Archive for '2008'

Affiliate Confession is putting on a contest in partnership with Market Leverage, and Vat 19.

There are more than $350 worth of prizes, which include a Nintendo DS and two games, a Flip Video mino (that I really, really want!), and more importantly a USB missle launcher and a Banana Bunker that has to be seen to be believed. All you have to do is post about the contest and leave a small comment – so get on that right away (there’s less than a week left in the contest).

Also – I’ll announce on Monday what some of you have been waiting patiently for – my “unexpected Internet connection” and a very unlikely stream of new traffic for one of my blogs. In addition to that – I will be releasing a Free Niche Store Script here very soon – so stay near your RSS reader!

Is a dot info (.info) domain good or bad for a BANS niche store? We’re going to do a little testing and find out!

This is installment #9 in the Watch me build a BANS niche site from Scratch series!

There’s been a lot of talk about whether or not a dot info domain is worth having any more (for a BANS store). There are countless forum threads in the BANS members forum about it. Until recently I wasn’t personally sure if google had a vendetta out against dot info (.info) domains or not. That was – until the other day.

I’ve had a few dot info domains for about a year now. A lot of hosts (goDaddy) were offering .info domains for only 99 cents for the first year, which led lots of webpreneurs like myself to grab up prime names quickly for just a buck. I grabbed a handful – like 10 I think. It looks like I was just small potatoes though – as I’ve read about many BANS site owners who bough 100+ for BANS stores. To make matters worse, with the .info so cheap BANS site owners weren’t the only ones cleaning up – spammers were buying up the names in droves, because for for only a dollar, surely they would earn their money back and then some before their domain was banned or blacklisted.

I think what happenned here is that BANS sites (with original content) got caught in the crossfire. If you were a BANS site owner that purchased 100+ domains and just did the basis setup (with no content pages) – to google you really were a spammer and you site had no value (beyond the auctions) to visitors. Our test BANS site for this series (Used Cell Phones) was de-indexed by google early on, and I attributed that to “google sandboxing”, since my other .info domains (which are blogs) have been fine.

Then, last week one of my dot info blogs (Top Jokes) got dropped by google like a hot rock for no good reason. I don’t sell text links, I regularly post new content, and I wasn’t doing anything even remotely unscrupulous to irk the ire of google to drop me. It looks like even regular sites (with lots of content) can get caught in the crossfire as well. My other .info sites are all still fine in the google index. So who knows what the rhyme and reason to it is.

As you’re read in previous posts, our BANS test site is making money and getting traffic from MSN Live Search just fine. Nothing is really coming from Yahoo! yet (although their crawler visits daily). So I’ve decided to move our BANS test site from .info to .com to see what happens! Now, mind you – I’m not going to take down the .info domain at all. Why should I? It’s making money and getting traffic from MSN Search, why give that up? But I’m very curious to see if google will index the .com version of our BANS test site as “original content”, since it won’t index the .info version at all. I think this is a very worth test experiment.

As luck would have it – I already own a related domain Cell Phone How To that established with a PR. So, I created a sub-directory “/used-cell-phones” to move the BANS site to for the test. I did this rather than purchase a new domain name because I don’t want to end up in the sandbox (again) and want to get on with the experiment.

How to Move a BANS niche store to a new domain

This is a very easy and quick process, I had my store moved in about 10-15 minutes. I’m going to assume you can navigate your own webhost control panel to do the following operations:

1. Create a new database on your new domain
2. Create a new database user
3. Assign the new user to the new database
4. Export your MySQL database from your old domain
5. Import the MySQL database on your new domain
6. Edit your /cont/cont.php file with new info
7. Login at the new domain

If it all seems very easy – it is. The first thing I did was change my meta description and title a bit to make it different from the old site just slightly. Then I checked my pages to make sure that the links weren’t broken. If you setup any manual links, you may have to edit them. Other than that – everything seemed to work beautifully right out of the box.

Next on my agenda is to remove my old (.info) sitemap from google webmaster tools and add this one. In addition – I’m not going to register the sitemap on this new test site with MSN or Yahoo at all (why screw up a good thing on the other site for now). The goal is to find out if I can get indexed on this new .com version of our BANS test site, and to see how long it takes. I’m not going to do any link building this week at all – let’s just see if we can get in the index or not and go from there!

As always – if you have something to add or a question, by all means comment now!

Don’t have “Build a Niche Store” yet? Click here:

If you’re reading this page to try and figure out is Build a Niche Site for you or not – please consider buying BANS through my affiliate link. I make a small commission, which would help defray some of my time and expense for putting together this BANS tutorial (and future BANS success articles) for you! I purchased my copy through an affiliate link in gratitude to the blogger who talked of his success with this niche building site script.

Also – if BANS isn’t for you, please consider reading How to earn money using Affiliate eBay WordPress Plugin BAYRss. With BANS you build content basically around eBay auctions, but with BAYRss you place eBay auctions in your posts and pages. Check it out, I use (and make money) with both BANS and BayRSS!

For a successful BANS site the importance of your store pages can’t be overlooked. Setting them up for ease of use and maximum monetization isn’t just to make more money, believe it or not it’s to build more traffic too!

This is installment #8 in the Watch me build a BANS niche site from Scratch series!

We’ve done a lot of things in this series so far, from keyword research, to building links, and creating content. But one of the things that we haven’t done (and I’ve overlooked) is manage our store pages properly. You see, if we’re going to own a store we have to begin to think about our BANS site like a brick and mortar store is setup. Imagine that you’re going to the supermarket to get some groceries. Think about the first things that you see as you pull up to the store. You see the sign, the name of the store, and as you park your care and walk up to the door you see some ads in the windows. As you go down the sidewalk and walk inside usually the very first thing you see is the weekly ad prominently displayed with a neat stack of them so you can take one. As you grab a cart and head toward that first aisle with the weekly ad now opened in your hand you usually have to pass by big pallets and piles of those weekly specials just to get to first aisle.

As you make your way around the aisles, at the end of each is an “endcap” display highlighting something on sale in that aisle. As you make your way through each aisle you see red stickers and signs pointing out all the specials and deals as you go, some of the shelves even have coupons you can take. Once your cart is full and you think all your money has been spent you head toward the checkout. As you stand in line you read the tabloid headlines, grab a cold beverage from the cooler or maybe a candy bar and think about whether you need to purchase the crazy glue, nail clippers, or eyeglass repair kit you see while waiting to put your items on the belt.

Now stop and think about everything you’ve just read. Compare your walk through the brick and mortar store to your BANS site. How many opportunites does the supermarket have to guide you towards something they want to sell you? How many times do they try and suggest something? How does the placement of items affect sales?

How can you use this knowledge and apply it to your BANS site?

Let’s go back through the walkthrough and apply what we’ve learned…the following real world principles should be applied to your BANS store:

Give your BANS store some CURB appeal: Nobody is going to stop, stay, or shop at a run-down store. Learn how to or pay someone to customize your BANS store a bit and make it look more professional. At very least have an eye-catching header, but there are other things you can customize too. Doing this will spice up every store page you have since your template is the frame for them.

Design your home page like a supermarket would design an ad or flyer for the week: What are you highlighting or featuring (if anything?). Are you linking to inside store pages? Do you have eye-catching pictures?

Design every top level “store” page like a store aisle: Have appealing ads and graphics before and after your top level store content and auctions acting as “endcaps” in a store aisle. Suggest specific products by using or creating specific search or product pages, point to content pages and reviews and keep visitors moving throughout your store.

Use the “checkout” technique: Suggest appropriate and relevant items in your store by playing links, ads, graphics, content, text or whatever is appropriate. For instance, if you’re selling camcorders a sub-page for “camcorder batteries” may have to be created because eBay has them buried in an “accessories” page – and then suggest and link to that page on the camcorder section with text or graphics.

I’m going to help you put those 4 concepts into action. Probably the easiest and quickest way to give your BANS store some Pizazz is to just change the template. You only get so many templates when you buy BANS – but you can sure install a FREE BANS Template with ease from one of these sites:

Concept #1 – Spruce up your BANS site

Blogger Unleashed has a free Brown BANS template for download

The Niche Store Builder has a download with 8 different colored free BANS templates.

Best BANS Templates has both Blueberry and Kiwi free BANS templates for download

Blog Explosion has both a Sniper and Prosense free BANS template for download

Build a Niche Store Blog has a really cool and impressive “Green” free BANS template for download

Nails Blog has a cool free BANS theme called magazine

SEO Zombie has a free BANS template called “Ice”

Maybe you don’t want to have to install a new theme, but would like to change the colors of your BANS store. If that’s the case just use the free Color my BANS free online tool to automatically select colors and get a free customized CSS file for your template (without having to know any code).

If you want to learn how to change the colors in your BANS stylesheet on your own, Niche Store Strategies has a nice tutorial on How to change the colors on your BANS site.

Concept #2 – Highlight, Feature, and Link to BANS store pages on Home Page

Look – if all you BANS site has is your navigation you’re sunk! You front homepage should have some good original content food for the search engines, but you shouldn’t overlook your visitors! Have you ever seen the adsense heat map? Visitors have a short attention span and their eyes are front and center on your homepage. Give them something appealing to click on NOW! If nothing more add some pictures to some of your products, but be sure to actually link them to pages inside you’re store!

Things you should highlight:

• Items for upcoming holidays
• Accessories
• Hottest selling products
• New Products
• Featured content

If you stick to those 5 areas you should have no problem creating eye-catching graphics for internal BANS store pages. Be creative, be sure to update for the holidays, add accessories that go with your main categories, keep up with what’s new and selling on ebay to match with hot products in your store, and be sure to feature your best content pages as well. Towards the end of this article I’m going to show you how to rotate these easily on your home page and other store pages.

Concept #3 – Treat BANS “store pages” like aisles in a real store

Building on the concept #2, you want to treat your internal store pages like aisles in a store. Wrap the content and auctions with “endcaps”. The first thing you can do is monetize your site beyond the usual “adsense” ads sitewide. If you’re a member of Commission Junction, or Pepperjam, get some banners and link codes for merchants that complement your niche store. On your store pages, just add them in the “before” or “after” content blocks in edit mode (or in the sidebar). You could add these in under “ads” to be sitewide, but people become blind to ads, and I think it’s important to have different onces on different store pages. Once again – I can show you a way to rotate these a bit at the end of this article.

Monetizing your store pages is great, but don’t forget to promote yourself. I think that every store page should some type of recommended products or pages before and after the content. Use graphics, text, again – be creative! You should be thinking here like a salesman would, a camcorder site should have tripods and batteries linked on the camcorder product pages – not just under accessories! You should mod your BANS site to make it intuitive, so people don’t have to think or hunt and peck to find what they need.

Part of this concept is actually creating new store pages that contain only specific hot or top products. For instance, I’m going to create a page for “Top Cell Phones”. It will be a store page where my main category is filtered to the keywords “used cell phones” and above the content is a list of top 10 phones linked to 10 other store pages I’m going to create. Each of those is a sub-store-page of “Top Cell Phones”, and they are limited to a keyword search for just that phone. Of course each individual store page will contain a mini-review of that phone. Now I’ve created 11 store pages that have content, and I can use them to feature on the homepage, and other store pages, etc.

Concept #4 – Use the “checkout” technique

I may not have explained this one very well earlier. In the supermarket the “checkout” bombards you with all kinds of things you might want to “impulse buy” at the last second. I think that a successful BANS store should behave more like a real store, and even though you may think that’s distracting your patrons from buying your niche product it will enhance it. I’ve witnessed people in retail saying “this is all you have?” I think (contrary to what I’ve read) having a niche store with a half dozen pages is a really bad thing. My advice is to do some research and think of your own items to use for “checkout”. On your BANS site people could buy at anytime, so you want to surround your products with relevant items that somehow didn’t either make it into your advertisements or your store pages.

For example, say your site is about digital cameras. Check all your store pages, and if you don’t have camera cases, flash memory cards, and batteries under your “accessories” sections – add them to your content and store pages. You could add them to your sidebar or advertisements as well. Doing this by hand is a little tedious, what might be better is to use a merchant to rotate the items or advertisements for you. You want to do this in a unique way to make the “checkout” items stand out from the auctions.

The way that you can do this easily (believe it or not) is by using Amazon. If you’re not already an Amazon Affiliate – signup now. I’ve seen some people say that it’s hard to make money with amazon, and really it’s not as long as your ads are relevant to the content. Amazon has some really unique widgets that will stand out in your BANS store – and they have nearly every product on earth. Stick with me here and watch some techniques you may not have seen before…

Amazon Ideas for BANS

The things you can do with Amazon are nearly limitless, but you may not new about some of the newer widgets to come out in the last year. Amazon has been pretty innovative with new promotional widgets.

Amazon MP3 Widget: You would not believe how attractive this little widget is. Amazon sells MP3′s now, and you can make some quick cash with this thing. I believe the commission is current 20%(?), which may not seem like much, but most people buy more than one song on an impulse buy like this. The widget looks like a video at first, and when people the play button it goes through and plays clips from all the songs and albums you added. This thing is awesome, and complements relevant content wonderfully. If you have anything in your BANS store at all music related, you should check this widget out. Here’s a live example:

Amazon Carousel Widget: I think this widget is ingenious because it’s eye catching and you can promote like a dozen things in a very small space with eye-catching pics. Put your mouse over any one and get details. It’s not branded too, which is great – nobody knows it’s Amazon until they click. Consider using these on your store pages (content pages too) – here’s a live example:

Amazon Unbox Video Widgets: Amazon also sells movies and video you can download to your computer. Take advantage of this if you have related content. If you have a store about comic books or characters let’s say – list all the relevant movies you can to sell through Amazon Unboxed. Here’s a live example:

Amazon Slideshow Widget: Much like the Carousel widget, the slideshow give a very appealing view of products and entices visitors to click. You hand pick the products to put in it, and this is isn’t branded as well. Here’s a live example:

Amazon Tag Cloud Widget: This is one of the coolest widgets I’ve seen because it’s intelligent. Unlike some of the others where you have to choose products, the tag could is intelligent like adsense and scans the content of your page to show relevant products. The look and feel is like a blog tag cloud, and when visitors mouse over a world – a product pops up! Here’s a live example:

Amazon Favorites Widget: The favorites widget is as close to “checkout” mentality as it gets, actually showing items that you recommend to your visitors. Here’s a live example:

Omakase Links Widget: This widget is very interesting because it tries to give a “best effort” to show a combination of what the user wants and what is relevant to the page. It actually uses the amazon cookie and knows what the user has search amazon for in the past, and displays things they like in addition to relevant products. Here’s a live example (that should be different for each and every one of you):

Recommended Products: This is by far one of the oldest widgets amazon has, but in can be quick and dirty solution in some cases. Just give it a general category you want to display things for and it gets the job done. Here’s a live example:

I just gave you a bunch of ways to create a “checkout” mentality in your BANS site to enhance your niche store. Earlier I promised to give you a way to rotate some ads in your BANS store to keep it fresh, and now we’ll get that done.

Using PepperjamAds to Rotate Merchant Ads in your BANS site

You may have read my post the other day Pepperjam and eBay What does it mean? You can now promote eBay (and BANS) through Pepperjam, but you may not know that Pepperjam has a widget of it’s own called “Pepperjam Ads”. If you’re not already a member, you need to signup free as a Pepperjam affiliate. Then at the top toolbar click on “Pepperjam Ads”. All you have to do is select the merchants and ads you want to display and create ad units for your BANS site. These are text ads that look exactly like adsense ads – so my advice to you is if you’re using adsense, don’t display these on the same pages. Choose a page and show only Pepperjam ads on it. Other than that – it’s a great way to show targeted rotating ads for niches and select store and content pages. Here’s a Pepperjam Ads unit I created for our test BANS site:

Rotating Ads in BANS with PHP

I’m currently working on an Ad Rotator PHP Hack (mod) for BANS so you will be able to rotate graphics, ads, features, links, or anything you want anywhere in your BANS store. Watch out for that as soon as I get the code finished!

As always – if you have something to add or a question, by all means comment now!

Don’t have “Build a Niche Store” yet? Click here:

If you’re reading this page to try and figure out is Build a Niche Site for you or not – please consider buying BANS through my affiliate link. I make a small commission, which would help defray some of my time and expense for putting together this BANS tutorial (and future BANS success articles) for you! I purchased my copy through an affiliate link in gratitude to the blogger who talked of his success with this niche building site script.

Also – if BANS isn’t for you, please consider reading How to earn money using Affiliate eBay WordPress Plugin BAYRss. With BANS you build content basically around eBay auctions, but with BAYRss you place eBay auctions in your posts and pages. Check it out, I use (and make money) with both BANS and BayRSS!

As you probably already know, eBay left Commission Junction and took it’s affiliate program in house – which is now called the EPN or “EBay Partner Network”. eBay was Commission Junction’s largest merchant and I’m sure that CJ made the most money from them. It was a huge loss when they left, and I bet that eBay is saving millions monthly by moving the program in house. So it was a big surprise when PepperJam Network announced that you could signup to be an affiliate for eBay through them. Let’s be clear, eBay is NOT shutting down EPN. You can signup to promote eBay as an affiliate through EPN or Pepperjam (or both, but I don’t know why you would).

So – if you don’t know who Pepperjam is, you are probably wondering first “Why would eBay do this“, and second “Why would I want to promote eBay through Pepperjam – I’m signed up through EPN“.

On the first point, I believe eBay is working with Pepperjam because they are the fastest growing affiliate and Search Engine Marketing company (SEM) in the world. They are a small but very aggressive and rapidly growing company with just enough saavy to have the abilty to do more in months than Commission Junction had in years. In this digital point thread Pepperjam says that eBay actually reached out to them. So – the second point is probably what you’re really wondering, why would you signup to promote eBay through Pepperjam? If nothing more, it should be for the fact that if you plan on being even a mildly successful affiliate for eBay – you’ll make more money. If you are wildly successful – you’ll make a LOT more money through Pepperjam. How much more? Let me tell you…

eBay Commission Structure Through Pepperjam

Bid Revenue Tiers:

$0.00 – $99.99 – 50.00%
$100.00 – $4,999.99 – 55.00%
$5,000.00 – $199,999.99 – 60.00%
$200,000.00 – $699,999.99 – 65.00%
$700,000.00 – $2,999,999.99 – 70.00%
$3,000,000.00+ 75.00%

New Signup Tiers (ACRU’s):

0 – 49 – $25.00
50 – 1,999 – $28.00
2,000 – 29,999 – $31.00
30,000+ – $35.00

You can see under the bid revenue tiers – that if you make only $100 or more per month in eBay affiliate revenue – you can earn 5% more per month. If you earn $5,000 per month or more you can get 10% more in earnings. That should be enough reason to exclusively promote eBay through Pepperjam and not EPN. You can get more money in new signups too. I know, you have to get more than 50 per month to get more, but I get 5-8 new signups now per every $250 ebay affiliate revenue on one of my niche sites.

Now, if you promote eBay through BANS, a niche store, or a WordPress plugin – not to fear! The first thing Pepperjam did was work with BANS and PHPBay to have the authors update so their products will work with the Pepperjam network. Yes, I know this means changing the affiliate code and updating your software in ALL your sites and niche stores, but for more money isn’t it worth it?

I think that this is the beginning of really good things to come. I say “things to come” because it’s not like you can login to Pepperjam and start creating eBay widgets or anything, you can create banners, text links, and the “advanced links” section right is limited to search boxes. Pepperjam does have a single widget called “Pepperjam Ads”, but that’s for creating ads for multiple advertisers to rotate in a widget. You can’t (currently) create ebay specific widgets like you can through EPN using the editor kit. This is probably the reason that Pepperjam contacted BANS and PHPBay authors right away to grab that audience quickly. In my opinion – what they should (also) do is create custom widgets and scripts you can’t get anywhere else at all to set themselves apart from anything else out there.

There was as time when eBay was creating some pretty cool flash widgets to make it really easy to add them to web sites, blogs, and even things like MySpace and Facebook. They were calling them “eBay to go” widgets. eBay didn’t have them ready by the CJ to EPN transition, and in face they only showed up on the EPN web site in the last week or so. That means I’ve been losing commission on the ones I created for my niche stores all this time. I’d like to see cool widgets like that available through Pepperjam. They already have “deep linking” available, so hopefully cool widgets aren’t that far off.

One of the things that was speculated upon when this was first announced was whether or not Pepperjam would release anything to basically create a BANS or niche type store (without having to buy BANS or a script). Maybe some of us mis-interpreted Pepperjam when the commented (in the previously mentioned DP thread) “We are working to implement BANS or a BANS-like solution ASAP.“. In fact roughly a week later it was announced that both BANS and PHPBay were updated to work through Pepperjam (which is awesome!) – but it may have left some of thinking – “well, will be you creating your own Pepperjam tools to create niche stores for free?”. Maybe they’ll comment on this post and let us know one way or the other.

Regardless, (in that same DP thread) Pepperjam did give enough basic info to allow anyone to create a script or tool for a simple BANS or niche store using their linking structure. Just by using the Pepperjam tracking ID, like http://www.pntra.com/t/2-4881-770-6928?url= (use your own of course if you create a script), all you have to is add the URL encoded eBay destination after it to have trackable Pepperjam eBay links (thanks to Zeropaid for this). Seems like a script to hack the trackable URL into eBay URL’s from an eBay RSS feed wouldn’t be too hard (anyone out there up for it?).

Pepperjam did say in the end of that thread (again) that they were working on some cool tools that would be released in the near future – so keep your eyes peeled! If you aren’t already – be sure to signup for pepperjam yourself, so you don’t miss out!

Back in Mid-April I wrote Forbes Likes my Web Site. They started the “Forbes Blog network” and hand-picked 400 blogs worldwide to take part. I think their initial idea was to be able to sell ads beyond Forbes.com to a stable of business and finance blogs to not only generate income, but also to expand their reach and audience.

I was contacted in Feb 2008 and asked to participate. Flattered to be considered (and contacted) by someone at Forbes.com I readily accepted. I was told that we would be paid per impression and not by click, and that from time to time posts from bloggers would be linked or featured somewhere on Forbes.com to be determined. It wasn’t guaranteed, but the prospect of this was exciting. By Mid-April they had even hired a new VP exec to head up the Forbes Blog Network and to kick start media buying and ad sales.

In the last two months I’ve only seen 4 maybe 5 different advertisers launch campaigns in the network. Out of the 55,000 impressions I have personally served, only 5,000 have been paid ads and the remaining 50,000 have been free advertisement for the Forbes Blogging Network (unpaid). CTR has been an abysmal 0.5% or less (due to non-targeted ads), and I have earned a ridiculous $30 to date.

It’s for these reasons that I’m calling “shenanigans” on Forbes and (as you may have already noticed) have removed all ads from my site from them. As a result, my pages now load about 50% quicker as well. I have inquired via email to my account manager twice about the status of the network and my concerns for ads served, but have received no response to date.

There are lessons to be learned here:

First – just because you are a well respected (print) company doesn’t mean you can start up a new (web) advertising network and be successful overnight. Especially when it’s a “blogging” network and those in charge aren’t bloggers OR familiar with the Blogosphere.

Second – when you deal with bloggers, don’t be surprised when they write about the details of dealing with you. Take this into consideration when you ignore their emails.

Third – as a blogger, feel free to try new forms of monetization and exposure – but don’t be afraid to kick them to the curb if you don’t get results.

I’m sure someone’s getting paid on the Forbes Blogging Network, but I have a feeling it’s a stocks or trading site with 50,000 pageviews per day and not me.

I read a feelgood story today that made me stop and think, it’s posted on ABC dot com and was on Good Morning America this morning. It’s the story of Tommy DeCarlo, the new lead singer for Boston. The original lead singer of the classic rock band “Boston” Brad Delp, committed suicied in March 2007. The band was staging a tribute to their fallen singer in August 2007 and Tommy desperately wanted to go (as a fan). He had even written a moving tribute song to Brad, and since he couldn’t afford to go to the concert, his 19 year old daughter created a myspace page to share it with other Boston fans. She knew how much her dad loved Boston and also posted some Karaoke tracks of her dad singing Boston tunes on his myspace profile as well.

Tom Scholz’s (original founding member of Boston) wife was surfing the web one day and just happenned to land on Tommy DeCarlo’s profile. She was listening to his Karaoke Boston tracks as Tom walked through the room and he asked where those tracks were from (he thought it was actually Boston). His wife said it was some guy singing karaoke from Charlotte, North Carolina – and at first he didn’t believe her. He pumped the music from the computer to big stereo speakers and realized that it was a backing band and a different singer – who just happenned to sound nearly identical to the original Boston lead singer. Tom Scholz emailed Tommy DeCarlo, which led to him first performing with the band Boston at the tribute concert, and now in 2008 he is officially the new lead singer of Boston and touring the world. To make this story even more stunning, DeCarlo is 43 years old, has a son 17 and daughter 19, has never been in a band in his life, and he was working as the credit manager for a local Home Depot.

You hear about stories like this more and more, it was only in December of 2007 that Journey found their new lead singer on YouTube. The power of the Internet is unbelievable. It takes down all barriers, levels the playing field – and if you’re talented you can showcase your skills on the web for free. How can you use the Internet to showcase your talents and skills and connect with other people? The story that I described was a complete accident, what you want to do is to orchestrate and cultivate connections through the web to help build your online business. You should take some time today to think about how you’ve tried to reach out in new ways to build your reputation online.

How to set yourself up for unexpected connections…

1. Update or create online profiles (myspace, linkedin, mybloglog, blogcatalog, youtube, entrecard, etc)
2. Volunteer to guest post on blogs you read
3. Ask bloggers you respect to post on your site in specific areas
4. Feature and review blogs your like
5. Interview successful bloggers
6. Ask successful bloggers and affiliate managers to review your site for improvement
7. Create, review, update, and test all contact forms on your site(s)

In the coming weeks I will reveal an unexpected Internet connection that I made from a very unusual source that will fuel one of my blogs with new traffic and visitor like I’ve never seen before – and it was completely for free and unsolicited on my part. Keep reading in the coming weeks – I think you’ll be very surprised.

This is my Best Practices cribsheet for setting up new BANS Niche Sites to be profitable.

This is part 7 of the Watch Me Build a BANS Niche Site from Scratch, be sure to read the rest of the series!

I remember when I first bought BANS or “Build a Niche Site” – it said “it may be addictive”. Sure, it may be. It’s no different than having 249 new ideas for making money online – and not enough time to do them all. I want to speak a little bit about the realistic effort(s) required to get a brand new BANS store off the ground and making money. I saw a twitter post last week where one guy said “I just setup a dozen new BANS sites” and I thought – “…are you insane?”. It got me thinking first about the fact that I myself had a half-dozen BANS sites I desperately needed to get setup and running, and then immediately after that I realized it could take an entire week of bleary-eyed late nights to get it all done. I tend to write a lot of in-depth posts and articles about how to do very specific things for BANS sites and WordPress. In fact I wrote Best Practices for Setting up a New WordPress Blog in 60 minutes or less last year as a cribsheet for myself setting up new blogs. I have determined that I now need the same thing for my BANS sites – and hopefully it helps you whether you are a niche site newbie or a pro.

This cribsheet is my personal work plan for 6 brand new BANS sites I just setup. I created it because without a plan – I’ll never do the required work to set them all up and get them running. I mean, if you’ve been reading this series at all you know how much I’ve been dragging my feet on the one test store already – at this rate I’ll never get the rest of my niche sites setup without a concrete written action plan.

Step 1: Initial Creation of Your BANS Stores

I think that if you’re going to setup a lot of BANS sites you should just set some time aside to get the initial setup done for all of them at once. I created 6 brand new BANS sites by taking 30 minutes one night while watching TV to upload the files to all the domains, and then the next day I took another 30 minutes to get them all connected and logged into for the first time. So – all in all it took 60 minutes for the initial setup of 6 brand new BANS sites. For the record I use Linux, and administer my sites with cPanel, all these sites were created on my Hostgator account. Hostgator has been very good for my BANS sites, and one of the easiest setups I’ve ever had on a web host.

This is what I did:

1. Uploaded the latest BANS build to 6 new domains.
2. Created 6 new databases
3. Created 6 new database users
4. Assigned the users to the databases
5. Run bans for first time on every site, adding in database info
6. Login to bans for first time after setup and immediately change username and password

Step one time required was: 60 minutes

Step 2: First time Setup of Your BANS Stores

The very initial setup of a BANS store (once it’s created) can be done in about 10 minutes or less if you’re prepared. That is, if you already know what you keywords are and enough information about your niche to fill out the initial metadata required. If you aren’t ready for this step, read my keyword research cheat sheet.

This is what I do:

In the “setup” tab of your BANS admin…

1. Enter your site name
2. Choose an eBay category
3. In “Site Wide Meta Tags”, remove “CATNAME” if the eBay category name isn’t descriptive enough
4. Delete “keywords”, and enter my own 8-10 descriptive keywords
5. Delete “description”, and enter my own keyword laden 30 word description
6. Choose a product layout (try not to make all your stores the same)
7. Enter your affiliate ID (or you won’t get paid)
8. Check the box to remove the “powered by” link
9. Enter some kind of keyword in “site wide search query” to narrow down products, like entering “ps3″ if the category is “video game systems” but your niche is “playstation 3″
10. Change the navigation. I like “open” (show all pages all the time) for smaller sites, and “closed” for larger sites

In the “template” tab of your BANS admin:

1. Choose a default template (I choose 2 column, one for navigation and one for ads)
2. Upload a custom header logo
3. Add google analytics code to the footer.php for tracking site stats

In the “ads” tab of your BANS admin:

1. Add “above” ads (I prefer 336×280 adsense blocks)
2. Add “below” ads (I prefer another 336×280 adsene block or an Amazon widget of some kind
3. Add “left” ads (I prefer a small link unit)
4. Add “right” ads (I prefer the 160×600 Adsense skyscraper and maybe an amazon search box or smaller box ad)

In the “content pages” tab of your BANS admin:

1. Edit the “home” page with meta info, title, description, and keyword
2. Edit the “page info” with a good main keyword category name and page url
3. Edit “page content” with at least one good 100+ word paragraph of original content
4. Edit “below products” with some kind of offer related to the content from amazon, commission junction, or other affiliates prefaced by a few word of original content
5. Edit “product info” with a search query if you need one…i.e., if you want to highlight specific things on the home page you may need to enter specific keywords here to filter down to what you want displayed

In the “store pages” tab of your BANS admin:

See what you have listed. If you only have one, then your chosen eBay category ID might not have any sub-categories to make pages out of. If that’s the case you’ll need to create your own additional pages and use the same category (or other categories) and use keywords in “search query” to get the specific products you want for each page. If you have a ton of pages listed, you may need to delete ones that don’t apply – or change keywords on them to remove things that aren’t relevant. You may also want to rename the page links and URL’s quickly to what you want (before the site gets spidered by search crawlers).

Believe it or not, I can do all these things in about 10 minutes, but I usually have my header logo already prepared. The only exception would be if the BANS store had tons of store pages (created from eBay categories) I had to edit. So for this section I had 6 sites to “setup” and it took a little over 60 minutes for me to do them all.

Step two time required was: 60 minutes

Step 3: Creating Original Content Pages for BANS

The thing about BANS sites is that you want to make sure your niche store has original content. Without it, google sees it as one big heap of garbage. It’s true, I’m making money on our test site created earlier in this series from only MSN traffic – but I think that the profits would be x4 if I had google traffic too. Probably one of initial reasons I put off setting up a BANS site is knowing how quickly I have to get original content into it (before the spiders come) if I want it to be successful. I personally think you should have at least 6 original content pages for a brand new BANS site, but in reality I’m usually lucky to crank out two.

The time required to create good original content pages for a BANS niche store depends on how long the research takes and how good a writer you are. For a good, quality, keyword-laden, well-research article it takes me usually one to two hours (*per article). You may think that’s a long time, but it’s really not once you factor in the research and reading time, keyword research, and then actually putting into BANS itself – adding in title, description, keywords, URL, link text, etc.!

What makes a good BANS Content Page?

1. A good sentence of two introduction “synopsis”
2. An introduction or setup paragraph with keywords
3. Sections separated by keyword-laden “headers”
4. “Ask a question” based on good keywords
5. Explain the product or concept
6. Describe specific models using names and numbers people search for
7. Close with a closing statement paraphraph summarizing your article

This may seem kind of vague at first, view an example on our test site for Bluetooth Headset Review. Any additional components you add to an original content page will only enhance it. Try adding images, relevant YouTube videos, flickr images, whatever you can find. It’s also a good practice to link other sites in original content pages because then all your external links aren’t all nofollowed and you look like more of a legitimate site to a search engine and less like a “store”. You may also want to re-read Creating BANS site content for Traffic.

Step three time required: 12 hours

That time required is just for 2 articles per site to get them going. 6 articles per BANS site would be 36 hours or more.

Step 4: Registering Your BANS site with Google, Yahoo!, and MSN

All Bans 3.0+ sites have an “XML Sitemap” automatically created. You can access yours by adding “sitemap.xml” to your BANS url. Here is our Test BANS site sitemap. To get your site and all pages properly indexed in the search engines you must register that sitemap with MSN, Yahoo, and Google. You need to make sure you get this done, but don’t do it a second before your original content pages are created in your BANS store. The entire purpose of doing this is to get those new pages listed in the major search engines.

Step four time required: 15 minutes

Step 5: Building Links for BANS sites

As soon as your site is registered you want to think about building some links for it. My advice is make sure you do this, but don’t go hog wild the first month – because that will increase the factor by which your BANS site could be “google sandboxed”. Read BANS Success: Building backlinks Part 1, and How to Build Better Backlinks in Forums. By leveraging blog comments and forums posts you can easily build links for your new BANS site. My advice is to spend at least 15 minutes per site per week creating 2 or 3 backlinks. For 6 sites that’s 90 minutes per week – and I would do this for about 4-6 weeks at least (if not more).

Step 5 time required: 90 minutes (per week)

Step 6: Promoting BANS sites

Steps 1-5 are all that are required to get a brand new BANS niche store off the ground and ready to start making money. If you wanted, you could at this point start some adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns to direct traffic to the site and start making money. Personally, I’m a fan of seeing how much money I can make without spending any money. To do that (organically) requires good old fashioned promotion. Some of the best ways to do this are by submitting articles, and by created community pages like Squidoo and HubPages. I’ve writte guides for both subjects – read my guide to Article Directory Promotion, and BANS: Building Targeted Links and Authority.

The time required to submit at least 2 articles and create one HubPage and one Squidoo page is about 4 hours total (from my personal experiences).

Step 6 time required: about 24 hours for 6 sites

There you have it – in my estimation, to properly setup 6 brand new BANS niche sites to start attracting organic traffic without spending any more would would about 70 hours over the course of a month. That’s about 2 1/2 hours per day, 7 days a week for a 30 days. I’m a firm believer in planning and honesty – and I’m not here to sell you “hope in a box” (as Jeremy says). I want you to understand that there’s money to be made online for sure, but you must invest the time and effort required. The next time you hear someone say they “setup a dozen BANS stores”…now you know that it takes about 2 months to do that right!

Don’t have “Build a Niche Store” yet? Click here:

If you’re reading this page to try and figure out is Build a Niche Site for you or not – please consider buying BANS through my affiliate link. I make a small commission, which would help defray some of my time and expense for putting together this BANS tutorial (and future BANS success articles) for you! I purchased my copy through an affiliate link in gratitude to the blogger who talked of his success with this niche building site script.

Also – if BANS isn’t for you, please consider reading How to earn money using Affiliate eBay WordPress Plugin BAYRss. With BANS you build content basically around eBay auctions, but with BAYRss you place eBay auctions in your posts and pages. Check it out, I use (and make money) with both BANS and BayRSS!

Adding a Forum to WordPress increases SEO by adding indexed pages and improves community by giving your visitors the ability to “participate” far beyond what normal comments allow. It also gives you a place to write random bits of content without writing lots of short, useless (and annoying) posts.

Web Forums are a very interesting way to build an online community, such as the infamous webmaster forums Digital Point, and Webmaster World. Forums are generally where people ask questions, and hopefully they get answers. A successful web forum can generate exponential pageviews vs. a blog or web site if there is a good community reading and participating.

It’s no surprise that this kind of functionality is long sought after in WordPress, and what site owners want most is the ability to embed and use that forum from with WordPress itself. Who wants a separate forum install? I’ve had them, and even from within a sub-directory of a successful site – it’s hard to get them off the ground.

There are lots of ways to “add a forum to wordpress”. The first methods is to integrate a popular forum with your WordPress install like Simple Machines, Vanilla, bbPress, phpBB, or PunBB bulletin boards. Integrating a forum into WordPress means a separate directory, a separate install, and a separate database. With some advanced coding and hacks you may be able to share logins, comments, etc. I am not a fan of this, and personally I think these techniques are a setup for failure. Mainly because, if you had to hack them to make them work – making them work with future versions of WordPress is likely going to be difficult, hard, or impossible. If you want to try, follow some of the older threads listed on this post: Integrating a Forum with WordPress.

The next way to setup a forum in WordPress is by using a theme that displays the categories and posts in forum type layout. This is nice because it requires installing nothing and only changes the way your content is displayed. It could also be bad because then you’re limited to that kind of layout. To check it out try the TDO Forum Theme for WordPress.

The final way to setup a forum in WordPress is by using a plugin. There are two that seem to be no longer supported, or not updated to be compatible with WordPress 2.5 and up: both XDForum 2, and WP-Forum.

The WordPress plugin that I chose works with WP 2.5 and seems to be updated on a regular basis: Simple:Press Forum WordPress Plugin. It’s currently the only one I see listed on the WordPress 2.5 Plugin Compatibility list.

There are some things you need to know about using Simple:Press. The plugin is listed to work with WordPress 2.04 – 2.51+, but in addition to that your MySQL server needs to be version 4.20+. The first site I tried this on was WP 2.3.3, but the mySQL was 4.1.2 (Hostgator) and I got this error:

WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '' at line 1]
SELECT display_name FROM wp_sfmembers WHERE user_id=

Immediately following this my entire WordPress install (dashboard and public pages) locked to a blank screen, and I had to delete the plugin to get my blog back. So I opted to try it on my (still existing) godaddy hosting account – which gives you an option of MySQL 4.x or 5.x. I just created a new 5.x database and dumped my current (4.x) WordPress blog db in it. Then I reuploaded the plugin – and everything seemed to work good, until I created some groups – and lockup central again! I deleted the plugin and all was well again. I did determine that if you decide to use Simple:Press on 5.x MySQL database on godaddy hosting – it has to be the main domain, it can’t be a virtuall hosted subfolder with a domain mapped to it (unless you figure out how to fix the .htaccess file). Finally I moved it to my dedicated box and it worked fine. My advice to you is backup your WP database if you try it on an existing site, and make sure your MySQL server version is 4.20+ and you’re plugins and WordPress install are current.

Once you enable the Simple:Press plugin, just to go “forum” in your main WP dashboard and (if you did everything right) you should see the install button as in the pic above. Unlike other plugins (that install database tables when you enable them) this plugin requires you to manually “install” the first time.

If everything goes as expected this is what you should see:

The basic setup options of the Simple:Press forum are like any other forum you’ve encountered in the past – with the exception of the fact that this forum is setup within WordPress itself. WordPress by default has 2 kinds of accounts “guest” and “administrator”. Simple:Press adds a new type “member”. But the real advantage of WordPress ‘embedding’ is Simple:Press’ ability to do “post-linking” – which is best explained by the help file itself:

This has some very distinct advantages over a normal wordpress blog or standalone forum:

1. As a blog owner this gives you a TON of more search engine indexable pages
2. It keeps blog posts from getting clogged with hundreds of comments (just close them after a few and force everybody to the forum after that)
3. It makes your blog uber-interactive, much more than a blog with comments alone
4. You now have a place to post random tidbits of info without having to create tons of useless blog posts
5. If your blog gets comments now, that’s pretty much a guarantee that your forum will get posts. The worst thing about a new forum is getting people to post, by seeding it with blog posts you get an instantly active forum
6. Your blog now has more pages to monetize – w00t!

Simple:Press also has an “accounce template tag”. Once you enable this option you can display most recent forum activity from either your sidebar, home page, or any other post or page in your blog:

As “Add-Ons” in the forum you can enable private messaging, image uploads, or polls support (through the “Democracy” WordPress plugin). There are many, many other options – such as graphics, style, icons, and more that you can use to customize Simple:Press look and feel to be more like your site design.

I’m only beginning to scratch the surface of Simple:Press in this WordPress blog, but you can check out the new JTPratt’s Blogging Mistakes Forum Here. This is only the beginning of dramatically changing the methods of interactivity and community in this web site.

Have you managed a forum or tried to include one in your WordPress blog before? Comment now – or follow the forum link and add to the discussion!

If you’re not getting any BANS traffic from Google – there is still hope of making money. Just make sure you’re BANS site is registered in all the right places!

When I first started this series “Watch Me Build a BANS Niche Site from Scratch” I had envisioned working on my BANS site nearly every day. I had never used BANS before, so I felt this would be a good way to see if we could make money or not – and have a great tutorial series as well for all of you wondering the same. The reality of it has been I haven’t had nearly enough time to devote to this project, but despite my (sporadic) effort our BANS test store has still made some money. Maybe I should have called the series “Watch me make money with BANS while nearly ignoring my site!”.

If you’ve been reading the entire series, you already know that our test site Used Cell Phones is NOT indexed in google at all (even though it was in the beginning), and we might be in the google “Sandbox” too (for being a new site). This means we may have some time before we get google traffic again. For a BANS site google traffic is very important, because it’s a significant source of revenue. There are different kinds of traffic, such as “social traffic” you might get from say digg or stumbleupon. But “organic” traffic is natural visitors you get from a search engine when someone types in keywords and your site comes up as a listed search result. This type of traffic works well for BANS sites because if someone types in something they want, say a specific model cell phone – when they visit your BANS page for it the “conversion rate” will be much higher because you took them directly to what they wanted. Social traffic is more like a “recommendation” of something cool – and not as specific.

Google is the best source of “organic traffic” currently because they are the largest search engine, and they get the most searches. That means they can send you the most visitors, and getting good traffic from them can make you the most money. But they’re not the only search engine, and it’s definitely worth your while to try and get traffic from both MSN Live Search and Yahoo! Search as well. Why? Well, because it can enhance money you make from Google, but if (like our case with the test site) google isn’t sending you any traffic – the other two search engines may be all you’ve got until you get some google love again.

So – you may be asking “can I really make money with MSN or Yahoo?” I think that I’ve definitely found out (by accident) that you can. Let me show you…

The graph above are the eBay earnings for May 1st – May 19th, 2008. For the most part you don’t see a lot of activity or commission. Then on May 16th you see $58 in commissions and then on May 18th you see $52 in commission for our Used Cell Phones BANS site. When I first saw this graph I thought that we were back in google’s good graces, so I went to google analytics to check.

In the pic above from google analytics, I ran a report for the last 7 days which shows that 79% of all our traffic to our BANS site is coming from MSN search (the first 2 lines).

This pic from the same google analytics report shows that 61% of our traffic comes from just 2 keywords “used cell phones”, and “refurbished cell phones”. So I went over to www.live.com to see how we ranked for our main keywords “used cell phones” –

Now you can see the source of all our BANS traffic – it’s because we rank #2 in MSN search for the keywords “used cell phones” (not bad!). That means that we’ve been all the right things in our BANS series so far, setting up the site for traffic, using good keywords (which we researched), and built good backlinks. Even without google traffic that has all paid off, and in fact we’ve made back our entire cost of the BANS software in just 2 days commissions! So, my advice to you would be to first re-read this BANS series to make sure you’ve everything to date. Then – make sure that you get your BANS site registered with Yahoo, Google, and MSN by reading my post Increase Traffic with MSN, Yahoo, and Google! Now that I know what kind of money my BANS site can make by hardly paying any attention to it (once setup properly) – I’m convinced I need to spend more time promoting it. Especially since you can even make money – without Google!

If you have anything to add or a question about this post – please comment now!

By becoming involved in specific communities you can promote your BANS sites, build links, and possibly make money all at the same time! Build buzz for your BANS site AND your blog!

This is installment #6 of “Watch Me Build a Niche Site From Scratch”, and since our BANS test site still has a google penalty and/or is in the “Google Sandbox” (read the last installment) – we’re going to start building some more “targeted” links back to our BANS niche store. We’re not going to see results overnight with this, but over time this can and will dramatically help our store with both relevant backlinks and possibly traffic!

If you are building BANS stores (or any niche sites) there are two communities you should know about right now.

Both of the communities above allow you to “author” your own targeted pages (as many as you want) on specific (or broad) niche topics. Want to become an expert of learning guitar? Maybe you love origami? Write about travel topics, cars, or sports! Whatever you choose, these niche pages have the ability to promote your BANS or Build a Niche Store better than anything you’ve seen. Why build a single link when you can build an entire relevant page! And the best part is, if your page is successuful (on hubpages or squidoo) you can earn money there too!!

First view the pages that I created for our BANS test store as part of our series “Watch me Build a BANS Niche Store from Scratch“:

My Used Cell Phones Squidoo “Lens”

My Used Cell Phones “Hub”

The process of building your own page is nearly identical at both Squidoo and HubPages. Select a (not already taken) name, click “ok”, add “modules”, publish! Both sites have similar modules, “text”, “Amazon”, “eBay”, “polls”, and more. Squidoo has more robust modules since they’ve been around longer, both sites allow you to pull images from flickr. Both sites allow you to earn commissions from affiliate sales, but at HubPages you actually get to enter your Amazon, Adsense, and eBay affiliate ID’s for direct commissions. Squidoo I believe pays you a percentage.

At both sites when you build a page (“hub” or “lens) it’s like you’re building a mini web site all on one page. You squeeze as much original content in as you can about the subject, then add relevant modules for either additional content or relevant monetizations (like items from eBay or Amazon). The give and take of Squidoo and HubPages is no different than submitting articles to Ezine Articles or working the Entrecard system. Creating a page is great, but you are expected to promote it a bit by commenting on other people’s pages or using the forums. This will raise your “score” (hubpages) and “rank” (squidoo). You “could” spend as much time modifying these pages as you do an entire blog or BANS store – I recommend that you try not to lose yourself in these as you will quickly lose 1/2 a day (they are addictive!). I could write dozens of posts just on the ins and outs of creating Squidoo lenses and HubPages hubs.

The thing that’s unique about these community type “all-in-one” promo pages are all the different things they can be used for. You are building a targeted keyword laden page containing new original content that can obtain it’s own pagerank over time and promoting it. Within that page is a link to your BANS site, you could even link several pages within your niche store. You can link back to your relevant blog(s), web sites, forums, or whatever else you have. If you promote well you can build traffic to both these pages AND your BANS store.

The potential is unlimited because you can created UNLMITED hubpages and lenses at both these sites. For instance, I created the default page about “used cell phones” at both Squidoo and HubPages which links to my BANS store, and my cell phone blog. Backlink, traffic, and monetization all at once! But, I could create many, many more pages on specific topies linking back to BANS content pages, BANS product pages – linking to specific accessories, cell phones, plans, parts, and more! Imagine a dozen pages on Squidoo and a dozen pages on HubPages all pointing to a BANS site home page and deep linking inside pages! If you promote these pages well and become an authority in these communities the targeted links you cultivate will gain their own pagerank and become better for the health of your BANS site than hundreds of blog comments or forum posts!

Have a special way you drive traffic to your BANS site? Comment now!