Tweaking your Template

It may seem fairly trivial when you think about tweaking your BANS template, but there are some things you can do to help with S.E.O. I also personally feel its important to spend a good amount of time tweaking and customizing your BANS template, if for nothing more than looking unique. Browsing the BANS member forums, I have seen store after store with the same old boring default white/gray template with a simple header graphic.

Lets start with a simple example by comparing two of my very own BANS stores. One of which is fairly successful, the other which was a complete flop. I won’t even tell you which one is the more successful store because if you can’t see it, I think you need to check your pulse.

• BANS Store #1
• BANS Store #2

So what do you think, which one is more successful? If you said number two, put the defibrillator machine away, because you’re right. It doesn’t take a rocket scientest to see that there was simply more time and effort put into the second store than the first, and the hard work as paid off pretty well. While I’m not going to retire on the $150/month I get from the store, its that much more money I have to support my growing PPC addiction, but thats besides the point.

Choosing the Right Template

BANS comes pre-loaded with three blank slate templates that you can use. They come in three different categories, with each category having three layout options. The layout options consist of “left”, “right” and “both”, which describes the location of the navigation sidebar. You might guess that the “left” layout puts it on the left, the “right layout puts it on the right, and the “both” layout puts a sidebar on both sides of the page.

I can’t say there is any real advantage to using any of these template styles over any other, its really just a matter of personal preference. Depending on your Niche, and how you plan to setup the site, you might want to have navigation bars on both sides to maximize ad real estate. I personally like the “right” aligned template for some reason. Whichever you choose, Im sure it will work great.

DISCLAIMER: I in no way claim to be an expert on web design. While I did do it for a living at one point, I never really considered myself good at the actual design part (i was better at coding!).

Getting Head…er

The header image at the top of your BANS store is going to be the first thing your visitors see, so make sure you make a good first impression. While this probably isn’t going to have a huge impact on your stores success, anything you can do to provide a sense of professionalism will help with conversions.

Getting images is a lot easier than you might think. For a while I used to try and either create my own images, or find a royalty free stock photo site. Anyone who is still doing this, however, is simply wasting time. Did you know you have the largest gallery of stock images on the internet available for FREE? Thats right, its a little site called Flickr, you may have heard about it?

What you may or may not know, however, is how to search for copyright free images that you can use and modify to your hearts content. Its pretty simple really, just head on over to www.flickr.com and click on the advanced search link.

This will bring you to the following page:

Enter some keywords for the type of image you want to search for. On the BANS site that I am working on, Project Cars For Sale, I did a search for something like “junk car”. The most important thing to look for is at the very bottom of the page, in the “Creative Commons” section. Make sure you check all three boxes. Any images that you find using this filter should be 100% legal to use and modify.

In Living Color

I don’t have a whole lot to say about color choices because I’m really not great at choosing color schemes myself. If you are as bad as me with color, try an automatic color scheme generator to help you out. It will generate colors that complement each other nicely. The way I chose the colors for my BANS store was by just using the color picker tool in the GIMP on different parts of my header image.

Ess E Ooooh!

This is obviously the most important part of modifying your BANS template. SEO should be on the top of your list for every decision you make. Luckily for you, the BANS developers have really done a great job of making BANS as SEO friendly as possible, right out of the box, but there are still some thing you need to think about.

H1 Tags

I am personally using a technique called “Keyword Sniping” with my BANS store. In short, the idea behind keyword sniping is to build an entire store around a single keyword. The keyword should be in the domain, titles, h1 tags, internal linking anchor text and more. One important thing to have on every page of your site if you are keyword sniping is a keyword rich H1 tag. Luckily, BANS lets you do this almost automatically. Here is how:

When you build a BANS store, you will notice that the name of the store is superimposed on top of your header image, as you can see in the example below:

This text is on every page of your BANS store, and is conveniently enough wrapped in an H1 tag for you. All you have to do is set it in the admin section, which is easy. To do so, just click on “setup” on the left hand side of the admin section, and enter your target keyword into the field labled “site name”

not only will this put your keyword in an H1 tag on every page, but it will also put an internal link to your homepage in the footer, with your keyword as the anchor text, sweet!

H2 Tags

H2 tags can also help in your SEO efforts if you put your keyword in them, and their are a couple of places you can change them in BANS. The first option is to simply use H2 tags in your content, but since this article isn’t about content, im not going to touch on that right now. Another place where H2 tags in BANS exist is in the navigation sidebar. The default headings which read “Site Navigation”, “Store Navigation” and “Sponsored Links” are all H2 tags, and you can change them. Unfortunately its not as easy to change these H2 tags as it is the main H1 tag, but its not all that hard.

To change the text, click on the “template” link on the left hand side of the BANS admin area. This will show you which of the 9 templates you are currently using, and provide you a link to edit each of the main files (header.php, footer.php,styles.css).

To edit the H2 tags in your navigation sidebar, click on the link that says “header.php”, and it will bring you to a text editor allowing you to edit the actual header.php file.

Note: Make sure header.php has write access on your server

Even if you arn’t familiar with HTML, you should be able to pull next part off. Look through the header.php file and locate the text that reads “Site navigation” and “Store Navigation”. Simple change one or both of these to a keyword rich title and click “update header”. Done.

Final Remarks

One last SEO effort that I personally tried to make template wise on this store was to make my navigation links as keyword rich as possible. I gave my nav links anchor text like “Project cars for sale”, “Project Trucks For Sale”, “Project Motorcycles for Sale” and things like that.

Editing your BANS template can be as simple, or as complicated as you want to make it, but just keep in mind that people like to feel like they are looking at a professional site. Try and spend at least a little bit of time making your BANS look different from all the others out there. If you really want to stand out, you could also make a complete BANS template from scratch, but I think that would be like re-inventing the wheel unless you had a good reason to do so.

A couple days late, but here is the second part to my BANS From Scratch Series.

Now that we have done a little bit of niche and keyword research, we (and by “we” I mean “I”) have a good idea of what we’re going to do for this brand spanky new BANS site. If you don’t feel like reading the last post, basically we used pulse.ebay.com in combination with freekeywords.wordtracker.com to find both our target niche and our target keyword. I made the word “keyword” bold, because I want to point that I am taking an approach known as “Keyword Sniping” to get this campaign ranked #1 for “Project cars for sale” (look at that, link building already!), it should prove to be interesting.

Playing the Domain Name Game

Ok, I admit it, I got really lucky with this domain name. www.project-cars-for-sale.com was as available as a fat kid on prom night, so I scooped it up. Chances are, your not going to find a domain name with your exact keyword available, so what do you do? Get as close as possible of course, just make sure you don’t make the mistake I did and register something generic like www.online-dating-blogger.com. You are going to want a laser targeted domain name if you are going to rank #1 in Google for your keyword. If your niche was “Tuxedos for fat kids”, dont register the domain name www.prom-tuxedos.com and use a subdomain or subfolder named “fat-kids”, just try and get the real deal.

Your domain name is going to play a huge role here, and could even mean the difference between success and failure with your store, so spend some time on this and try as many variations of your keyword as possible, like www.projectcarsforsale.com, or www.project-cars-forsale.com, or www.p-r-o-j-e-c…..ok, maybe thats a little overkill, but you get the idea.

Getting your BANS store setup

I am not going to take you through the installation of BANS itself, because that would be way outside the scope of this article, and there are plenty of resources available with the information already nicely written up with screen shots and such. What I am going to do, however, is take you through my thought process on setting up things like navigation, colors, SEO, etc.

Navigation

Before you even think about playing with things like colors and images, your first priority when you setup your BANS store should be to figure out what kind of navigation setup you want to have. If you think throwing up a BANS store with a high level ebay category and auto generated sub categories is going to bring you success, you might as well throw in the towel now. The whole idea behind BANS is to “Build a Niche Store”, and that means drilling down as tight as you can (within reason). Let’s take a look at the two different ways I could setup my Project Cars BANS site:

1. I could enter in category “6001″(thats the “cars and trucks for sale” category) as my high level category and let the BANS software generate about 14,978 sub categories for every freaking make and model of car ever produced on the face of the earth. Tell BANS to use “Project” as a keyword, and be on with my life.
2. I could build a custom store by still specifying category “6001″, but instead of having 14,978 sub categories, I could create my own 5-10 targeted categories. I could also specify a search filter that reads something like “(project,restore,needs work) truck” in order to get a “project trucks for sale” page.

I think I’ll go with option number 2, what do you think?

But how do I narrow all those ebay categories down into 5-10? Well lets just go through a real quick brainstorming session here. Aside from cars, people like to work on other kinds of automotive projects. There is a big difference between a restoration project car, a drag racing (or any kind of racing) project car, an import project car, a project truck, or even a project motorcycle. This is where building a store around something you are passionate about really comes in handy. Because I’ve been so involved in “project cars” myself, I really have a feel for what people might be looking for when they enter “project cars for sale” into Google.

Ok, I got the idea, how do I do that?

If there was a difficult part to setting up a BANS store, this would probably be it. Getting your store pages to display exactly the items you want is almost an art, and is an ever changing process. As not to drag this post out to long, I’ll take you through the process of how I set up my “Project Trucks for Sale” page. If you want to do something like this, I would highly recommend you brush up on your advanced ebay query knowledge. This can REALLY help you out with BANS.

The first thing you will want to do aside from the normal setup options, is to tell BANS you are building a “Custom store”. You can do this from the BANS admin panel, under the “setup” link by entering in the number “2″ into the category # box. Scroll down to the bottom and click “setup store” to save your changes.(click to enlarge)

If you wanted to let BANS generate a crap load of sub categories autotragicly, you could click on the link that says “build a custom store” and enter in as many ebay category numbers as you want, but we’re not going to do that.

Create your store pages

Now that we have that out of the way, its time to setup our actual store page. Like I said previously, I’m going to show you how I setup my “project trucks for sale” page. In the BANS admin panel, click on “store pages”, and this will bring you to a list of all the store pages you have created thus far.

You are going to want to click the link that says “create store page”, which I have so conveniently circled in a glorious lime green color in the image above. This is where all the magic happens. Your going to want to get your SEO cap on and start thinking about title tags, meta, description, and content. Here is where you enter your dreaded content into BANS, but we’re going to cover that in a subsequent entry, not today. What I do want to direct your attention to, however, is that you need to make sure your target keyword is in the HTML title tags on every page of your BANS store. It doesn’t have to be the only word/phrase in the title, but it should be there none-the-less. The text boxes you see in the following screen shot directly coincide with the HTML tags that will be on this store page.

When you scroll down to the bottom of that same page, you will see a few option boxes that are going to be of interest to you. The first box you see is the category number. For this particular store page I am going to use the “cars and trucks for sale” category, which is #6001. Next is the “search query” box, and this is where you can fine tune the ebay listings that are shown on your page by using advanced ebay search queries. The example you see below is VERY simple, but its just for demonstration purposes. The search queries on my Honda Parts Store has about 20 negative keywords, “ands”, “ors” and all kinds of other search gold, which gives me a lot of control over what shows up on my store pages.

I usually just leave the “parent category” as the default, but you can play around with that later on. What you want to pay attention to right now is the box labeled “Page name”. Whatever you enter here is going to to be the anchor text used in your navigation sidebar for this partular page, so think SEO, and choose wisely.

Finally, you can set the file name of the page to anything you want. This is whats going to show up in the address bar, so again, think SEO here. I would suggest not using spaces, because this might add those ugly “%20″ characters into your URL. Use things like hyphens instead.

I think thats about it for that, you can see the final product by clicking on my niche keyword rich link here: “Project Trucks For Sale”

More tomorrow…or the day after

This post actually went way longer than I had planned, and I didn’t even get to half of what I wanted to talk about, so I’ll leave it for the next entry. Ill talk about things like images, colors, and other template related stuff.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing to my RSS feed to get the latest updates on my BANS from scratch series!

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!

If you haven’t at least heard of Yahoo! Answers yet, I think you should try and come out from underneath that rock. Yahoo! Answers is one of the fastest growing social sites on the internet. The basic premise of the site is that people who have questions can ask them (in just about any category imaginable), and others go and answer them. People asking specific questions, looking for specific solutions. A GOLDMINE for affiliate marketers!

Wait, isn’t that just called a forum? Whats so great about that?

The biggest difference here is that Yahoo! Answers uses a rating system to rank users who are answering questions. The implications of that are huge. Instead of a bunch of people coming in and flaming the crap out of you, which is what happens on most message boards, the people answering questions actually have something to gain…R-E-S-P-E-C-T!

In a nutshell, the Yahoo! Answers point system works like this: There are 7 levels of “expertise” that you can achieve. The higher your ranking, the more authority you have on the site. Observe:

So Where Does BANS Come In?

If you are having trouble putting two and two together, let me spell it out for you. With millions of people asking hundreds of thousands of questions in hundreds of categories every day, you would be hard pressed to not find something related to your niche. All you have to do is get out there and find the right questions to answer, then throw a link to a store page (or content page) on your Build a Niche Store site in the “sources” section, and bada bing badaboom…targeted traffic!

Sounds Great, where do I sign up?

Hold on there skipper, you can’t just go around spamming the crap out of Yahoo! Answers. They are cracking down more and more every day on spammers, so you have to cloak your ulterior motives behind a veil of knowledge. If you plan on doing this, you better plan on answering questions like your the leading expert in your niche, or you can bet that your account will be banned in no time. There is a real art to this (which i have yet to master), but the rewards can be pretty big. There is a shit ton of traffic flowing through Yahoo! Answers everyday, you just have to know how to get it.

If this method is too black hat for you, I’m sorry. Please don’t even bother reading the rest of this article. I personally don’t see any real harm here. People are asking questions, and you are answering them with valuable information. Its a win win situation for both sides.

Example Please! Kthxbye

When I first read about this method over at CashTactics.net (which, by the way, is the best damn affiliate marketing blog you will EVER read) I was pretty confused about what exactly was going on, and I wished someone would have given me an example (I still wish someone would give me a good example, actually!) . So here you have it, a visual example just for you!

Obviously the links I put in my sources go straight to a custom tailored search page on my BANS store. (Here and Here). I gave a brief paragraph sharing my personal experience (which is a true story), and put my links in. Now this doesn’t quite demonstrate how you should be answering questions, its just a quick example. You really should be taking some time and effort into answering each question. You will also eventually notice that questions start to repeat themselves after a while, so SAVE all your answers for later use!

Oh, and my names not “John”, thats my super secret Double agent Yahoo! Answers alias. Pretty slick eh?

Talk to yourself

Taking this Yahoo! Answers method a step further, you can create multiple Yahoo accounts and answer your own questions! Ruck over at CashTactics.net has around 50 unique Yahoo IDs just for this method. 25 for asking questions, and 25 for answering them. Answering your own questions means you can manipulate the questions and answers to appear higher in Google’s SERPs. See below…

Parasite SEO

Here is another great thing about Yahoo! Answers. Google fricking LOVES it! Seriously, I’m sure you have seen plenty of Yahoo! Answers pages rank on the first page of Google’s SERPs. They are a PageRank8 Site, and its crawled constantly.

So how can you take advantage of this? Easy. Using standard SEO techniques, like Keyword rich titles (super important here) and text, you can achieve some pretty impressive S.E.R.P rankings in very little time. Don’t Believe me? Check this out. This was a question I both asked and answered myself for the sole purpose of getting a good ranking in google:

No, that’s not a joke! That is a NUMBER 2 RANKING for a highly targeted, highly searched keyword. The best part? I got there in less than 1 hour. I’m not kidding you, within 1 hour of posting my question (which I then answered with my other account, with links of course!) I was in one of the top SERP spots. Please tell me you see how you can benefit from this…
The downside is that these rankings don’t last quite as long as a normal website you might build (they tend to fluctuate up and down), but you really can’t beat it for what it is!

TIP: In order to get ranked so quickly, I used PinGoat.com to ping that specific Yahoo! Answers page. This basically tells the search engines that there is updated content on that page, and to get over and index it right way. Pinging is not just for blogging!

Finding the right questions to answer

You will quickly notice that searching and waiting for targeted questions to appear can be somewhat time consuming, so you’ll want to find a way to find questions as quickly as possible (after all, the more you can answer, the better the results). There are two solutions to this problem:

1. Buy the AnswerSniper script, which is super powerful.
2. Use my very own, exclusive RSS method.

“I’m cheap, whats this RSS method about?”

I have not personally bought Answer Sniper yet, although I do plan on it, so I came up with a less effective, but much cheaper method of targeting questions to answer based on specific keywords, here goes:

1 . Get a list of keywords that you want to target. For me, ill use the keyword “Honda” as an example.

2. Click on “Advanced” search:

3. Fill in the details of your search. Be sure to select “Open Questions” (marked in green), and “Within 7 days” (Marked in Orange).

4. Do the search, and subscribe to the RSS feed at the bottom of the search results.

5. You will now have an updated list of all open questions with your keywords! Answer away.

Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

All of what I have presented here (except the RSS trick) I learned over at CashTactics.net, which is run by a guy name Ruck who is a seriously awesome dude. If you haven’t been over to CashTactics.net, Get your ass over there! Here are some Yahoo! Answers related links from Ruck’s site:

• Free “Ebook” on Yahoo! Answers Marketing
• Video Follow-up to the ebook
• Question and Answer Session
• Forum Post

THAT is why CashTactics.net is the best F#@king Affiliate marketing blog you will ever read.

Get your BANS store up and Cash in!

If you haven’t already, its time to just break down and buy your copy of Build a Niche Store. I know there is a lot of controversy over the BANS script, but I can tell you from personal experience that it has paid for itself at least three times over, and it keeps increasing every month! Just do it already.

Something many people make in 10 minutes, but my highest single day BANS earnings to date (this is from www.digmyhonda.com/store) and puts me at over 30% of my goal!:

On top of that, there were more unique visitors to this blog than any other day thus far (around 200). New inspiration always comes at the best times!

Even though I stopped updating my blog, I certainly did not stop trying to make money online. In fact, I hit it double time, and it really paid off! Since January 1st I have Grossed $169.00, with only $25.00 in expenses, yielding around $145.00 or so in net profit as of last night. Want to know how I did it? Read on.

Build a Niche Store

If you haven’t purchased a Build a Niche Store license yet, you are simply missing out. Plain and simple. I know there has been a bit of controversy over the software, but I can tell you from personal experience that it is worth every single penny. The more you use it, the more you realize just how powerful it can be. I only have two niche stores setup, and they have yielded 98% of my profits for this month. BANS has paid for itself almost twice over already, and iv only had it running for less than a month. If you havn’t tried BANS yet, BUY IT NOW!

Some of you have already seen my first BANS store (check it out here if you haven’t). Its a store focused on Honda automobiles and the Honda Tuning scene. There is actually a small network of BANS stores working together there, where each Honda model has their own separate store. (Civic Store, Accord Store, s2000 Store, etc). This has really worked well for me so far, and it integrates very well into my existing site at www.digmyhonda.com

I have also created a new store since I last updated my blog. Long ago (back in october) I was on a domain buying spree and I had purchased the domain www.tire-depot.us, in hopes of using the www.tirerack.com affiliate program (which is run through commission junction) to start some kind of PPC site. Unfortunately I got wrapped up in other things for a while, and the domain name was just sitting and collecting dust. About a week ago I decided to do something with it, I did pay for it after all.

This was a perfect candidate for a niche store! I threw together a quick, cheesy header image, tweaked the BANS store colors and added some Ebay categories related to tires. All of this took maybe a half hour of work (including installation), and the store was ready to roll. Within two days I was indexed in Google and I had already made my first sale with it! It was only around $5.00, but for something that took so little effort to get started, that was pretty good! I have since added some content and made things a little better, so hopefully Ill start ranking for some good keywords. Check out discount tires at the tire-depot.

Link building is important!

This is something I have really come to learn over the past couple weeks. Of all the SEO methods I have been trying to learn and implement, link building is by far the most effective. I was able to get www.tire-depot.us indexed in Google within 48 hours because of some simple, but strategic link building. For example, I have been using my stealth forum linking method, but in a more strategic method than I had been in the past. Instead of just posting links on any forum I could find, I have targeted my link building to high PageRank forums which allow both links and images in your replies. The best example I can give is the forum at www.nbc.com, which is a PageRank 7 site, and does not use “nofollow” tags.

That last part is extremely important. If you are trying to get backlinks, make sure the site you are posting in does not use nofollow tags. The easiest way to determine whether or not they use nofollow, is to simply look at the HTML source code and search for other, existing outgoing links. Check to see that the anchor tags are nofollow free, and you should be all set to start posting.

As I said, I was posting links over at the members forum on www.nbc.com, which in turn has sub forums for each of their shows. I happen to be the biggest “Scrubs” fan on the face of the earth (I have all 6 seasons on DVD), so I fit right in under the Scrubs sub forum. I would post something relevant to the thread, but include the following code.


[URL=http://www.tire-depot.us]
[IMG]http://www.digmyhonda.com/store/images/blank.gif[/IMG]
[/URL]

blank.gif is a simple, transparent 1×1 pixel gif, which is just about impossible to see. This is the exact method I used to get the site indexed so quickly.

Google Adsense

Although my BANS store was the biggest earner, I am also having a record breaking month with Google AdSense. I have already matched my December AdSense earnings, and it seems like I am doing better with it every day. The thing that has really attributed to this is a steady increase in organic google traffic to www.digmyhonda.com and www.hondoogle.com. It seems that the longer these sites are online, the more traffic I get. I have also tried to do a little bit of link building for them as well, which has probably been the cause of the increased traffic.

The moral of the story is that if you havn’t purchased Build a Niche Store yet, you really need to do it today. The longer you wait, the less money you will make. Focus on SEO and link building, and you will be on your way! In fact, I’m challenging all of you to surpass my earnings! (If your already a successful affiliate marketer, you don’t count!)

 Call me an uber noob, but I just recently read that you can create multiple commission junction PIDs for different web sites that you own, which is a tremendous help with tracking clicks and conversions.

As you know, I have my first BANS store setup and ready to go. The site is setup in such a way that there is a ‘mini’ or ’sub’ store for each Honda model (Accord, civic, prelude, etc). I would really like to track each one individually so I can see which is the best performer and tweak the store accordingly. Using multiple commission junction PIDs is the perfect solution for this!

I am sure most people who have been around commission junction longer than I have are probably laughing to themselves, but for any noobs like myself who might be reading this blog, here is how you can go about creating the seperate PIDs.

Create Separate CJ PIDs for tracking

1. Log into commission junction

2. click on the “Account” tab.

3. click on the “Web Site Settings” tab.

4. click on “Add a New Web Site”

5. A new window will pop up and ask you for a bunch of different information. Enter the name of the new site, the URL to the site and a brief description. You also need to select which general category your site falls into.

6. Click “Save” at the bottom and your new site will appear in the dropdown list along with its new, unique PID for tracking!

More Positive Profit Today But it has to stop.

Just a little side not here, I made $3.00 profit today from Ebay. That brings me within $2.00 of breaking even! woot.

The Bad news? I found out today that my campaign is actually against the Ebay Affiliate T.O.S. You cannot link directly from AdWords to ebay unless you have an Ebay store of your own (or BANS). Hopefully they don’t detect this and pull the $37.00 I’ve made so far! So the campaign has been pulled, and now its time to get some link building done on my BANS store. Better luck next time I guess.

Today marks the start of my ‘post-for-30-days-straight’ challenge. Alan from www.AffiliateConfession.com (great blog by the way, i would highly recommend subscribing to his RSS feed) has issued a challenge to his fellow bloggers to make at least one interesting post every day for 30 days. Now that my final exams are over (as of 10:00am this morning!!!) I will have a ton more free time to focus on affiliate marketing. The fun really starts now.

Earnings update

I know its been a while since I posted anything about my earnings, but really there hasn’t been a whole lot to say about it. At one point last week I finally hit a positive net profit, but that was quickly turned around when conversions on my campaign shot through the floor (almost overnight!).

As you can see, I was doing ‘OK’ until December 16th, and sales just completely stopped. My first thought is that this is due to the fact that the online “get it before Christmas” shipping deadline hit hard and people just stopped buying stuff online for the Holidays. These earnings that you see are 100% from my “Christmas Dog Outfit” campaign, but I have other earnings from Adsense and some other small affiliate offers.

I am now getting about an average of $0.04 per click and peaked at a 4.2% CTR!! (i wish I would have got a screen shot of that) and have been spending an average of about $3.50 per day on this campaign. You really can’t beat $0.04 clicks, especially with the Ebay affiliate program because their cookie lasts 7 days, and there is something for everyone on Ebay.

Out with the old

So how far in the hole am I? About $5.00, which if you ask me, could be a lot worse. This campaign was a tremendous learning experience. I learned the ropes of adwords, I learned how the Ebay affiliate program can get you commission for items completely outside of your market, and I learned how Capitalizing a single letter in your ad copy can increase your CTR by 200% or more. I regretfully never got a chance to make a landing page for this campaign, so everything you see here was 100% on Google’s content network. My next campaign will definitely have a landing page! In fact, I plan on making two parallel campaigns with one optimized for search and the other optimized for content. I have learned a few little tricks in that area over the past couple weeks that I can’t wait to try out.  I’m going to let this campaign run  up through  Christmas day (like I said, you cant beat $0.04  clicks, no matter how you are getting them. It’s the cookie that counts) , but after that I will be starting a new (hopefully more successful)  journey into PPC marketing.

In with the new

With the closing of the Christmas season approaching its time to focus on bigger and better things for the future. I’m really having a good time tinkering with BANS, and I just read a really inspirational post on the BANS member forum about people making upwards of $10,000 per month with only 5 BANS sites, thats pretty impressive!

In between school work I was able to finish up my network of Honda related BANS sites so its time start planning my marketing campaign for the next few months. Check out the finished product. I think I’m going to try and build off my already decent search engine rankings for www.DigMyHonda.com and get some incoming links to the store by means of Honda message boards. Once I start getting some organic search engine traffic, then I will start with my PPC campaigns. I think this market is really going to be a challenge because Honda drivers are pretty stingy when it comes to buying things online. We will see what the future holds!

Small personal milestone

Aside from all this affiliate marketing stuff, I’d like to point out something else that is really important to me. There are now 10 RSS subscribers to this blog, which isn’t a whole lot in relation to other blogs, but it gives me more incentive to make posts in higher quality and quantity. So thanks for reading guys, and keep an eye out for the next 30 days as I try to meet Alan’s challenge.

Somehow I was able to find some time these past couple of days in between studying and writing 20 page final papers to finally setup my first BANS store. Let me tell you, it has been a blast so far. Everything with BANS is super easy, from installing to customizing and fine tuning. My store ( www.digmyhonda.com/store/accord) is targeted toward the Honda community, which is something I have very close and personal ties too. I have owned Hondas my entire life, and have almost literally taken apart every bolt in my old 1992 Honda accord and my current 2001 Acura Integra.

Before I was even remotely interested in affiliate marketing (this past October) I decided to create a Honda site of my own based on the Pligg platform , which is basically a digg.com clone. The pligg software is really a fantastic foundation, and I would recommend it to anyone. www.digmyhonda.com was kind of a flop when I first went public with it, and after 3 months it still only brings in about $20 a month in adsense with around 250 unique visitors per day. The problem is that the automotive community is still stuck in the internet stone age. Many car enthusiasts don’t even know what RSS is, and they surely don’t understand the concepts that made digg.com popular.

When I first read about BANS, I immediately knew I had to make a Honda related store, and what better way to do so than to “integrate” it with a site I already own? Thus, the www.digmyhonda.com store was born.

Drilling the Niche

Thats a term I learned on the BANS member forums. Basically it means finding a general niche, and then narrowing (or “drilling”) it down to an even more targeted audience. For example, if your niche is “Camping”, you might want to “drill” it down to “Camping equipment”, and then take it even further to “Coleman camping equipment” or something similar.

Personally, I had already started setting up my Honda niche store before I read the articles on “drilling” your niche. You can take a look at my General Honda store here. As you can see its geared toward all Hondas and Acuras. While this would probably be fine, I wanted to try and drill the niche down a little further. I decided that instead of catering to all Honda models at once, I would make a “separate” store for each model (Accord, Civic, Prelude, etc). Even though each individual store is separate, they are still linked together as you can see in the navigation to the right of the page. Here is a “side by side” comparison. So far I have only setup the “Accord store” but I plan on just copying the entire install to a folder called “civic” for example, and just change the search terms to match.

General Honda Niche store

Targeted Honda Niche store

The BANS process

While going through each step in the BANS process is outside of the scope of this blog (and is already clearly documented in the PDF file you get with purchase), there is no need to waste time with the basic setup and installation. Instead, ill take you through the process I personally went through at a high level to setup my Niche store.

Installation

Installing BANS is really super simple. You basically create a MySQL database on your server (Make sure its a UNIX server!!), ftp the BANS files over, and go to the install page. The actual install process takes a whole 3 minutes. One thing I will suggest to apache noobs is to make sure you transfer over the hidden .htaccess file. I’m a pretty seasoned UNIX and apache user and I couldn’t figure out for the life of my why BANS wasn’t automatically creating an htaccess file. It turns out i simply forgot to do `ls -a` and missed the hidden file when i did my FTP transfer.

Setup

As with installation, the basic BANS setup is extremely easy. There is basically a list of about 20 options you can choose for your store, like whether or not you want to display “buy it now” items only, what your commission junction affiliate ID is, and what ebay category to use for your store. For my store I chose to use the ebay motors category called “Car parts & accessories“,which has a bunch of sub, and sub sub categories that BANS automatically imports for you.

For each of the categories you can go in and specify a custom search term that will act as a “filter” for your store. For example, the “Car parts & accessories” ebay category has parts for all makes and models, but my store is targeted toward Honda Accords. With bans, getting the right targeted parts is as easy as entering “Honda Accord” as a search filter, and like magic you have a laser targeted niche store! I actually entered a bunch of negative keywords as well, to help further filter out any unwanted items. Check out the screen shot below:

There are actually about 20 negative keywords in that list, but you cant see them all in the screen shot. I basically made every other make (like nissan, toyota, ford, etc), negative keywords.

Customization

The best thing about BANS is that it’s really flexible and easy to customize. Here is an example to demonstrate how easy it really is. The first thing you notice about a “blank” BANS store is that there is no header image at the top, and its just a big void of white space (sorry, no screen shot). Uploading a custom header image is as easy as creating a logo in something like photoshop (I personally use The GIMP), making it the correct size for the template you are using, and using the BANS upload form.

Then, like magic, you have a custom store logo ready to use!

Other customizations

The customization you can do with BANS is limited only by your imagination and your web design skills. Changing things like colors of text and backgrounds requires you have a little bit of CSS knowledge, but its really not difficult to learn. One thing I would like to see (not for myself, but for less knowledgeable users) is a visual “color picker”, where you can set the colors of different elements by pointing and clicking rather than getting down and dirty with CSS.

Content Vs Store Pages

BANS was created for, and created by affiliate markers. One of the first things you learn as an affiliate marketer is that in order to get good search engine rankings, or a high PPC quality score, you have to have some unique and valuable content for your visitors. BANS has this covered by allowing you to create two different types of pages on your store. The first are “store pages”, which show the ebay listings on the page. The other type of page you can create is called a “content page”. With these content pages you can put any kind of information you want on them to help with SEO and/or quality score. You can even use them as PPC landing pages if you want! BANS makes it super easy to edit these pages as well, with a feature rich text editor for those without a lot of HTML knowledge.

My future BANS plans (hey, that rhymes!)

Like I said earlier, I only have the Accord store setup, but I plan on making a series of Honda stores for the Civic, Prelude, CRX, CRV, s2000, Fit, and so on. Along with those, I will be creating an Acura based chain of stores dedicated to cars like the Integra, RSX, Legend, etc. I am hoping development on these stores will be super fast since they will all basically be clones of this base store with different search filters.

Along with www.digmyhonda.com, I also purchased www.digmynissan.com and www.digmyvdub.com which I will also be creating stores for, very much like the Honda one. There is a lot of work to be done with BANS, and I can wait to start seeing some results!