March 12th, 2009 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

Build A Niche Store (BANS) the automated eBay store builder has been coming in for a bit of stick lately, seems that people have tried and failed. It doesn’t take long for the bad publicity to start once people begin to struggle with a method. It’s not my job to stick up for BANS and no doubt there will be plenty of people who will disagree with what I’m about to say but I’m going to say it anyway. BANS is still a great system and it is still possible to make real money using BANS websites. All it takes is some common sense and a little effort. That’s not too much to ask is it?

When I first bought BANS I spent a number of days pushing out niche store after niche store. I spent a small fortune on new domains convinced of the “build and they will come” mentality. Just for the record some did in fact do OK, most of them bummed badly though. My problem was that I was taking the BANS system a little bit too literally, just chuck up a store up and make money. I was missing something very important, as with ANYTHING, and I absolutely do mean ANYTHING online the more effort you put in the more you get out. I was investing no effort at all into my BANS websites so little wonder it was left in the lap of the gods to decide if they made any money or not.

I have a feeling that most of the people who have been having problems recently are people that adopted my early approach. What I learnt is that this is the wrong way of using BANS. Think about it for a minute. BANS is doing little more than using an eBay RSS feed to populate a website. Why do people think that a website comprised 99% of eBay feed is going to rank well and attract traffic? WHY??? Targeted traffic is the key to making money online and with BANS it’s no different. So you’ve bought a really great keyword specific domain name, so what! You need to do more than that, it takes more effort than that.

My BANS websites that are still making money today have a number of things in common and I’d like to share those factors with you:-

1. They all have very relevant unique articles built into the BANS store – This is hugely important.

2. They have all had some link building time spent on them including directory submissions, blog commenting and forum signatures.

3. I have spent the time to customise the category pages, even if it’s just adding 30-40 words at the top of the page.

4. I have made the effort to alter the default templates that come with BANS enough to make the store look unique.

5. I was prepared to make them look like quality websites by adding pages like a privacy policy, terms and contact details.

In short I have taken the time to build a proper website around the Build A Niche Store system. Over 80% of my traffic lands on one of my unique articles (articles written via Text Broker at an average cost of around $8 an article!). By taking the time to customise the category pages (and having them deep linked from within my articles) I find them appearing in Google’s search results as well, something that never seems to happen when you just dump a BANS site on the web. It’s not even like you need huge traffic when using BANS, it’s possible to make money with only 20 visitors a day in some niches. If you take the time to provide a unique quality website then of course it can pay very well.

BANS is still one of my recommended ways of making money online but it doesn’t suite everybody. You need to take action and put some effort in for it to work.

Anybody else have any experiences good or bad with using BANS?

Related Posts

Paul B