BANS Today

Get to the Top of Google

Written by mbpage on June 18, 2008

I have just finished reading Get to the top of Google by David Viney. I had been looking for a SEO book that was bang up to date and this was published early in April. It is actually a very good book, extremely well laid out, logical and pretty easy to understand even for us non-techies. I learned some good stuff particularly with regards to off page optimization and different link building strategies. David lists some great resources and these alone are worth the price of the book. What’s more you even get 6 months free access to Davids SEO Expert forum thrown in. All in all a recommended read.

I’d give it 8 out of 10.

Build a Niche Store Secrets - Research Yes Forensic Investigation No

Written by mbpage on June 13, 2008

Todays Lesson learned, number 5 I believe, is getting to grips with niche store research or not depending on your preference. 

When I initially started to look for niche stores to build there was plenty of advice available.  All of it seemed pretty good but no matter how hard I looked I coudn’t find a niche that ticked all the boxes.  Either search volume was too low, competition too high, too many other BANS stores, not enough demand, poor sell thru rates and so on.

I’ve just built my 35th store and that is the first one that I’ve identified  that met all the criteria mentioned above.  Lets see if it becomes a top performer over the next couple of months!

So where does that leave us?  Well, in the beginning I spent a couple of days looking for the perfect store and getting nowhere.  In the end I just built a couple, one did great the other not so great (too small a niche).

I’ve made several attempts at in depth research since but all it does is dampen my enthusiasm for the project so I’ve cut things right down and now all I do is this:

• Browse ebay categories in search of inspiration
• Pick one I like
• Go to terapeak and check out sell thru rates - I look for greater than 40%.
• Check out average sale price - I’m looking for items that regularly sell in excess of $100.
• Check out current auctions and look at bidding activity - Is there something happening or is everything dead.

Thats it.  It takes me about 10 mins and the evidence suggests it works pretty pretty good. Not the most scientific approach I admit, but, importantly it keeps me moving. There is one final check in relation to keywords but I’ll cover that in the next post.

I guess what I’m saying here is don’t over anal-lyze (if you get my drift).  With 35 stores I have stores that looked like they’d fly perform like dogs and stores that I thought would suck that made sales from day 1.  It’s virtually impossible to predict.

BANS Secrets | Learn Search Engine Optimization

Written by mbpage on June 11, 2008

Today we finally arrive at Lesson Learned 4. I believe this will be the most important post I have written so far and taking on board what I have to say today will either make or break you. I don’t mean to over egg this (I do really) but SEO will determine your success or failure with Build a Niche Store. When you first launch a store it seems to get a mini boost from Google for the first 30 days. You can expect some sales but once the 30 days has past the site seems to lose momentum. Without SEO that momentum will probably be lost forever. Witness my Coach store which was my top performer in April but made no sales in May! Sales from my other early stores have also fallen off.

I hadn’t really appreciated this fully when I bought the script and indeed one of the reasons there has been so much time between this and my last post is that I decided I had to understand more about SEO before building any new niche stores. I am changing my store building strategy as a result but I’ll save that for a later post.

Buying BANS means that to succeed on a, lets say, huge scale a full understanding and commitment to SEO is required. It might take an hour to put up a store but you can multiply that by 100 (over the course of a year) to properly take care of the SEO (unless you can afford to outsource that is).

Now one thing I’m not is an SEO expert but I’ve been learning fast. I’ve been tracking down great resources and I’m delighted to provide links to some really quality in this post. The web grapevine suggests the best source of SEO material can be found at SEObook. There are some great tools and freebies but Aaron no longer sells his famed e-book having switched to a monthly subscription model ($100 per month - ouch).

Next in line comes Dan Theis at SEO Fast Start who produces an awesome free e-book that will give you all the info you need to get started. Diving into this will be the BANS eye opener as the reality dawns that putting up a store is the easy bit. It was for me at least and I now have 27 stores to get back to and optimize properly (I thought I’d done an ok job as well). Actually I’m being a bit harsh on myself as I had done an ok job but not a great job. How do I know?

Well a great complementary resource which I came across courtesy of Soggy is Instant Position which will evaluate and grade site SEO on a page by page basis. You can use a limited function of this site for free but sign up for the one day trial to see the additional info that is provided and then decide if it’s worth paying extra for. My feeling is it’s definitely worth 6 months membership. Once you’ve assessed your sites 100 times you’ll pretty much have down what you need to do!

And what about those early stores? Well my off page SEO continues and I expect them to make a come back over the next 2-6 months as a result of my link building activities.

Now that may be a short post but I believe it is the most important post I’ve written to date. To succeed at BANS on a huge scale (as in I want to quit my day job) you need to become a highly competent SEO professional. And the good news is it’s not as hard as you might think. I hope you enjoy the resources.

Lesson Learned 3 - Record Keeping

Build a Niche Store Secrets - Keeping Records

Written by mbpage on June 3, 2008

In case I was a bit vague in my first post of this series I want to repeat that if you wish to build niche stores that generate organic traffic i.e. free traffic from search engines you will not make huge profits over night. It is a slow process that can be achieved but it will take approx 6 months if you are able to work on each store for 1-2 hours per week. Obviously things will take longer if you can only spend an hour per month on each store for example. I’m not posting this to scare you but rather that you understand this is not a get quick rich product. It’s a slow burn and you will be rewarded for patience persistence and hard work.

Lesson Learned 3

I wish I’d known when I started is Keep Records - that’s an exciting one isn’t it. Yes keeping records is boring as hell but you will get in one hell of a mess without them. I think I built around three stores before I started losing track of things.

I am currently developing my own system of record keeping but until it is ready hop over to Mark’s site and grab a copy of his worksheet to tide you over. Mark is a top guy and whilst your there I’d recommend you sign up for his RSS feed as he posts some great info.

This sheet records all the key information to your store and you should use it to make notes on actions taken to develop stores. It helps keep track of links, articles, content, bookmarking, directory submissions, store pages and the status of your store.

Boring it may be but good record keeping will be critical to your success. Ignore this lesson and you will lose your sanity once you have more than 20 stores.

Build a Niche Store Earnings Update

Written by mbpage on June 2, 2008

Well I’m not going to break any records but I think May ended up pretty good. The best was save till last as my utility vehicle site, which is only two weeks old stormed in with its first sale generating $80 and 31 May ended up my highest earning day of my short 2 month BANS career.

It was a mixed bag of a month. I now have 27 BANS stores and this month 15 made sales. Disturbingly last months top earner failed to make a single sale. After the initial store building burst I have now settled in to the routine of building one or tow new stores a week. This is likely to be one per week for June as I am also building a couple of wordpress adense sites at the moment following Courtney Tuttle’s Keyboard Sniper strategy. His articles on this topic are probably the best I have read on the net.

Forgive me while I digress a moment but in 4 weeks I have put together a debt site targeting a keyword that has competition of 5.5 million (that was a mistake as my initial research showed competition of 795000 which is still way more than the 30,000 or less recommended by so many). For that keyword I am currently ranked 120 and rising and using Courtney’s model I am confident of a front page listing later this year. The site is already profitable as promotion costs have been zero and earnings for May $10 which has more than paid for the domain cost of $5. I expect the site to do about $50 per day when it hits the front page of Google.

Back to Build a Niche Store. I have a couple of completely hopeless sites - only a couple of visitors in a month and with a bit more experience I can now identify the reason for this as poor keyword selection and a too general niche. To be more specific I built a store selling watches. I now believe for it to make sales I need to use long tail keywords like “Discount Omega Watches For Sale.” Easy to do but search volume is virtually zero for that term and there is still too much competition. Now I could succeed with this store by building a couple of hundred pages targeting very specific low volume keyword terms but the amount of effort required and time investment simply isn’t worth while. The time is better spent optimizing the more successful stores and building new sites. I’m not going to flog a dead horse. If it picks up on its own I will re-evaluate though.

Here’s the full approx earnings break down:

Utility Vehicles $81
Figurines $50
Fishing Gear $26
Watersports $13
Bikes $12
Collectibes $10
Motorcycles $10
Hobbies $9
Audio Equipmnet $6
Gardens $3
Binoculars £2.50
Boats $2
Guitars $1
Lighting $1
Computers 50c

I have invested a lot time this month researching link building. This off page seo technique is the key to success with Build a Niche Store and I now beleive that 50 percent of my time each day should be spent link building. I use two main techniques for this at the moment. Directory Submissions and Article Marketing and I’ll write separately about this as part of the BANS Secrets Series.

I did explore other techniques that used auto link building software and create directories on BANS stores and I am testing one of these. The software is awesome (bit of a pig to configure) works really and builds automatic link directories. The problem is it all looks a bit out of date and whilst (despite what many say) putting a directory on your site still works and is a great idea, most webmasters now appear to have nothing but appathy or contempt for this techniqe and consider your attempts to contact them as spam. I figure if I distribute an article that gets picked up by a few hundred sites this actually takes less time, is more focused and builds one way rather than recipricol links.

I do seem to have verbal diarrhea this morning so before I shoot off on another tangent let’s end it there for today. In summary then April Earnings were $85 May earnings $240. Visitors up, click throughs up, keyword rankings moving up. Everything is moving in the right direction for many stores. Will I top it in June? Maybe not and you might wonder why that is. Well my Coach site (my top earner last month) has made no sales in May - it seems to have been sand boxed but I have also read that many BANS stores do well in their first month and then spend a couple of months in the wilderness before storming back later. We’ll see how true this is over the next couple of months.