As you all know from my previous posts I’ve been experimenting with BANS (Build a Niche Store) recently. I must admit it’s very addictive! So don’t get into it if you haven’t got the time to spend.
This is a post to let you know how it’s going and to tell you if I’m rich yet!
I have put together 6 stores so far and am working on a 7th. I’m learning all the time and realise that 2 of the stores are in a much too narrow niche. All the advice on the forum is to narrow your niche down so that you can target long-tailed key words but I believe they emphasise this too much and influence people to narrow down too much. My first store Lawn Mower Auctions is doing the best in terms of hits and is a fairly broad niche. After reading all the advice I started narrower niche stores which aren’t doing so well, so my advice is not too narrow down too much. You can target long-tailed key words on each page of your store, which BANS is really set up to optimise. I also run all my pages through Instant Position to check that they are 100% optimised for my keywords.
Clearly the way to make money with BANS is to have multiple stores each bringing in a small amount. I’m experimenting with using a .info domain name which is cheaper and is on offer at Go Daddy right now for $2.99 for 1 year registration. I’ve tried to find out if the search engines are influenced by the type of domain and so far the information I’ve found is that it doesn’t make any difference. If you have any more information on this could you share it with us? At this low price I wouldn’t mind putting up a lot of stores, seeing which ones work and dumping the others after the year’s registration expires.
I’m also adding the stores to directories and am considering paying for someone to add my stores to multiple directories. It’s very time consuming doing it myself!
So far I’m making enough to cover my costs but hopefully that will increase. Already my first store has a PR of 1 after 1 month. I also realise that lawn mowers are a very seasonal commodity and the peak of searches is in April so hopefully I’ll see an increase in hits on that site soon. ( Checked with Google Trends)
Hope this is helpful to any fellow BANS users or anyone thinking of becoming one!
Table of contents for Bans Progress Reports
- BANS - My Progress Report
- BANS - My Progress Report No 2
i think this is a great tool
provided you have found the right niche which is the hard stuff
Very good info. I once had one of my web pages up to a 4, but it was my only site and it took constant attention. It has since dropped to a 2 because I just didn’t have the time to keep it up.