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…

eBay example commissions

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.

used cell phone google anaytics

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).

used cell analytics keywords

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” –

used cell msn search results

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!