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…

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.

Isn’t it ridiculous what some of these Internet marketers will tell you!  The problem is, somehow many people actually believe them.

When I started in Affiliate Marketing I found so many of these claims that if you buy their e-book, you will be making thousands by tomorrow.  Just type “make money online” into a search engine and look at the claims made by the sponsored ads on the right.  The truth of the matter is this; Many of these affiliate marketers make money by selling you products that tell you how to make money, yet they themselves don’t actually make a dime, unless you buy the book! Photoshop is a handy tool, isn’t it!  It can help put a face in a sports car, or in front of a large home that they claim they bought with all their internet earnings.

Now don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of money to be made in affiliate marketing or internet marketing, but it won’t be quite as easy as many claim.

Affiliate marketing is an interesting business that certainly keeps me on my toes, much more than any “real job” has.  With a conventional job, you go into work everyday and you trade your time for some money.  While you’re there, you do what they tell you to do, within a set of guidelines and expectations and then you head home for the evening and do it all over again.  This kind of arrangement is just not for me.

I have a very entrepreneurial mindset in that I would rather make $30k working for myself than $100k working for someone else.  Sure, a steady paycheck might be nice but what do you sell in exchange for the money your employer gives you?  Time with family, friends, helping others…those are much more important than anything else, even driving a nice car or living in a nice home and certainly not worth the trade-off in my opinion.

So What Is The Affiliate Marketing Life Really Like?

Many 12 hour days of sitting in front of the computer where some days, if I calculated my time vs earnings,  I work for $1 per hour…whereas other days, I will earn much more.  Here’s how I spend most days:  I get up early only because I like to, not because I must.  I work  a few hours at Starbucks on my laptop before coming home.  I work for several hours at home then take a break and watch a little TV.  Then it’s supper and then I’ll work on my laptop and watch TV with my wife or occasionally we go out.  It’s not a glamorous life, but I like it.

Am I rich?  NO WAY!  Do I have the potential to earn quite a bit?  YES, but it will take a lot of time, commitment and perseverance.  No one is cracking the whip everyday and making me work.  If I don’t work, I don’t make any money - it’s as simple as that.

Don’t get sucked into ridiculous income claims.  If you desire to make money online, just work hard, keep your head up even when things are not going well and eventually your hard work will pay off.  You will need to be a constant student;  Learn new information or techniques and come up with new ideas that will help your business every single day.  People that make money online are explorers, innovators and are driven to learn and succeed.

Those that are looking for a manual that will tell you exactly what to do to make money online…I suggest you keep your day job!

My BANS progression has been slow and steady and my ideas have evolved over the past 6 months.  At first I was building nice BANS stores, but very thin.

Next step was to add some content pages.  Then content on store pages.

After that I was still making under $300 per month from 22 stores, which was pretty sad.  The next logical step was to add a blog in a directory called ../blog.  This is when sales really started taking off.

Things were going along well, and then comes the EPN expirations which made me re-evaluate my sites.  I looked at the ones with low EPC, or the ones that were in niches that I thought would be good,  but turned out to be terrible.  I shut those stores down and was down to 14 quality stores.

Then came the WP/BANS integration talk and I jumped in.  Since I had BANS on the root directory and the blog in a blog directory, I could not use many of the templates that require Wordpress to be installed on the root.  Soon enough my issue was solved when Soggy, from the BANS forum started offering BANS/WP integrated templates for those that have BANS in the root directory.  For a small investment I now have 14 very nice, quality sites that I am adding content to quite often through the blog.

The result; Clicks are down, sales stayed about the same for now and EPC went up quite a bit.  Traffic is growing slowly.  Now the people that stick around on my sites appear to be less likely to click unless they’re serious about buying.  I suspect this is part of what eBay has been looking for when they talk about “engaged” users, but really…no one knows what they really want!

Really, for me it doesn’t not matter anymore what Ebay thinks.  As per yesterdays post,  I have been terminated by EPN, so I will continue on with my sites, without eBay.

I highly recommend buying templates from Soggy and you can get his WP/BANS templates here.

So now you might be wondering what I’m going to do.  I’m going to keep the 14 BANS/WP integrated sites that I have and start building a business with CJ, Pepperjam and Shareasale using PopShops.  At least I should be able to build a more stable and secure business since Ebay was highly unreliable.

My advice to anyone that is considering purchasing BANS - Go for it, but integrate it with Wordpress and DON’T build a business with Ebay.  Build it with PopShops and merchants that are actually greatful for your business.

Even with the SE’s being less than kind, I have still managed to do pretty well in terms of sales. Over the summer months MSN was bringing in a bulk of the traffic and it helped me to increase 90% month over month, with no cost.

So you might be wondering what it is that I did to get Yahoo to come around and the answer make surprise you. I did nothing! Well, not exactly nothing. I’ve been building my sites for about 6 months now and Yahoo seems to have “flipped a switch” and turned the traffic on. It just showed up one day recently.

I know people constantly harp about Google killing BANS sites and other thin affiliate sites and this may give reason to panic if you earn your income from thin sites. For those that build quality websites with plenty of content, custom design and a good niche, no need to worry. Best case scenario; Google won’t touch your site. Worst case scenario; you get de-listed by G…BUT, there are other search engines out there. As long as your niche isn’t so obscure that it only receives 20 searches per month, then you will be fine with MSN and Yahoo traffic as it provides decent search volumes for many niches.

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.

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.

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.