Making Money with BANS

A Monthly Report on my BANS activities

2008-11-04T09:32:00.001+13:00

October is over and looking at the figures pending in my EPN account, I can report to you that the month was not exceptional, but still acceptable in terms of revenues. I have made a little over $200 in October only in EPN. Almost all my sites contributed a bit, but there three of them did exceptionally well. I got one ACRU (eBay registration), which I worried a bit due to their "engaged traffic" issues, but my performance reports are showing very high marks so far (probably because I have very few ACRUs), so no point of worrying. I have finally reached a payment threshold in my AdSense account, so there will be an extra boost next month.

Another few good things to share is that my very first site, the main earner, that was in a sandbox almost all its existence so far is finally out and starting to pickup pace in the Google SERPs. My second website is still deep in the sandbox with Google, but apparently it's got very high in rankings on Yahoo and MSN and gathered over 2000 unique visits last month (it's a good traffic figure for me). It's a shame that most of the visitors were tire-kickers, but nevertheless, it was in the top three of my high earners.

That's it for now,
Be well,
Mik

Getting Backlinks with Directory Submissions

2008-10-21T13:33:00.002+13:00

Hello everybody,
I planned to get back to my blog earlier but circumstances have changed for me – I'm a father another time around and I'm helping as much as I can to the mommy to look after our brand new baby. And now back to business.

Directory submissions are the last technique I'm going to discuss in the subject of getting backlinks. Well, first things first and we'll start from basics: directories are websites that list other websites and group them in categories. For example, http://dir.yahoo.com/ is the Yahoo directory. Getting you websites into directories can be manual, manual-outsourced, automated, or automated-outsourced. Some websites charge for listing websites in their directories (e.g. Yahoo Directories) and some are free (e.g. dmoz).

If you select doing manual submissions, you will have to submit yourself your site to the directories manually, one by one. That's very time consuming and tiresome. In the case of manual-outsourced, you pay someone to do it manually. There're a lot of companies online offering directory submission services (and other submissions as well), but you have to be careful who you choose as cheapest is not always the best. The catch can be that you pay for manual submissions and they'll just use some automated program to submit your websites. It's hard to say whether they will or not in any case, just look for trusted sources. I'm going to advise one company that I used myself, the name is SubmitEdge . They're moderately big, affordable and trustful (in my opinion), have good customer services, and offer promotions quite often.

The automated way is to find a program that will do submissions for you and automated-outsourced is the same, but you pay someone to do it for you. I have not used automated services and I'm not going to for several reasons. First, when you do automated submissions, you usually submit to thousands directories at the same day and that will be very suspicious for any search engine, Google or not. They can even de-index your site and that kind of back-fire we really don't want to have. And another one is that submitting to thousands directories will eventually lead to submitting to not relevant directories and that can be penalized by search engines as well.

So two main things to remember when doing directory submissions: it should be relevant and it should be done gradually, not all at once.

There're still a lot to learn about backlinks and different ways of getting them, but these articles should give you a decent start and some understanding of the subject.

That's it for now, be well,
Mik

Getting Backlinks for your BANS sites: Part II (Article Submissions)

2008-09-12T15:50:00.000+12:00

Hello,

The next way of getting backlinks in our list is the Article Submissions. The article submission is writing articles about some products listed on your site and submitting them to article directories. For example, if we had a BANS site selling musical instruments, we could have written an article about Harpsichords and then submit it to one of the Article Directories, to list a few: Ezinearticles, Squidoo, and USFreeads. Somewhere in the article (anywhere if it's Squidoo or USFreeads and only at the bottom of the article if it's Ezinearticles) we would put a link to our BANS store inviting readers to come and have a look on current listings.

I have mentioned only three sites above, but there're really many more, it's just I'm using only these three and find it enough. Writing articles and submitting articles may not bring tons of traffic (but again in some cases it may if you do it smart, researching keywords etc.), but it will definitely get a backlink from a well-established sites that will be counted by search engines and that's what we're after in this exercise.

We will finish the series next time and we'll talk about directory submissions.
Until then,
Mik

Getting Backlinks for your BANS sites: Part I

2008-08-24T21:42:00.000+12:00

Hello,

I was going to start doing "Unessential Expenses with BANS: Part II" when I realized that it might be more than just a few parts as I go into details for each subject. So, we will not abandon the idea as such, but it will come under different headings.

Researching your keywords is very important at the first stage, but not less important as getting your BANS sites to the top pages of Search Engines. And that task can require spending of a few more extra bucks.

There're two things that can help you to stay on the top of the search pages: first is having backlinks to your site and being rated well by these Search Engines and second one is having relevant contents on your site. We'll talk first about having backlinks and about contents later.

First, what is exactly a backlink? A backlink is an incoming link to your website, or in other words, if the link to your site is placed anywhere outside of you website, it is a backlink.

The next question is "Why do we need these backlinks at all?" And the answer is: Search Engines rate your site by several factors and one of them is the number of backlinks to your site. If you know about Google Page Rank, it's calculated using your backlinks as well. Recently, there is a lot of tendency to move towards counting only relevant links, but at the end, if you have enough relative backlinks to your side, you will rate better.

And the final question is where to get this backlinks? There're several ways of getting them, some are more advisable, and some are less. I know the following ones, but I don't use them all: social bookmarking, article submissions, directory submissions, and link exchange.

We'll start from the one I wouldn't recommend or at least call to extreme caution if you're going to use it: the Link Exchange. In theory, it means that you have links to somebody's site that is similar to your site and they have links to your site. Sounds quite simple and not too dangerous. The problem that this process got very automated and spam-prone at the recent years and you may not have control of what sites will have links to your site and may end up with a bunch of porno sites pointing to your musical instruments BANS site. This can lead to all sorts of complications, including losing your account with ePN and getting your site completely de-indexed (removed) in Search Engines. If you do it old way, exchanging links with somebody you know and trust, it will still work fine, just don't abuse it.

The next one is Social Bookmarking. Social bookmarking means getting your links into forums and websites created for people to socialize and share news (digg.com, stumbleupon, twittle, etc.). This way of getting backlinks is mostly free, but can be very time consuming, especially if you're going to use forums. And in theory leaving a few messages here and there with a link to your BanS website(s) in your signature would do the job, except for the fact that quite a lot of forums would ban you for this kind of behaviour and delete your messages. You will need to communicate with people, get them to know you and only than you can sell (figuratively speaking). I don't do social bookmarking anymore, except for Digg. I found communicating and participating in forums is way too much time consuming for me.

I think we'll stop for now and I'll continue about other techniques in my next post.
Be well and until next time,Mik

A Monthly Report

2008-08-10T22:39:00.000+12:00

Hello,

The month is over and it's time to look at the final figures. I have to say that July was my best month so far. I made with my BANS stores over $200 not counting some small amounts accumulated on AdSense and Squidoo, which will get paid when they reach some paying threshold.

I'm pleased with the results but it would be of course nicer if it were $2,000, not just $200. But patience is a virtue my friends and we will prevail!

In this particular month, all income was from my very first store, which is fully optimised, has a bit of contents, over a hundred backlinks, and over a hundred indexed pages in Google. And despite all of these SEO goodies, it's still pretty much in the Google sandbox (I'll write about it a separate post one day, but in two words – it's not getting much organic traffic from Google) and most of the traffic surprisingly is coming from Yahoo with a very little trickle from MSN. All of my other sites are deep in the Google sandbox and not yet well ranked on Yahoo due to the lack of contents and their yet young age.

Talking about content – you might have heard this catchy phrase before, but I'll repeat it again: Content is King. There're some opponents, but for our BANS stores it holds fast and without contents we'll never see our sites getting on the first page of any search engine, at least for a long run. So, encouraged with my late progress and success, I decided to do a bit of outsourcing. I have started to order texts for my sites to speed up the process. And more about that will be in my next post, "Unessential Expenses with BANS: Part II".

I hope your sites if you have any are doing well,
And until next time,Mik

Unessential Expenses with BANS: Part I

2008-07-27T22:45:00.000+12:00

Hello,

Last time we found out how much we have to spend in order to buy and run BANS sites. Today, we're going to look at a few extra expenses that may not be necessary as such, but can prove to be quite essential to succeed with BANS.

The first area we're going to talk about is your keyword research. I'm going to have a separate post on the subject of keyword research some time later but at the time being if you're not sure what it is, let's say it's a stage when you pick up your website domain name, main categories, and subcategories. At this stage, it's very important to select correct words and phrases with reasonable (and even better minimal) competition and good potential as how much people are or will be using it.

You can of course just go with simple guesswork, but there're programs and sites that will help you to optimise your effort. There're in fact a lot of free and paid sites and programs claiming that they're the best and it can be very confusing to pick the one that will work for you and will worth trying. I'm going to mention three possible candidates.

The Wordtracker – is the biggest probably on the Internet, but one of the most expensive as well. They're very good and they have a lot of useful option. Many people are using them and I had tried myself their free trial version. I liked it but still can't justify paying $59 a month or $329 for their annual subscription for something I'm not going to use all the daylong. So, my recommendation is definitely to try their free version, but then think if it's worth it for you.

The Nichebot – is another alternative to help you to do your keyword research. I'm using it myself in fact. They're not as big as the Wordtracker, and they don't have all options and features, but they provide what you need to have – a list of keywords with all necessary statistics. Moreover, they using the feed from Wordtracker, so it's the same data. Their fees are much more acceptable: it's $9.95 a month with a free month trial. The Nichebot was a choice of my preference until just recent time when I found out that I could do the same or almost the same, but completely for free.

The Google Keyword Tool – this one was around for ages, but to put it bluntly, it was quite useless. It was giving you some abstract and vague graphs and there was no way you could interpret it into anything meaningful or useful. Not any more, now it will give you exact numbers and a few online gurus checked those numbers out already – they're pretty much on target. This tool of course target only Google searches, but it would be pretty much applicable to any other search engine.

To summarize, I would give a try to a free version of the Wordtracker, subscribed for at least a month with Nichebot, and still would keep using the Google Keyword Tool. You may get better understanding of keyword research concepts if your try a few tools rather than just use one.

Well, I think I'll wrap it up for now and we'll continue next time with directory submissions and creating contents for your site.

Until next time,
Mik

Essential expenses for BANS

2008-07-17T22:55:00.001+12:00

Hello again,

Today we'll talk about costs involved in buying and running BANS. The base price of BANS is $97, but it's not the only mandatory expense you're going to face. The amount of cash you're pouring into your online business (and you'd be better off if you treat it as a business) can be of course regulated by the tightness or lousiness of your budget.

As we are going to build websites, we'll need domain names, at least one (that's how your site is called, e.g. http://mybestsite.com) and web hosting (that's where your site(s) are living). And that's the only two necessary expenses that we must have; everything else is optional.

The cost of a brand new .com domain can be around $10 for a year. You can get them a bit cheaper if you look online for discount coupons or other promotions. Some web hosting companies would provide you with a free domain name if you sign up for their hosting services. But we'll count it just as $10 a year for now. As for recommendations, I have all my domains with NameCheap – the price is under $10, they usually have discount coupons, and provide free whois protection for all new domain name registrations. As for precautions, I'd mention 1and1 – they're quite big and may have serious promotions from time to time, but I had very bad experience with their customer services and hence wouldn't recommend them to anybody.

The cost of web hosting can vary quite a lot, as there're many types of them. Starting from cheapest shared hosting (when your account sitting together with a hundred others on the same machine) to the most expensive dedicated servers (when your account is on a dedicated or separate machine). I'm personally using shared hosting at the moment and the cost of this service can be around $10 a month.

Many domain registrar companies offer web-hosting services as well, but I found that having a company that focus only on web hosting could be more rewarding. I first had web hosting provided by NameCheap, the same guys who I have all my domains with, but they had a limit on the number of addon domains and databases. And when I almost reached the limit, I switched to Hostgator with their unlimited sub-domains and databases plan. So far I had a few problems with them (last time a few months ago), which were reasonably well handled, but unless you have a dedicated server and pay hundreds dollars a month, you should expect and be prepared to some casualties along.

Well, that's it for expenses that you must have and now we can estimate your totals. We'll calculate the cost of running BANS for 1 and 12 sites for one year:

For one site:
BANS: $97
Domain: $10
Web Hosting: $120
----------------------
Total for one site for one year: $227
That means your site needs to bring at least $19 a month to break it even.

And now for a dozen:
BANS: $97
Domains: $120
Web Hosting: $120
----------------------
Total for twelve sites for one year: $337
And in this case your sites need to bring just $3 a month to break it even. I hope the maths is clear :)

You have to be careful nevertheless as having too many sites means you won't have enough time to spend on them doing SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and without it, they may not bring any profit at all. So you need to find this golden ratio for the number of sites you want to maintain. I have twelve sites at the moment and frankly it seems as a bit too much; six probably was the number I was looking for but apparently got a bit too greedy ;) or rather not experienced.

Well, that's enough reading for one post. You should be clear about essential expenses for BANS now and next time we'll talk about other expenses, some more essential and some less.

Until next time,
Mik

Introduction

2008-07-11T19:19:00.000+12:00

Hello,

My name is Mik and I'm starting this blog in order to share my experience of using the BANS (Build A Niche Store) system, talk about different techniques, approaches, and tricks to make this system working and even just discuss various sides and aspects of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) in general.

I have started using BANS about 7 months ago now and even I haven't quit my day job (which I like by the way and not thinking of quitting yet), I have managed to make some money with BANS and I'm sure I have one or two things to share with somebody who is just about to dive in or just started using the system and wants to start making money with BANS.

I want to state right away that I'm not a guru or pretending to be one, and everything shared in this blog may or may not help you, but sadly as it often happens in life, something what works for me, not necessarily will work for you and vice versa.

Well first thing's first, and if you're not familiar with BANS or familiar but not enough, please read this article first, it may be informative and hopefully entertaining ;)

And a little disclaimer at the end: all links to all sites and tools in this blog have my affiliate link in them, meaning that if you click the link and subscribe for something, I'll get a penny dropped into my piggy bank – that's basically how all affiliate marketing works including BANS itself. I think it's fair as a good and timely advice is worth much more than a penny ;) Also, I'm going to recommend you things outside of BANS, but I'm not going to recommend you something that I'm not using or what I tried and found not as useful as the owners of these tools might be saying.

That's it for now, be well.
Mik