Yeah, for some of you BANS owners, it’s been a pretty tough last few months.

I’m knocking on wood here. If you remember right from my initial Build A Niche Store Review, my goal was to build 100 BANS sites. Now I’m thanking my lucky stars that I have AMADD (Affiliate Marketing Attention Deficit Disorder) and only made it to 30 sites before I lost focus and went off doing something else. So far none of my sites have been touched by either Google or eBay. I’ll give you my theories on why that is on down the page.

A Few Theories Why Google Is De-Indexing BANS sites.

I’ve been following a lot of the chatter on forums about this subject as well as receiving a lot of email. This is what I’ve figured out to this point. No one has 100% concrete proof why Google is de-indexing BANS sites. There are a few theories floating around.

1. The BANS program was being used by a lot of spammers. Many of these guys/gals were throwing up huge numbers of BANS sites on .info domains. They never bothered to change anything with the programs, their only concern was to get as many BANS sites up as they could, as cheaply as they could. This left a huge footprint for Google to follow.
2. Most of these same people never bothered to put any content on their sites. They were simply ebay sites with ebay auctions on them. This would be what Google calls a “thin affiliate” site. And we know what Google does with thin affiliate sites.
3. In order for Google to get all the spammy BANS sites, it had to take some legitimate sites along with them. It’s the shotgun approach. Use a huge pattern to make sure you get all of them. Try and limit the casualties but go forward knowing some innocent victims will be in the pattern.

My Theory On Why Google Hasn’t De-Indexed All BANS Sites

Even as far back as when I bought the Build A Niche Store program, there was talk about Google finding the footprint of all the standard BANS templates and possibly penalizing them. It seems this bird has come home to roost. From the start, here is what I did to try and make my BANS sites unique from all the other cookie cutter BANS sites.

• I changed up the CSS a little bit on every site. I made sections like the header and content fields larger and smaller.
• I changed the colors on every site.
• I changed the size of the headers on every site and used graphic headers.
• I DID NOT go out and start sending hundreds of backlinks to my sites. I built them up over time using blog carnivals, article submissions, reciprocal linking and adding one way permanent links.
• I added content to nearly every page plus I used a lot of graphics.
• I never put eBay auctions on my main page. I put content on the index page to make it look as much like a informative content site as I could. Just look at how many BANS sites have nothing more than auctions on their front page.
• On many of the domains that hosted my BANS sites, I added blogs, article directories and forums to many. (mostly just blogs that supported the main domain)
• I never put more than 2 BANS sites on one hosting account plus I paid extra for all sites to have a dedicated IP’s. I’ve read stories of people hosting all their BANS sites with one hosting company. Wow, I can’t fathom that idea. I’m just too paranoid I suppose.
• I only used dot com domains. Of course, these last two items is what I do for nearly all of my affiliate sites, not just for BANS. I want to make it as hard as possible for Google or any other search engine to spy on my websites.

Now, I’m not saying if you do these things that Google will not index your site. These are the things I did to every BANS site I had. I did these things from day one and as I said above, knock on wood, my sites haven’t been touched. In fact, many are still climbing the SERPS.

Is the Build A Niche Store Still Worth Buying?

I’ve had a few emails asking that question. Honestly, I’d say yes it is. But only if you intend to build sites that have a lot of content and you make them unique. If you’re plan is to buy it and throw up a bunch of BANS sites without adding any value to them, I think you’d be wasting your money. Google is on to you.

Alternatives to The Build A Niche Store program

If you’ve been reading this blog for more than a week or so, you know I’m impressed with the PHPBay plugin for WordPress. As I stated in my post Advanced Build A Niche Store Strategies, I’ve been using PHPBayand WordPress to make blogs and stores with eBay auctions. It seems every week that my PHPBay/WordPress stores outproduce my Build A Niche Store sites. Hey, it’s no secret that Google is crazy in love with WordPress blogs. Why not take advantage of that? Plus, to be honest, a WordPress blog and PHPBay combination site just looks much better than 99% of the BANS sites out there, mine included. (hey, maybe Google hates ugly sites?)

Whatever the real reason that Google is de-indexing or penalizing BANS sites, owners using this program need to proceed with caution. If you continue to make sites with BANS, then do everything in your power to make them unique and stand away from the crowd.

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I’ve been experimenting for a few months on my Build A Niche Stores to see what would increase traffic and rankings. Other than building links to the BANS store. Don’t get me wrong, without links, your BANS store is dead in the water.

What I wanted was a way to increase my SERPS rankings, traffic and get more pages indexed in Google. I tried several things, but this is what I’ve come up with so far it is working like gangbusters.

Increasing Your Build A Niche Store Rankings and Traffic

What I started to do with my Build A Niche Store sites is add a WordPress blog to them. I choose a main keyword that I’ve been targeting the search engines with then I add a sub-domain onto my site. Then I install WordPress.

For example, let’s say you have a BANS site about Watches. Let’s say your site name is mybanswatchsite.com. When you add a sub-domain, it would look something like this: watchblog.mybanswatchsite.com.

Now, you also have another keyword in your domain name!

There are many advantages to adding a sub-domain to your Build A Niche Store site. Here are just a few.

1. Increased rankings. Google loves blogs, especially WordPress blogs. Expect your post to get indexed faster with a blog.
2. Easier Content Creation. What I started doing was featuring some products from my BANS site on my blog. I then link from my blog back to the page on my main BANS site where they find many of the products for sale. Let’s say you had a post about fake Rolex watches. You’d create the post on your WordPress blog then link back to the category on your Build A Niche Store site that had all the auctions for fake Rolex watches. Now you’ve also created one way links with anchor text AND directed visitors to a place where they can by fake Rolex watches.
3. Easy link building. Blogs just naturally attract backlinks if the content is anywhere near informative. But the real advantage of having a blog as a sub-domain is that you can create one way anchor text links from the blog back to your BANS site. This will give your BANS site a boost in the Google SERPS.
4. More income streams. With WordPress, you can add a few plugins and actually increase the income your Build A Niche Store is capable of making. For example, on my Build A Niche Store blogs, I use the PopShops WordPress plugin and PHPBay plugin. I have several BANS sites where the sub-domain actually makes more than the main site. Let’s go back to your Watch blog. With PopShops plugin, you can feature new Watches from merchants on any affiliate network where you’re a member. (don’t forget to sign up with the merchant first!) Then at the end of the post, you can add ebay auctions from PHPBay. Your giving your customer many ways to buy from you and little reason to click off of your website!

Think this out. With WordPress as a blog on your Build A Niche Store sub-domain, you can do many, many things that will enhance your main site. Don’t be surprised to see your sub-domain actually make more than your main site. The sites I have PHPBay on are really outpacing my Build A Niche Store only sites.

What do I blog about on my Build A Niche Store Blog?

Anything I want!

Seriously, I will do product reviews, special deals from merchants, hot auctions on eBay, coupons and I even search article directories about articles relevant to the content on my BANS site. At the end of the article, I put the PHPBay auction in and sometimes even some new products with PopShops. This is all good stuff! 

PopShops is also adding a nice stream of income for those Customers who come to my sites but want to buy something new rather than play the eBay game.

Currently I’m playing with 3 other plugins to see if they can help my Build A Niche Store or not. I’ll keep you updated on those results!

Tools Used In This Strategy

• Build A Niche Store Program
• PHPBay WordPress Plugin
• PopShops WordPress Plugin

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For those who’ve followed my blog for any length of time, you’ll remember that my Mother passed away in Dec. Since that time I’ve been trying to get her home and other affairs in order, which means a 500+ mile one way trip every time I went up there. I’ve been there more than here the last few months. I thought I had just about got everything in order too.

It Rains On the Just As Well As The Unjust..Or So They Say!

I had been home only a few days when I got a call early one morning from her next door neighbor. They had received torrential rains in Oklahoma over a few days time and my Mom’s home had flooded!

Geez! Throw me a bone already!

She lives on a creek, but this home had only flooded once before, in 1980! Since that time they had made improvements to the low water bridge upstream and to the creek itself. Flooding wasn’t a real concern since the creek rarely got out of its banks and even when it did, it receded quickly.

The bad thing was, most of her stuff I had organized and sit on the floor in boxes and bags. Needless to say, all that work was for naught because much of it was now ruined! I was just sick!

So, I jump in my Truck for another trip North. It took a few weeks, but I managed to get all the wet stuff out, including carpet and padding plus bad drywall. I fixed what I could and now I’m back home.

I guess we were lucky in one regard. The flood waters only stayed up a few hours. If it had stayed for days, it would have been a lot worse!

Hopefully, this time I’m home for more than a few days.

Here’s a little picture for you. The water was already down when I arrived but there was still a mess to clean up!

Catching Up on Emails – Please Be Patient

Thanks to everyone sending emails. I appreciate them.

For those of you who bought the Build A Niche Store Program through my site, and there have been many, first of all, THANK YOU, I APPRECIATE IT VERY MUCH! Second, you should have your Free Special Report by now. If you’ve bought BANS through this site and have not received your Free Special Report, please resend the information and I’ll make sure you get it.

I’m going to try and get back to regular posting. All the drive time I’ve had between here and Oklahoma gave me plenty of time to think about affiliate marketing and ideas for Post. Some I wrote down while I was driving…yeah, I know…not a good idea…lol

Since I wasn’t home to manage my offline business first hand, I was worried about my income. Thankfully my Wife has a separate job and my employees are pretty good people. So I only have one mountain of papers on my desk instead of a dozen!

What really made me feel good was the income that I knew would keep coming in from my Internet work. Day in, day out, the Internet will work for you if you set it up right. There’s no way my Internet income comes close to matching what I make in my offline business, but I knew if my employees ran off and I didn’t have a lick of business, I’d still receive checks from my Affiliate Marketing efforts. This is why I believe the Affiliate Marketing is sooo sweet! And why I believe it’s worth all the time and effort I put into it.

The best income in my opinion is passive income. Income that keeps coming in whether your on vacation, fishing, goofing off or in a hospital. Trust me when I say there’s is a certain kind of Peace you feel knowing that money will be deposited into your PayPal account or that a check arrive in the mail whether or not you’re “at work”.

Okay, so its now back to the grind of affiliate marketing and blogging…sheesh…I can already feel the sweat beads popping out on my forehead

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Update to the Update! Currently I can not recommend the Build A Niche Store program to my readers. Here’s why. Google has been deindexing many BANS sites, mine included. They apparently do not like the fact that this is a script that auto generates web pages with affiliate links on them (the ebay ads). However, Yahoo and Bing seem to still be ranking these sites and I’m still making money with them, but not near as much as I was when they were indexed in the top pages of Google.

If you’re looking for a legitimate way to create an eBay store where you can sell real products, I recommend Pro Stores. Currently they’re giving a free month trial for you to try it out. Use this link for your free trial – One Month Free Trial! ProStores – an eBay Company

Since I wrote the Build A Niche Store Review, I’ve had quite a few emails asking me to give everyone an update on how my Build A Niche Store‘s are doing, what techniques are working, which one’s aren’t, etc. I can say that the Build A Niche Store is still working for me, but a few of my sites have cooled off.

Currently I have 19 Build A Niche Store sites. These sites range from 11 pages up to over 40 pages. It all depends on the niche and how many categories ebay has for them.

Some of the first stores I built have dropped a little in the rankings as I’ve slowed down adding new content to them during December and January.

Last month my best performing Build A Niche Store did over $150 in commissions while the least performing store did just over $15. Sadly, this poor performer was a store I thought would be a great niche, but as it turns out, it’s a very competitive craft niche. This means I’m going to have to work very hard at building quality backlinks to this store to get it boosted in the rankings.

I didn’t follow my own advice when choosing this niche. It just “came to me” one night and I quickly looked up how many searches were being done for this particular niche and thought “Geez, this would make a great Build A Niche Store site.” The problem is, had I researched it a little further I would have found that the Niche has a lot of freebie websites out there giving away many of the same craft products I’m trying to sell on my BANS site plus many of these sites were built back in the late 90′s and early 2000′s by hobby Webmasters. This means they have their age working for them not to mention hundreds of old backlinks pointing toward them. DO YOUR RESEARCH!

On a very happy note, a few nights ago one of my sites turned in a $84 commission on one sale! That’s the best commission I’ve ever received from any of my Build A Niche Store sites.

Ways I’m Promoting My Build A Niche Store Sites

I’m promoting my Build A Niche Store sites just like I have any other website that I’ve owned or worked on. I’m building links slowly so they look natural. I’m using all of the Social Networking sites plus participating in forums that relate to the BANS sites I have.

One of the most effective techniques that I’ve used is buying advertising on other sites. You know the old adage of “It takes money to make money?” Well, I’m here to tell you that it works for BANS sites just as well. I’ve bought banner ads on several forums and other sites relevant to several of my Build A Niche Store sites.

I haven’t done much promoting through PPC. Most of the paid traffic has come through advertising on other sites.

Article Marketing is by far and away my best FREE* advertising to date. If you’re not using a service like Article Marketer to submit your articles to hundreds of places on the Internet, then you’re leaving a lot of traffic on the table.

It’s so damn funny to hear “Guru’s” say article marketing is dead and does not work any longer. Good for them, it means that there’s a tad bit less competition out there! Meanwhile my BANS sites are gaining backlinks and traffic!

*I say “FREE” because you can submit your articles to many directories manually for free. I prefer to pay a few bucks to Article Marketer and automate the process by sending one article to hundreds of places. You gotta work smart!

I’ve also went to DigitalPoint forums and paid someone to manually submit some of my BANS stores to Internet Directories. This has resulted in some nice backlinks as well. Eventually I’ll have all my stores in the free directories then I’ll start focusing on using some paid directories for more authority backlinks.

As I stated above, some of the Social Networking sites are sending good traffic to my sites. You’ll be surprised at how many old ladies use StumbleUpon!

Future Plans For My Build A Niche Store’s

Honestly I believe that I’m building stores faster than I can promote them properly. That’s okay because I can always come back and work on them later. There’s no problem in letting these stores sit and age for a while.

Speaking of aging, I’ve began buying expired domains and just uploading a BANS site to them, changing the colors and adding a header graphic and letting them sit until I can get back to promoting them and SEO’ing the pages. This is working damn good actually! If you have any domains parked somewhere, bring them out of moth balls and add a BANS site to them.

What Hasn’t Worked So Well On My BANS Sites

Unfortunately, Adsense has really sucked on these sites. While some have spikes in CTR, most of the CTR’s are lower than 3%. When your CTR starts averaging less than 3%, it can pull down all your Adsense sites due to Smart Pricing.

I’ve actually started pulling Adsense off of many of my Build A Niche Store sites. Now I do have to tell you that all my Adsense ads are at the lower left sidebar. This is a poor place to put Adsense on any site, so I’m not blaming Adsense entirely.

The reason that they are there is because I also use either affiliate programs and/or Clickbank products on the right side. These have been a big boost to the overall income of my BANS sites. They pay a helluva lot more than Adsense. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say that Adsense ads on a BANS site is a poor move.

If you just have to have some type of pay per click advertising, check out these Adsense alternatives.

Build A Niche Store Project Summary

Okay, while most of my sites aren’t doing as well as I hoped (don’t we all have high hopes for our websites?), at the end of the day they’re still making money. They’re paying for their domains and hosting and some are doing much, much better than that. I have a few niche’s that aren’t paying off as I’d hoped. Having said that, I have some small Niches I thought would be ugly ducklings turn out to be beautiful cash generating Princesses!

Some of the first stores I built will be coming out of the Sandbox in the next month or so. So be watching for an update as my older sites start kicking SERP tail.

Also, I’ve had some really nice surprises with the PHPBay wordpress plugin. I’ll give you an update on that in the next day or so.

Don’t Forget The Special Report Bonus

The Special Report “How To Maximize Profits With Ebay Affiliate Programs” is still being offered when buying your BANS program through this site. Read my Build A Niche Store Review for the details. It has many more techniques and tactics for building profitable BANS sites.

If you haven’t looked over the features of the Build A Niche Store program, click here to see them now.

Build A Niche Store – Update

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UPDATE: I can no longer recommend the Build A Niche Store Program now that Google has DeIndexed many BANS Sites. Most of mine were also deindexed. It seems the problem lies with Google not liking the fact that the BANS program is a script that makes websites by auto generating web pages with affiliate links on them.

However, all of my BANS sites are still ranked in Yahoo and Bing.

If you’re looking for a legitimate way to create eBay stores, then I’d recommend you take a look at ProStores. They’re currently offering a one month free trial for you to try them out. Here’s a link to the free trial >>>>> One Month Free Trial! ProStores – an eBay Company

About 2 months ago I bought two programs that promised to help anyone make money with the ebay affiliate program. I’m skeptical about any script or program that promises quick and easy profits. I’ll bet you are too. So when I came across these programs, I spent a good deal of time researching both of them before plopping my hard earned money down.

Ebay Affiliate Program – The Good, Bad & Ugly

I’ve used the ebay affiliate program in the past to make some decent money.  The benefit of using ebay is that the content changes on a regular basis plus ebay pays a high percentage of profit back to its affiliates.

The downside in the past is that you had to stay on top of the code and make sure it showed relevant auctions. On some days I’d check one of my websites where I was using the ebay affiliate program and it was spot on. Other days, my site was showing auctions for everything from lingerie to collectible dolls from Japan! (the site is an industrial tool site)

When the ads were showing relevant auctions, I’d make pretty good money. When they weren’t, which was often, I wouldn’t make a penny.

I hoped that AuctionAds would change this, but I’ve had the same problem with AuctionAds as I did getting the code directly from ebay.

Eventually I got tired of fighting with the code and quirky nature of the ebay affiliate program and stopped using it. I’ve also removed all AuctionAds from my sites as well.

Create An Ebay Affiliate Site In Minutes

I kept hearing about a program, or script, called BANS on the DigitalPoint Forums. It was getting rave reviews from those who had used it. I was still skeptical because I know some of the Forum members would stretch the truth to make a sale.

So I researched this program. It’s called Build A Niche Store or BANS for short.

It’s a PHP script that creates webpages that have specific ebay auctions on them. It can even create normal HTML pages within your site.

What BANS does is create an entire website. It uses several templates that come with the program. One of the features of this script is that you can use it with your own templates by inserting a little PHP code. (which the user manual describes in detail)

I found BANS a lot easier to set up than I had originally thought it would be. I’m not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination, so I was a little worried. However all the reviews I’d read stated the program was simple to set up and use.

And it was.

My first site took me about 30 minutes to get installed and set up the basic functions. My installation time for new sites has now been reduced to 10 to 15 minutes per site since I’ve became familiar with the script.

The templates that come with the script are customizable. You can choose the color and layout. If you now the basics of CSS, you can change quite a bit on the templates. The possibilities are nearly endless!

Getting Started With the Build A Niche Store Program

Before I go any further, I will tell you that you’ll need a CJ PID number (which you get when you joing CJ) and be approved by Ebay. These are simple to obtain, so I’ll not spend time on them.

Once you have the site installed and live, you can then begin to customize each page. BANS works off ebay category numbers. Once you’ve picked a main category, the script will even show sub-categories off of the main one if you want it to.

If the Category you choose is a big one, you could have literally hundreds of pages created within minutes.

I first used BANS on a site of mine that is 3 years old. I have never been able to nail down the niche for this site because I picked too broad of a subject when I first built the site. I’ve been wanting to make a change to the site, so once I had the BANS program, I wiped out the site and started fresh.

Within 30 minutes I had a basic BANS site up and running. Over the next several days, I created a custom logo and customized my Auction pages (which is important if you want you pages SEO’d, which in itself is important if you want free organic traffic from the search engines!)

Since this site was several years old and ranked fairly good for several search terms, I had early traffic. Not a whole lot, but enough that the site started making money within 3 days.

I wish I could say that about every site I built!

I then proceeded to make another site with a new domain. I was curious to see how long it would be before my first sale with a spanking new domain.

Again, I had BANS installed on the new domain within 30 minutes. In about two days, I had a hot new content rich website with fresh graphics ready to go.

I had the site indexed in Google within 4 days.

Then, the first sale happened on the 6th day. Not a huge sale, but a sale none-the-less!

That site is about two months old. I got all of the pages indexed and it’s ranking for some top keywords in its niche. (it’s a small niche so this wasn’t an Earth shattering task)

I’m now making some good change off this website.

More websites followed. (I have 7 BAN sites currently) My goal is to have anywhere from 50 to 100 BANS sites within a year. I’m concentrating on small niches and I’m working on each site making anywhere from $300 to $1000 per month. With the results I’m seeing so far from this program, I should reach that goal fairly easily.

Features Of BANS

One of the things that sold me on BANS is that it’s so customizable. I don’t want my sites to look like everyone else’s. I can also drill down to specific products and choose how many products per page are shown.

Furthermore, all auctions are relevant since they work off of category numbers and not “keywords”.

The other thing I loved is how it created sub-categories automatically. That is a huge, HUGE, time-saver…and money maker!

Other Features of the BANS program include:

• Choose between 1 and 100 products per page
• Up to 3 layouts per page
• Customizable SEARCH feature embedded into your website
• Ability to display or not to display auctions on your front page
• Product content is keyword rich and read easily by search engines
• Ability to add my own content
• Ability to add other affiliate programs to the websites. This allows you to add other affiliate programs to increase your sites profits. Many other BANS owners use Adsense. I used related Affiliate Programs to my websites theme.
• Content is automatically updated 24 hours a day as the auctions change…no need in constantly screwing with code
• Pages that BANS create are URL search engine friendly
• Ability to change the Title, Description and META tags of each page. Helps make your website more focused and unique.
• Member forum where you can find support and many answers to your questions about making money from this program.

If this sounds interesting to you, go visit the BANS website where you can see many Build A Niche Store’s in action.

Be sure to come back tomorrow for Part 2 when I’ll tell you about another program that I’m using on blogs to take advantage of the ebay affiliate program. I’m using this program to monetize traffic to some of my blogs without changing the layout or content of these blogs.

The Below Offer Is No Longer Being Offered – Sorry!

If the BANS program sounds like something you’d like to start using, I’ll help you get it optimized and making money in a short amount of time.

Here’s the deal. Buy the BANS program through this site and I’ll send you a FREE Special Report that I’ve written.

The Special Report is titled “How To Maximize Your Profits With Ebay Affiliate Programs”

This Free Special Report will show you the steps I take to optimize a BANS website including SEO techniques, ie; things I do and DO NOT do during the set up of my BANS site, traffic generation tips and tricks to send a stream targeted traffic to my new sites, monetization methods that have worked for me and just importantly, methods that have bombed plus this Free Special Report will have tools and resources that I use to get all this done and get my sites up and making money in a short amount of time.

I’ll also be show you HOW to find profitable niches for your BANS site. I have a few sites that I thought would be profitable (craft related) because the keyword terms have high searches. However these sites have flopped.

I’ve developed a technique to locate niches that people are actively searching and buying in. Since I learned how to use this technique, I haven’t had any sites flop and many have surprised me at how much they earn. A lot of them are in niches I would never have thought of before!

This special report will outline this technique for you so you can start finding niches people are actively searching for and buying products in.

To get this FREE Special Report, all you do is purchase the BANS program through this site, then use my Contact Form to contact me and let me know your purchase details including your name and email. To Order the BANS Program, click here.

I’ll then send you this Free Special Report to help you get your BANS site up and running and start making money with the ebay affiliate program.

Build A Niche Store

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