BANS Makes Money with NO CONTENT!

Can a barely out of the box BANS niche store make money with no original content at all? Just read and find out…

This is installment #3 of the Watch me Build a BANS Niche Store From Scratch! Today we’ve figured out that we’re already making money, even though we’ve barely this BANS site up. So we’re going to explore where the traffic is coming from, some google analytics stats, and create some original content. We’ll also do some link building!

About a week ago I added google anayltics to the footer of our BANS template. We really need that in there so we can track how we’re doing over time getting new visitors to our new web site. The BANS store we’ve built is already populated with all kinds of used cell phones and accessories that will sell well if we can manage to drive traffic to it. In fact – this site has been promoted a single bit in the since I first built it quite a few weeks back – and I’ve already had a few commissions even though this site hasn’t been promoted in any way, and last I checked it only had the home page even indexed in google.

You know something weird? It’s ALREADY making money! I have so many things to do across the multiple web sites I own that writing this “BANS Series” hasn’t honestly been at the top of my list of “things to do” daily. It’s been on the list, just not at the top. I haven’t thought much about it, because I figured that it was ok to do things little by little, and make sure the site was getting spidered and indexed by google. I was kinda waiting for the new BANS 3.0 to be released too, since this site is built on BANS 2.0.

You’ve heard people say that you can “make money doing nothing” or build “passive income” web sites haven’t you? Well, it’s a good thing that I installed google analytics a week ago, because this BANS niche store has been making money for the last 5 days straight now! That’s right, not a single backlink listed yet, I only have linked the URL once or twice in these “Watch me build a BANS niche site series” themselves.

On the 29th of February I logged into Commission Junction and found out that I had made $14! The sales had all come from our niche site, and for some reason each and every one of the 12 sales (yes twelve!) logged that day were made in the “Phone SIM Cards” category of the site. I’m going to show you two pics so you can see what the commissions look like when they come in – it was too wide for this page so I broke it up into 2 graphics and placed them one after the other.

So, we’re making money already – and we haven’t even done any link building or traffic building. In fact we’ve made money every day for the last 5 days (somehow):

1. Feb 29th: $14.07
2. Mar 1st: $5.02
3. Mar 2nd: $0.40
4. Mar 3rd: $0.52
5. Mar 4th: $0.22

Now, the weird thing is that first every day we’ve made money it’s gone down from the previous day. But when I look at the commission detail from every single day it shows the commisions coming from “Phone SIM Cards” each and every time. Somehow, somewhere we must’ve gotten indexed well for that category page in a search engine. So, I fire up google analytics to see what I can find out.

So in the picture above we see traffic growing every day. The graph may look impressive, but it only amounts to under 30 unique visits for all the days listed. The thing that IS VERY impressive is the fact that most of the visitor’s are new, the bounce rate is REALLY low (it means they’re finding what they came for), and the average visitor spends at least a minute on the site.

This is also a great stat – we’ve only had 23 visits in the last week, but 68 “pageviews”. This means that the average visitor has viewed just under 3 pages when they visit.

This is an important stat as well, it shows what people were viewing on the web site. The homepage is the most, but cell phone technoloy and an article page are the next highest viewed. I’ll tell you why this is important in a few minutes.

The stats above show that we got a few referrals from the first 2 BANS setup articles here on jtpratt.com, but we’re actually getting a little trickle of search engine traffic (which is probably where the sales are coming from).

So, I drilled a bit deeper, and the image above shows the 5 keywords that tracked visitor’s into the site from a search engine. They’re kind of all over the map – but the world “SIM” is used in 2 of the keyword phrases. So the mystery isn’t solved here of why all the sale are happening in “Phone SIM Cards”, but the keywords shown here are what someone typed into google to find our niche site. It doesn’t reflect what someone might have typed directly into the BANS search box once they got to our site. It would be nice to know, but BANS doesn’t track that yet (that I know of).

Now, moving on from the commissions and statistics, when we left you a few weeks back we were in installment #2 of this BANS setup tutorial I only had time to add original content on 4 “store” pages after doing my keyword research. This meant that I had NO time to create any “original content” pages. In other words, last time I added content to the actual main ebay auction pages with products, and that was it.

They key to being successful in any affiliate site is that you have original content, and more content than affiliate links (if you can). Google wants to know that you have information people are actually looking for, and not just a slew of sales pages. Once again pressed for time, today I didn’t have enough time to write all the original content I would’ve liked too, so I used an old trusty friend Ezine Articles to get some content to re-publish. People write articles everyday and submit them to Ezine Articles where they are free for you to copy and use (provided you keep the footer and Ezine Article link intact as well as the title). So I searched for “cell phone” articles that I could use.

I settled in 6 cell phone reviews, and 6 cell phone technology articles (12 in all) to publish in our niche site. Then I created 2 top level pages to make the parents of these: Cell Phone Reviews, and Cell Phone Technology. You can see from Used Cell Phones home page that these are now top level pages in the left hand side navigation. So, we now have 14 new “content pages”, 2 top level category pages, and 12 child pages with cell phone articles that target certain keywords people would be searching for related to content, such as mp3, ringtones, multimedia, unlock, reverse lookup, cell accessories, blackberry, iPhone, review, prepaid, and RAZR.

In creating these pages we’ve put some food out there for the search crawlers to come and index that should start to build some traffic. We built on the keyword research from the last lesson when we picked these articles out and setup the page titles, descriptions, and keywords. I told you a bit back in this article that in the “content overview” section of the stats I’d explain a significant factor in a few minutes. About a week ago, when I added the google analytics code, I first created the “cell phone technology” index page and then added just one article as a test that I linked on that page GPS Cell Phone Tracking. Back in the stats this page was the third visited page, it only had 8 visits, and it’s parent page (the index I created) Cell Phone Technology had 11 visits. What does all this mean? It means that those 2 single pages of original content actually brought in visitors! And (in turn) those visitors have purchased things through eBay auctions and we’ve made money!

In fact: in only 5 days with less than 10 visitors per day we’ve consecutively made money with our BANS niche site…

So – all this is pretty exciting isn’t it? If just one page and one article did this in less than a week – I wonder what the other index page and 11 articles I added today will bring in the coming week? To ensure some degree of success, I did some additional link building today. I went to digital point forums and changed my signature links. When you post (more than 20 times I think) at digital point you can add a “signature” to the bottom of your posts. In that signature file you can include up to 3 text links of your choice, and it’s a good way to build “backlinks” in the search engines. I changed one of my links to our BANS niche site home and replied to six different forum postings (which gives us now 6 different backlinks to our niche site).

I also went back to Ezine Articles and I had some (existing) content from my site(s) that I was going to “publish” there anyway. Now earlier we “re-published” content from Ezine Articles to put some content in our niche site. But, you can also submit articles to eZine Articles – and when other people publish them on their sites, you get 3 links in the bottom of every articles you can add. I published a bunch of articles that also point back to our Used Cell Phones niche site. I have 17 articles published (as of today) at Ezine Articles, and I submitted 9 new articles that had a link at the bottom like this Baked Beans Recipe. 9 Articles with that link at the bottom gives us 9 new backlinks to our BANS niche site. But wait – that’s not all! The beauty of Ezine Articles is that anyone can re-publish your content as long as they keep the links.

The image above is taken from my Ezine Articles publisher admin panel for the last 9 articles I published. See the stats for “Ezine Publisher”? These are the number of people that have “re-published” my article content on their web site. These numbers add up to “37” (as of today’s writing) – so now we have 37 additional “backlinks” for our BANS niche store. 37 plus the 9 from originally publishing the articles in Ezine Articles gives us 46, and the forum posts give us 6 more. With the handful of links in these BANS setup tutorial pages pushes our backlink total over 60 now for the BANS site.

So now – we have new original content and we have backlinks, and we’re tracking in google analytics as well. That’s enough for today – in the next installment we’re going to monetize the site and do some more link and traffic building.

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 always – if you have any thing to add that would make this article better (or a question), please comment now below, or Contact Me!