This post is installment #1 in my new article series “Watch me Build a BANS Niche from Scratch“. In future posts I’ll write about how to customize and promote this brand new site and you’ll get to watch whether or not I can make money with “Build a Niche Store”!
If you want to watch me build a BANS niche web site you’ve come to right place! Even if all you want are some BANS tips for your already existing niche site – this article series can help. I’m going to take you through the process of building a niche web site from scratch! You’re going to watch how I turn a brand new domain and BANS 2.0 software I just purchased into a profitable stream of monthly income! If you came here to get rich quick online – you came to the wrong place! You’re going to have to put in the required time to create a quality site and follow my instructions, but together we can make money online if you watch what I do!
How to setup BANS
Setup for Build a Niche Store is pretty straightforward. BANS comes with a pretty detailed manual that takes all the guesswork out. I’ve setup a lot of web sites so the first steps were pretty easy…
Setting up BANS
- I purchased a domain earlier this week to use for this series – http://www.used-cell-phones.info. I bought it from goDaddy, where I register all my domains.
- I purchased a brand new hosting account at HostGator just for this project, because they guarantee BANS will work there. I documented how to make a BANS site work on goDaddy here, but NEVER host all your web sites at one web host. Always try to use at least two or three different ones.
- I unzipped the files from the download I received when I bought BANS, and uploaded all the files for the US Store version of BANS 2.0 to www.used-cell-phones.info
- Reading the PDF manual that came with BANS it says to change the permissions on one file (which I did)
- I created a new mySQL database in my cPanel and a new database user per the manual instructions
The images above is the one you see when you bring your web site up in a browser for the first time. You of course click the link to install. Next you enter the database info, and then click install again to get this confirmation screen:
You absolutely HAVE to follow the instructions here and delete your install.php file from the server and also immediantly change your username and password from the defaults right after you login!
Total BANS Setup Time: 10 Minutes
At least, that’s what it took me to set it up. I’m experienced in setting up web sites and scripts, if you’re not it could take you 30 minutes.
Setting up the BANS Storefront
The first thing you want to do is go to “setup” in the left navigation of your BANS admin panel. Enter your “Site Name”, country and eBay category number. I chose 15032 because that’s “Cell Phones & PDA’s”.
Next you’re going to enter your affiliate details, to use BANS for eBay commissions you need a Commission Junction account click here to signup. Once you do go into “account -> web site settings” to get your PID number to enter in BANS. You also want to enter your Clickbank ID, if you don’t have one signup at clickbank.com. If another blogger sees your site and wants to buy BANS – why not get a little commission from it? Of course if you’re going to do this you want the “powered by BANS” link set to “Yes”.
In product details – you want to make sure that you have the items setup the way you want. The first one “Home Page Products” will determine whether or not you have eBay auctions listed right on your homepage or not. My choice is “NO”. We are building a quality site (not a spammy one) and I want some quality content up front first. Next, when you have auctions what are they going to be sorted by? I say to sort by “ending soonest”, because many people want to know what they can buy “right now” or within the next few days. It’s also the way that eBay sorts their auctions by default and what most people are used to. “Buy it now” or BIN only – I say “NO” to. I want to show all auctions and BIN ones are usually much higher priced than the regular 5 or 7 day auction format. I say “YES” to eBay logo because I believe that’s required in their terms and conditions, and also because I want everyone to know that these are eBay auctions and not some shady auction site. I like 20 auctions per page, less doesn’t give enough choices, and more makes the page load reallllly long!
Under your “navigation details” you just either choose “open” if you want links to all pages listed on every page, or “closed” to have just high level parent pages listed on every page for navigational links. “Switch” should be set to “normal” unless you run into problems later on. Now click on “setup store” at the bottom of this page!!
What do you have so far? We haven’t even setup the homepage, written any content, or defined any store pages at all – and you may be surprised by what we have so far.
We know we have some changes to make to the template, but I want you to see that we not only already have the basic structure of a web site out of the box. We have a search box, and a title – but what’s that on the left?? From the eBay category ID we entered in setup, we already have 6 default categories to choose from. Let’s pick one…
I clicked on “cell phones” and it already displays auctions! I want you to especially check out the navigation I have circled red on the left. See how it shows the “Cell Phones” category, and automatically shows the subcategories within it on eBay? You can click any one of these and drill down again. I’m liking this quite a bit, and it’s funny in a way because usually when you setup a web site you start with content and monetize it slowly over time. With a BANS site you seem to start with monetization when you choose a default eBay category, and then to draw traffic you have to create content around it.
Editing the BANS template
Now you click on “template” to the left and choose a template. I’m going to choose the “both” one where the navigation is on the left and I can put adsense ads on the right.
You can edit the (code for) the header, footer, or the stylesheet from the template tab just by clicking any of them. I’m going to choose not to edit any of them at this time because they aren’t necessary to get the store off the ground – and I can always come back and edit these later on. But I am going to click on “logo” and upload my own logo. One of the things that the BANS menu doesn’t tell you is that you have to make sure that you create and upload an entire header image the exact size required. AND – adding the header image WILL NOT get rid of the textual title on the page (which is good). So basically what I’m saying is you want to create a header with images only that won’t cover up the title. I created a crude quick header image which I can refine later as I customize and promote the site.
Creating BANS content pages
Next, I want to get some content on the home page because as “minty fresh” as the google index is anymore, this should be in the index by the morning. I want to make sure that there is some actual relevant quality content for the search engine crawler to eat. You can have as many “content pages” as you want in your bans site, but for setup I just want to edit the content on the “home page”.
Next you click on “edit” to edit the home page. As you edit the title, keywords, description and the actual text of the page pay attention to how long you’re spending updating each item. You may want to save every so often. I did notice that if I took longer than 10 minutes or so when I went to “save” it would revert to the login screen and I would lose my changes. So be aware of this if you are taking a really long time to write content.
I’m going to edit the homepage now, and I want you to see the interface (to edit pages).
Title: Give every page a keyword rich title, but try not to use 10 or less words.
Keywords: Keywords don’t matter much in search engines anymore, so just rattle off 6 or 8 important ones.
Description: Pay utmost attention to the description field. For every page you enter this for, when someone finds this page in a search engine result page the “description” field is the same as the text that describes a page. In other words, right after the title it not only makes your page come up higher in search results pages (with good keywords), but it’s what actually entices people to click! Visitor’s will click on your link and visit your site based on what that description says! Try to keep it down to 3 short sentences.
Get to know the content area and the rich text editor within BANS well, because you’ll be spending a lot of time in here. The first paragraph of every page should be a synopsis of what the page is about. Then try to write at least 3-4+ paragraphs of quality content for every single page in your site. Bold keyword phrases you are important (and that should help you come up better in search).
Now my BANS site is setup. This isn’t NEARLY enough content for the homepage, it’s enough to get my new site up and running for today (and for me to say initial setup is complete). 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 of BANS through Affiliate Confession’s web site, because Alan’s articles about success with BANS convinced me to buy my copy!
Now you can read Installment #2: Creating BANS Site Content for Traffic. 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!
Questions or something to add about BANS setup? Please comment now!
Hey John,
I noticed a couple of your pages go to a 404 error:
Phones w/o Service Contracts and
Phones w/Service Contracts
It’s because the name of the page shows up in the url and the slash after the w acts as a directory divider. If you rename and edit that page in your list of pages, that should take care of the problem. The only problem is I don’t know the correct name of the page. If you post a question in the BANS forum either Kelvin or Adam, or someone else would be able to tell you the correct name of the page or the fix.
You also might want to redirect your 404 error pages to the home page via your .htaccess file.
Alan
Affiliate Confession’s last blog post..It’s Not Always About Making Money
Hey JT, I was not aware of building niche websites. I think I shall watch for this series as I also have few niche domains lying but I never tried to build niche websites with the help of tools like the ones you mentioned. I just kept them parked as of now. Get your next posts out quick dude!
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LOL – thanks! Be on the lookout for it, it’s coming soon!
Thanks Alan! The problem is I didn’t setup any of those pages, they are automatically created by BANS based on the eBay category ID. Asking how to fix in the forums is a great idea – thanks!
Hi. When I create my store I see the “edit this page” text on my home page. Do others see that all the time? If so, how do I remove that?
Thanks
Nobody sees that but you…you only see it when you’re “logged in” to your BANS site. When you logout, you won’t see it anymore.
OK. Creating a BANS Site through your affiliate link is on my list of things to do. We just bought Josh Spaulding’s article marketing ebook, so we’re trying that model first. But you’re in our sights now…
2 questions.
1. Why do you never host all of your websites on one host? Is it because if the host fails, all of your sites go down at the same time? Or is because search engines view links from websites on different webhosts better than links within the same IP?
2. We just set up a site about bluehost but it took us over 2 weeks to get indexed at all. (We used google alerts to keep an eye.)
How did you get your niche site up on the index so quickly? What did we do wrong?
Thanks for the advice. Looking forward to watching this series.
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Thanks for the comment! I don’t have all my sites on one host for most of the reasons you stated. Matt Cutts has stated that google may in the future look unfavorably on all kinds of sites on one IP. I did read in a later article that he meant like 1,000+ sites but I’d rather be safe than sorry. The main reason is if a host pisses me off I have others immediately ready to go. BANS is a great example, it didn’t work right on goDaddy so I put it on Hostgator – no problem. Also if bandwidth is an issue on one account because a site takes off, I can move it or other sites to one of my hosts with plenty of bandwidth. I have 5 hosting accounts and I pay around $40 per month – I think that’s a pittance to pay compared to what I’m getting.
On the indexing – I don’t know what would hold up a site from getting indexed in less than 48 hours if you had some kind of content. Was it a blog, static site, BANS? It might have been google’s “sandbox” effect – I never thought of that. Brand new domains can be subject to that. Google “google sandbox” and read about it. I own 40-odd domains and I did forget for the BANS site I just took one that I hadn’t setup just yet and put this BANS site there. So MY domain wasn’t a brand new one I had just purchased – I had owned it already for the better part of a year. I have gotten domains indexed in a day or two that were brand new, but that google sandbox can really bite you sometimes. It’s in place to STOP you from getting brand new sites up quickly. Remember, google wants established sites with quality content.
I have the same indexing problem. It can really take a while when dealing with new domains. What I find works the best is getting as many links possible. Links and lots of them.
One more thing to keep in mind is to never submit a new URl to google right away. When you submit a new site to google you should be putting your sandals, getting your pale and your little shovel and prepare to play in the sand for a little while.
Even in that case, while in the ‘sand box’ try to get a PR5 and up link a couple times a week for a few weeks to speed up the process of getting out.
Anyway, great blog, great content and great post on BANS!
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This is a great walkthrough. It really broke down how BANS works and explains it in terms a newbie can understand. Thanks for helping me set up my first store.
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Thanks so much for this series! I’m still a novice and love it when I find an in depth article like this that I can dig into. Sorry for the short comment but I want to keep reading. =[]
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I am trying to follow along your tutorial. Where exactly do I enter Affiliate IDS? Which one goes where, and does an Ebay Affiliate Account id need to be put in somewhere?
Also if you look at my site when clicking many of the links, no items show up? I can’t figure it out!
Thanks for Any Help!
Mike
@Michael – in BANS 3.0, in your admin panel under #4. Affiliate Details – you just enter your EPN Campaign ID there. That’s the only affiliate ID you enter in BANS.
Alright Thank You! Could you explain what the Commission Junction is for. Thank You!
Commission Junction is an affiliate service that you can signup to promote merchants (like eBay) through. eBay used to use them and Commission Junction were the ones that paid you your monthly check. eBay took that service in house and now they track and pay their own affiliates through the eBay Parterner Network or EPN. This post was written before BANS 2.0 came out and before eBay switched over to the eBay Partner Network for tracking and payment.
Ah THank You! So If I put my campaign Id into the id box on setup. Then I should be ready to roll.
When I do enter my id, it changes it to a different number when I save it. Normal?
@Michael – no that’s not normal. When you edit and created store or content pages, do those changes save? Do other setup changes save?
My eBay partnership campaign id is: 5335992131
I type it into the setup under campaign id on my website admin panel.
It saves it. I return to page and it shows it as being: 2147483647
I have even tried changing it in the Database Manually, but it still changes to that number. IF i Put a 0 in the box and save it though. It saves a blank one.
@Michael – that’s the weirdest thing I ever heard. Submit a ticket to BANS or visit their support forum.
Michael, you need the EPN update fix download from the bans site. That ID is a generic ebay id and you obviously won’t get any credit for sales. If you install the update fix (not the full install) it will fix your problem. There are posts on this issue in the bans forum.
Very detailed post on BANS thanks for sharing.
Alright, can someone explain this to me. I want to get started on this BANS bandwagon but as I understand it I have to first be a member of Commission Junction and or a member of EPN, right? When I try to apply for membership with CJ or EPN I find out (during the process of applying online with their forms) that I first have to already have an existing website/business??? Does this make any sense? Can you please expain this process to me.
I am lost right from the start. You said at the beginning you selected “no” for home page products because you do not want ebay listed auction items on the home page, yet when I open up your site there are ebay links at the botton?? Confused from the start. How can I regard this as helpful if “what you say” is not “what you do?
Wow, that seems a bit too much for me as a newbe, I guess I would need quite some time to set that up. But I will consider that for later and follow through your series.
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