Getting Started with BANS: Build A Niche Store

Build A Niche Store (or simply BANS, is it's called amongst the user community) is a simple software program that lets the most clueless of beginners start their own eBay affiliate website.

With its low cost and ease of use, it has gone down in affiliate marketing history as one of the most popular storefront software packages ever made. Complete with a pictorial installation guide and a bustling community, BANS is a favorite amongst those looking to get started in the world of affiliate marketing - specificially with the extremely profitable eBay EPN program.

How it works: when you are accepted as an eBay affiliate, you'll have the ability to list eBay product widgets or feeds on your website. Every time somebody clicks one of these widgets or product feeds, a tracking cookie is dropped on their computer. Whatever they buy within the next 7 days pays off a commission to you, based on a percentage of the seller's fee that was paid to eBay. The commission varies, but there's one thing any affiliate marketer will tell you: it REALLY ads up on a month by month basis! Build A Niche Store makes this process easy on you, since you won't need to program (or hire a programmer to create) a website that displays feeds in an organized hierarchal format.

Through a simple and relatively un-cluttered interface, Build A Niche Store gives you access to a variety of tools you'll need to create a fully search engine optimized affiliate website that will display feeds from eBay. You'll need to apply to eBay Partner Network (or ePN...had enough acronyms yet?) in order to earn money from sales made through your website. In essence, the method for creating a website follows this typical path, after a quick install of the BANS software on your server:

1. Think of a "niche" product you'd like to sell: whether it's used golf balls or foreign car antennas, chances are that there are a ton of them being sold on eBay. Do some research. If you're happy with the results, and the competition on Google isn't horribly bad, you may have a great niche on your hands!
2. Find that niche product's category on eBay: Build A Niche Store will walk you through this quick process. Basically, all eBay categories have an ID#. Simply input this ID# into BANS, and it will automatically pull all of that product's categories into your website, essentially building the site for you on the fly.
3. Adjust the categories on your BANS site: Step 2 basically created a "clone" of eBay's product category on your site. As you may have imagined, that has a whole slew of duplicate content issues that search engines won't like. It's time to rename those categories! Adjust their titles, delete the ones you don't want, or create better ones (eBay typically makes bad choices when naming their categories...do better for your BANS site, and beat them in search engine results!)
4. Start writing content! Not only will search engines better associate your pages with the descriptions you type on them, but people will take your site more seriously. Nothing looks more "spammy" or unprofessional than a website that has nothing but products listed, with no descriptions of the product, helpful links, or anything else that a user expects to see. Make sure every page of your BANS site has some content on it! 200 characters are ideal, but a few sentences will do the trick for those really drilled-down sub pages.
5. Odds & Ends: Once your BANS site appears to be good to go in terms of content, it's time to finish the job by changing the look. Build A Niche Store gives you options to help you change the "default look" of your store, by swapping out the header and changing colors. If you're a CSS beginner, simply edit the organized style.css file within the admin panel itself (don't forget to CHMOD these files to make them write-able, first). BANS comes complete with several different template layouts, for those who like left or right-hand bars, and other configurations.
   

Once you've gotten the gist of using Build A Niche Store, you'll be able to easily update your site. As you probably know, search engines (especially Google) favor sites that constantly have new inclusions. So, you'll want to add a new product page each week. It's a simple task that is easy as creating a new page, typing in a keyword query, adding your content and publishing it. eBay will pull in a list of current products selling for that keyword/category, and it will now be a new fixture on your BANS website.

As your BANS site grows and develops, you'll undoubtedly promote it by writing articles and building links through social bookmarking accounts. Note that promoting an affiliate website is by far one of the most difficult online ventures, as you will not only want to hide your "niche" from other marketers who are eager to steal your idea, but you will have to advertise it in a non-spammy way that will build legitimate links to your affiliate site, and help it rank for the keywords you've chosen.

A popular old strategy in the golden years of the eBay affiliate program was to create dozens (or hundreds) of low-quality sites that earned at least $1 per day, each. This practice will easily put up a red flag in the eBay Partner Network office, and may lead to your getting banned from the program altogether. ePN has been ruthless with handing out account terminations since early 2008. Therefore, make sure your BANS sites are complete with content -- ePN is known to check up on their members manually!

There's no doubt about it: if you're just entering the world of affiliate marketing or want to get in on the eBay bandwagon, Build A Niche Store is the best way to start. Consider it an amazing learning experience, from the time where you break even with the cost of buying BANS (which is only under $100), to when you start earning a steady monthly income. Mix and match niches - don't only go for "micro-niches", but try out larger ones, too.

When it comes to competing with other BANS users, you'll notice that the majority of them are "set it and forget it" practitioners. It's easy to overcome them in search engine rankings by simply doing a better job, and putting more content on your site.

You'll not only learn everything you ever wanted to know about affiliate marketing and the ePN program, but you can also include Google AdSense ads on your Build A Niche Store site, or even Amazon Affiliate widgets to maximize your earnings. Before you know it, you'll be on your 5th or 10th site! Keep updating your sites here and there to keep them "fresh," and you'll undoubtedly have a network of sites pulling in steady risidual income for you on a monthly basis.