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!

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!

First off, I’d like to apologize if there was any downtime the last two days, I recently went through a big server switch from Windows to Unix hosting (ill talk about why in a minute). Everything will be back and running smoothly soon if it is not already.

With that said, lets get on to the good stuff.

My first commission

I have to admit that this whole PPC affiliate marketing idea has gotten the best of me for the past couple of weeks. Its all i can think about lately and has really consumed my life. I read blogs instead of doing homework, I stay up to about 2-3am every night, and I have spent somewhere around $35 on adwords so far, and hadn’t seen anything for it…until today that is. I made my first commission of $1.38 from the Ebay affiliate program. Doesn’t sound like much does it? I can assure you, however, that there is more behind it than the 138 pennies.

A renewed outlook

When I saw that I had actually made a commission, it was a really cool feeling. It made me feel like something can really come of this game, and that there is no real secret code to crack in order to get started. Even though I am still in the hole over $30, getting that first commission has rejuvenated my ambition to pursue affiliate marketing further. It instills in you a sense of accomplishment, and that in it self is worth a lot more than $1.38

What to do about the meter?

So now I have somewhat of a dilemma. I knew I would have to make this decision eventually when i started my blog, so i might as well do it now. If you have been following along at all, you know that the main idea behind the experiment is to make $1000, and you may have seen my progress meter at the top of my blog (which is pegged at 0%). So the question is, do I increment the meter whenever i get commission, or do i increment it when I get profit. What do you guys think? I’m leaning towards true profit, but id like to hear your thoughts

Sever switch for BANS.

As I said in my opening paragraph I am currently going through a server switch to a UNIX server. Previously I had my hosting through www.EasyCGI.com which is really a great hosting company. I was able to score a FREE years worth of hosting with them, and things have been really good. The only downside is that their shared servers are Windows IIS based. I’m not going to get into it here, but I’m a UNIX guy and have a strong passion against Microsoft products, so I was never really happy with having a Windows server.

Yesterday I decided to purchase BANS (Build a Niche Store), which is a fantastic product that allows you to create an unlimited number of “Niche” stores in really no time at all. It works using the Ebay.com affiliate API to display Ebay auctions and listings with your Ebay affiliate ID attached. People all over the marketing word have been raging about BANS, so I decided to drop the $98 and buy it for myself. With that $98 you not only get an unlimited license to the software (in other words, you can create as many niche sites as you want), but you also get lifetime upgrades and access to their fantastic support forums.

The problem I found after trying to install BANS was that it doesn’t work on Windows IIS server. That was a huge bummer for me, because now I had purchased this $100 software package, and couldn’t use it on my server. I had to make a decision about what I wanted to do, I could either use my PHP and MySQL skills to make it work with Windows, or I could break down and just purchase UNIX hosting. After some contemplation, I decided that trying to fudge the code was not worth my time and I purchased a hosting plan from www.tophostingcenter.com. I had recently seen them on www.johnchow.com, and remembered that they had a Holiday offer where you could pay $98 and get lifetime hosting. That means I’ll never have to pay again, so naturally I jumped on it!

The server switch was extremely smooth, and their customer service so far has been fantastic. I’m really looking forward to working with them over the next couple months. I would highly recommend them to anyone looking for a good deal.

The BANS software

I haven’t really got a chance to play with the BANS software itself yet, but I was able to get the framework installed (which was extremely easy) and my first “test” niche store up and running. The user interface is really nice, and everything is very easy to customize. They include 9 different templates that you can use to get started, or you can create your own. I have to say, I really can’t wait to get something started with BANS!

I’ll Explain my plans for BANS in my next post, but for now I have to get some homework done.