to be a big disappointment.  I was earning about $40 per day with Ebay and with Popshops…A BIG FAT ZERO!  Not a single conversion on anything from CJ or Shareasale in almost 2 weeks.  With some of my sites getting over 100 uniques per day, zero sales is an issue.  For most of my niches, Ebay was really the best merchant.

So now that I own BANS and can’t put Ebay feeds on it, what do I think of it?  I still think it’s a great product that coupled with an already content rich website or blog, can make you some serious money.  If you have a site where you talk about laptops or cell phones or whatever, that already had LOTS of good content, reviews etc., then BANS is the perfect companion to that site to help you earn some decent money.  Just install it in a subdirectory of your site like /store, and link to it from your blog or website and hopefully you will be successful in getting “engaged traffic”, as EPN calls it.  I have also used BANS to build a simple website for my article writing service so it’s not a total loss and I did earn back much more than my investment so no complaints.

For those looking for a get rich quick website builder where you can throw up 100 sites and make big $$$, BANS won’t work for you!  But for those that plan to build a very large, content rich website, or already have one, BANS is a GREAT way to make some serious money from that traffic.

You know the old phrase “Don’t sweat the details” - Forget that you ever learned that when building your BANS store.  You need to be a detail person and make sure that your website is finished properly.   

First clue to me that a BANS store is not finished is when I see “Your Link Here” or something like that.  These are frequently included in templates that you can download and they’re designed for exactly what they say they are…PUT YOUR LINK THERE!  Find the header file and replace the phrase with something like “Info About Widgets” and make sure your link works.

Another clue that a BANS store is not completed are the words “Store Navigation” or “Site Navigation”.  Every BANS store has these and it’s easy to change them.  These are also terms that are in the header.php file that you can change and it will help with your search engine rankings.  Just go into your BANS control panel, into the template file and search for the words “Store Navigation” and put “Widgets For Sale” or something related to your website in it’s place. 

Build your own store pages – Don’t import the categories from eBay.  Make targeted store pages and use unique meta information on EVERY page. 

Last clue that a site has not been finished is in the general design.  I tend to want to change as much as I can for two reasons.  I don’t want my site to look anything like an out of the box BANS store and I don’t want the search engines to de-list my store as a crappy thin affiliate site.  Go to the CSS file and experiment with changing the colors of the text, backgrounds, borders etc.  Don’t be afraid to use #ffffff, which is white;  People like white space.  If you’re really bad with design, buy a nice looking template.  Search the BANS forum for people making templates or offering design work.

When it comes to marketing, I’m somewhat lucky with building my BANS stores because I do have a bit of background in marketing.  I understand that not everyone has had this experience so it may take a bit of learning to get the hang of the marketing concept.

When you go about building your BANS store, start thinking like you are the customer.  What would you want to see when you land on a website?  What about colors an the overall “feel” of the website?  Does your BANS store have an attractive layout and color scheme?  This may be somewhat subjective, but your bounce rate can help you out when analyzing this.  If you’re bounce rate is 100%, then people get to your website and leave right away.  IF they clicked on an eBay listing, this is great, but if they just hit their back button, that’s not what you want.  Experiment a bit with the design to get your bounce rate to an acceptable level.  For me, my successful stores have a bounce rate of less than 45%, but this could be different for many people.

One thing I have noticed with a lot of BANS stores is that the builders just aren’t thinking in terms of target market.  Who are your customers and what do they want to buy?  For example, if you have a website selling womens shoes, it’s unlikely that a banner promoting software will be all that effective.  A better fit might be a banner promoting makeup or jewelry.

Now for me, I tend not to use banners on my websites as I’ve found that they just don’t convert.  I would rather have someone click on an eBay listing and have a cookie dropped than lose a click to another merchant, but that’s just me.  It might work for you.

It has taken 6 months to get my BANS stores to earn a reasonable amount of money, but it’s finally coming together.  One thing that I figured out a few months ago was that I needed to make it nearly impossible for someone NOT to find my website when they type in my keyword phrases.  For me, I realized early on that because my websites were in highly competitive niches that I wouldn’t likely be able to get these websites in the top ten searches easily.

First you need the basics.  A nicely designed store, content, a blog attached to your store.  Now what?

One effective way to get some traffic to your niche stores is to utilize social bookmarking websites and your blogs RSS feeds as much as you can.  Think about this; When you use Digg to bookmark a website and use a good keyword that doesn’t have a ton of competition, you can get on the first or second page in the search engines within a few days if you’re lucky. 

So why not do that with all the social bookmarking websites?  Eventually you have more than one reference to your website in the top ten positions.  Try Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit just to name a few. 

Next you need to make use of Squidoo and make a lens.  Use your blogs RSS feed on your Squidoo lens for yet another way for people to get to your website (this is assuming that your blog and niche store are integrated).   Don’t forget that your Ezinearticles.com account has an RSS feed as well that you can use on your Squidoo Lens.

Sign up for Zimbio as well and add your blogs.  Then you can ping your blogs and your blog postings will be added to one of their Wikizines.   

Look for other RSS feed websites that let you add your RSS feed.  Soon enough references to your website are everywhere and you have traffic coming from all over.  The best part about doing this is that it actually has made me rank better in the SERP’s because of all the backlinks.   

Now, I don’t want to sound like I know everything because I certainly don’t, but this has worked well for me.

The other day I decided to evaluate what exactly it was that made some of my stores very successful, while others are not.

1. Niche - I started looking at my successful stores and noticed that all of them are in highly competitive niches which are fairly broad.  I know this goes against the whole “micro niche” philosophy, but that’s how it has worked out for me.  Surprisingly, I just closed down any of my stores that were in a tight niche because of poor performance.

2.  Blog -  All of my successful websites have blogs in wordpress, in the /blog directory.  I try to post at least once per week.

3.  Articles - All of my successful stores have articles on Ezinearticles.com and about 4 other article directories.  I am getting backlinks from people publishing my articles on their websites.  I’m not talking about a lot of articles - maybe 5 for each website.

4.  Blog & Forum Comments - For my successful websites, I have commented on blogs and made a few forum posts in niche forums.

5.  Directories - Whether they work or not, I have these sites listed in about 100-200 directories.

6.  Squidoo Lens - These sites have a Squidoo lens.  Not huge lenses, but ones with a few articles.

7.  Social Bookmarks - I have utilized social bookmarking sites like: Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Propeller, Zimbio.

8.  Content - These websites have content.  Not as much as some  niche stores, but most store pages have content, and I’ve written 3 or 4 good quality articles for the content pages.

9.  Listings - All of my sites have listings on the front page, but not many, maybe 2.  They act as more of a teaser and I sort the listings in BANS so that certain hot items at low prices will show up.

10.  Style - My sites don’t look like BANS sites at all.  I change almost every color including borders and backgrounds, and I change how the sidebars look.

That’s about all I have noticed about my stores that are performing well.  I hope this helps in your success with BANS.  If you would like some help, send me an email under my contact section and I will get back to you.