BANS From Scratch: Part1

I’m going to start a new little series here at the $1000 affiliate experiment called “BANS from scratch”. I am basically going to take you though the building of a *hopefully* profitable Build a Niche Store site from the start.

This is going to be my second serious build a niche store attempt, inspired by the great success of my first build a niche store project. I have made a couple of other “thrown together” BANS stores, none of which have really even paid for the domain names (but its ok, because the successful one more than makes up for it!).

Lets get started

With this new BANS store I am starting, I will be taking a more planned approach. My First store was just kind of thrown together, and thrived off the existing traffic of another site I had until it started ranking on its own. Now it brings in more money with its own organic traffic! The problem though, is that I never chose an actual keyword(s) to target, it was just kind of “lets put this up and see what happens”. Luckily it worked out!

So the first thing I need to do on this new BANS store is to laser target a keyword I want to rank #1 for in Google. This sounds hard to do, but I have recently read a great article over at Court’s Internet Marking School about “Keyword snipping”. The idea behind keyword sniping is to choose a single keyword, and build an entire site around it. This is very well suited to BANS because you can make a new store in very little time! The keyword should be in your domain name, in your navigation links, in your H1 tags, in the footer, etc etc. Courtney has been able to rank #1 for some pretty good keywords! Read about keyword sniping here. Thanks to Tevin over at bankruptcytomillionaire.com for referring me to that article!

What Niche to Pick?

This is actually my first attempt niche research, I’ve never really done it before. But anyway, here goes!

BANS appears to work best in two ways:

• Selling big dollar items ($500+)
• Selling to people who aren’t tech savvy.

The first one is pretty self explanatory, high dollar items generate bigger commission, simple. The second one is a little more subtle. Anyone who runs a BANS store might know that a good portion of your profit doesn’t come from individual sales, it comes from the “new signup” bonus. Whenever someone signs up for eBay and buys/wins an auction through your affiliate link, you get a cool $25.00. So targeting people who aren’t as familiar with computers gives you a little better chance of getting those new sign ups because they are less likely to have an existing eBay account.

Well, since I have had some success in the automotive niche, I decided I was going to stick with it for now. I have found that people who are really into cars, aren’t quite as computer literate as someone who writes software for a living (I just happen to do both!). This is obviously not always true, but the statistics do sway in that direction.

The first thing I did was head over to pulse.ebay.com to check out what is selling on ebay right now. Pulse lets you see what some of the most searched items are on ebay in each category. I chose “eBay Motors” from the drop down to see what the hot items were.

Well, I am not really sure what a “Rat Rod” is, but apparently they are pretty popular! Im not going to choose that as a niche though. No reason really, it just doesn’t interest me much. Maybe its a good niche for you to try!

“Mustang” and “Camaro”are a little to generic for what I want to do, so we’re going to skip past those. The next two are really interesting. “Salvage” and “Project” are both pretty close to the same thing. Lots of people are interested in project cars and restoring salvage vehicles, this might be a good niche! Lets find out..

Let’s get some keywords

Now that I have an idea of what kind of site I want to set up, I head on over to trusty old freekeywords.wordtracker.com and start some keyword research. Lets try “salvage cars” and see what we get:

177 isn’t bad and would definitely be worth setting up a quick store for. But Courtney says to try and find a keyword with 200 daily searches per day at minimum, so lets try “project cars” and see what we get:

Thats not bad either! There is a little more search activity for “project cars for sale” than there are for “Salvage cars for sale”, so why don’t we try and go for that one? Another great thing to notice is that the keyword is actually “Project cars for sale“, so people are ready to spend some money. This should be a good start.

Tomorrow I’ll take you through the Domain name search and BANS setup, but you can catch a sneak preview at http://www.project-cars-for-sale.com (please keep in mind its not nearly finished yet!

Tags: BANS