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Build A Niche Store – Setup A Storefront In Minutes

Posted November 27th, 2007 by Jeremy Schoemaker

Build A Niche

It’s that time of year when people blow their wads on online shopping. It’s also the time of year that affiliates can really bank hardcore… but many lack the skills to build a nice oriented store. I was checking out some of these “instant” storefronts and thought I would give building a niche store a go….

When I first went to the site I wasn’t really that impressed… I also had a hard time finding the purchase button. I did manage to find it though. $97.00 Paypal and a redirect later I was able to download the store files.

So I thought if I am going to do this…I better do it right ;) . I registered shoemoneyshoes.com with godaddy and waited for the dns to take effect… (I tried not to use any of our own resources that any of my readers would not have available). Uploaded the files through FTP and proceeded to follow the step my step instructions.

So I put in the basic database information about my host (username,password,database name) the normal stuff then I am presented with the admin control panel:

Pretty smooth so far… so I go through all the options… first changing my password and username then hitting the settings. I am presented some basic setting options like store name and keywords… category… put in your ebay affiliate id etc..

Obviously I chose some shoe categories.

Then I choose which template I wanted (I went with a 3 column)

Then in the ads section you can put in advertising code… you can put in pretty much anything you want.. Adsense or whatever… In my case I put in Zappos affiliate banners (Zappos is by far the best for shoes).

The ONLY thing I custom edited was the header. I had an old image a friend of mine made that I just added the words Shoemoney shoe store to.

Literally 10 minutes start to finish I have a great looking working storefront on Shoemoney Shoe Store

This is of course showing live items on eBay and also advertisements from zappos for shoes. 2 of the best paying affiliate programs on the market.

Build A Niche store is some really SWEET software. If you are looking at firing up a niche store I highly recommend it. I did not need it but they have a very busy support forum with people available 24/7 to answer any questions or just to talk about how stuff works.

They also have a really nice affiliate program which pays out $44 per sale (%50) commission.

I think this software is pretty amazing for as cheap as it is…. even for those who do know what they are doing there is some great code in there you can learn a lot from (if you are thinking about doing your own thing).

Disclaimer

Before acting on this post, be sure to read my Disclaimer.

- Comment Likes - Comment Dislikes

206 comments. What say you?

  1. Good Comment?
    Amazon Scraper

    With the latest changes in Ebay’s affiliate program (payment per click) some of the biggest affiliates have left Ebay. Amazon again became a great alternative.

    Optimal Product Finder is the premier windows based solution for scraping the Amazon Product Advertising API. Optimal Product Finder (OPF) compiles a CSV (Comma Seperated Value) file to use in other scripts to create Affiliate Niche Sites and earn money with Amazon’s Associates Program.

  2. Good Comment?
    Ankit Nahar

    I think i am aleady 2 years late on this BANS program. Well gotta give it a try now anyway.

  3. Good Comment?
    Build a Niche Store Video

    BANS is a great way to get started in affiliate marketing because it is so easy to set up and get it running.

    The important thing is to focus on different ways to get traffic rather than relying on google. If you do that, you can easily and quickly build a network of profitable stores.

    Here’s one of mine. http://www.probandgear.com/

    You can see that with a little bit of customization, you can really make these unique.

  4. Good Comment?
    Build a Niche Store Guide

    I know this post is old and many folks who use BANS are already well on their way to success with it, but I wanted to let you know about a new BANS Guide that is being released in a week or so.

    Looks like Adam and Kelvin, the original dev’s of Build a Niche Store are releasing a new guide to help everyone get with it!

    Mark

  5. Good Comment?
    ShriNagesh

    Amazing review and guide for BANS.

  6. Good Comment?
    Xbox

    Thats very cool if you could get it ranked high it could be a good earner.

  7. Good Comment?
    Build Niche Store

    SEO in the Build a Niche Store software is too generic to be any good. It is best to do your keyword research and define your main titles, and keywords for each category in your store then individually add them in for at LEAST your main money and popular items.

  8. Good Comment?
    Jonathan Castro

    BANS is expensive. Check out this course instead – it enables you to create your own niche store from scratch, and costs only a fraction of the price ($37).

    http://www.7dayebaystore.com

    Jon.

  9. Good Comment?
    ndesigns

    (Build a Niche Store) is the hot phrase this season and with good reason. Shoemoney not only mentions it in his blog, but my affiliate manager gave a distinct nudge in the direction as well. And it’s all good for

  10. Good Comment?
    Steve

    I agree that it is easy to build the site but promoting it is a bit difficult. Google won’t come to you and knock on your website’s door.

  11. Good Comment?
    GolfSpy X

    Was wondering what your opinion was when you compare (Build A Niche Store vs. PHPBay Pro w/ Wordpress)?

  12. Good Comment?
    Nate Hill

    Yeh if anyone can reply to this I will probably consider buying BANS but there are rumours that this might me the case/

  13. Good Comment?
    CodeFreedom

    It wil be interesting to see how eBay manage the change over from CJ to their own new Partner Network. Is BANs on top of this? I am considering buying BANs but wonder will it be obsolete when eBay drop CJ. Would anybody know. Thanks.

  14. Good Comment?
    pc store

    I set this one up a couple of weeks ago, traffic is low at the moment.

  15. Good Comment?
    Daniel

    They got hacked and are having hosting problems… they should be up soon, hopefully.

  16. Good Comment?
    Adam

    i just bought it last week and never got a confirm email until I sent a couple of emails. Now when I go to the site, it says This Account Has Been Suspended. Don’t know if it’s just my account or the whole site.

  17. Good Comment?
    Diane Lefrandt

    BANS must be down. I can’t access the website at all. Does anyone know why?

  18. Good Comment?
    specmoney

    Not sure about Wordpress, I’ve read that it works well, and I know that BANS does have an option to add their software to an already built site as well. I built a BANS store, and I’m happy to say that it’s taken 3 months, but I’m profitable already for the month of March. I’ve surpassed the spending for the site and hosting, and have made a profit of $10, not much but very excited.

  19. Good Comment?
    Affiliate Marketing Tool Reviews

    So is anyone actually using BANS Build A Niche Store successfully with Wordpress, because it would be an awesome combination?

  20. Good Comment?
    Chris

    Great article–I would never have known about this software. I think I will have to check it out. Let me ask you this: have you made any sales? Or I should say, how many sales have you made?

  21. Good Comment?
    File Snatcher

    For those who have these types of sites, how do you go about marketing them? Do you just use PPC programs?

  22. Good Comment?
    Syed Balkhi

    by promoting your store on websites. Adwords, buying banners, text links etc.

  23. Good Comment?
    Dave King

    What an informative post! Good job. I used to use BANS a lot. Recently though i’ve started switching over to Compare4.us it’s basically a hosted bans with more options. Love it :) BANS is still good!

  24. Good Comment?
    bruce

    I’ve been slowly working on my Build a Niche Store and have made about $10 in the last two months. The great thing beside actually making money though is the learning of building websites. I’ve never done that before, but since I’ve been tweaking it a little here and there I’m getting an understanding of websites. Build a Niche is a great tool.

  25. Good Comment?
    Bob

    Just wanted to thank everyone for their post… learned some things about BANs that I haven’t thought of. I have one BAN site only and haven’t made anything yet.

  26. Good Comment?
    Mark - Niche Store Builder

    Great tutorial running at the site in sig…

    Build a Niche Store Empire in 12 Weeks – Now if I could only get Jeremy to let me run with his shoemoneyshoes site! LOL

  27. Good Comment?
    Simlock verwijderen

    I have yesterday started my niche store, and i have now 1 sale.

  28. Good Comment?
    Ty Brown

    You never mention in the article how successful the venture turned out.

  29. Good Comment?
    Free Xbox 360 Package

    if you have the experience and right attitude then yes

  30. Good Comment?
    domprofesor

    This looks kool. Must give it a try.

  31. Good Comment?
    Powered by Build a Niche Store

    If anyone wants me to list their bans site, give me a shout out and I’ll give you a free link to yo niche store.

  32. Good Comment?
    Neo2012

    Great info on BANS. I have several sites and have set up a pixel page to display custom headers and provide a link to my BANS Sites. The site if free if you wish to place your header and link it back to your BANS site. You can take a look here..
    http://www.million-dollar-website.com/pixel/public_html/index.php?grid=3

    Thanks

    Neo2012

  33. Good Comment?
    balootisme

    this BANS is cool…

    but i can’t sign-up as affiliates with CB because im from malaysia.

    and CB had ban malaysia….

  34. Good Comment?
    TheNicheStoreBuilder

    Just thought I would jump in on this post and offer a bit of insight. First, I have been a developer for several years, worked my way into SEO because, well, I had to!

    I bought BANS in August to monetize several domains and I have not looked back yet! I currently have about 15-20 BANS sites open and while earnings fluctuate… the combined total has grown into the $xxxx.xx range in less than 6 months.

    It IS NOT a point, click, earn $$ script… and you will need to spend 6-12 hours on a site to make it unique! On all my sites, I load it up and through a few hours of keyword research, focus on developing a menu based on long tail phrases. That being said… once you invest 6-12 hours into a site, it WILL perform for you! After the initial creation, you revisit and view the logs once or twice a month, add/edit your menus to target your strong terms and the traffic increases steadily!

    The MOST important thing you MUST to a BANS site is make it unique! Im not talking about the visual look, I am talking about the text menus. Dont settle on the default categories the script peels from eBay or you will have nothing more than a site identical to what hundreds of people, including eBay, are already doing.

    Someone said you dont get indexed well… you only get indexed as deep as you create your own structure, while remaining niche focused. The design of the sites can be as simple or detailed as you want with header/footer files and you are only held back by your imagination.

    I have a written a series of posts on my site… it is called “The Niche Store Process” (Google it – you will find it) and outlines every step you should take with a BANS site…. from what is this internets thing, to, I made my first sale!

    Great script, cheap, indexes well, has unique cxontent, changes by the minute… takes less than 1 hour a month to maintain once it is up and running! Who could ask for anything more!

    Default site: racecars-forsale(dot)com
    Optimized site: getaracecar(dot)com

    Mark

  35. Good Comment?
    balibuddy

    Nice ! how much ?

  36. Good Comment?
    Affiliate Confession

    You don’t really need a new site as long as you are on UNIX hosting. I have a couple of sites where I just installed BANS in a new directory.

  37. Good Comment?
    Make money now

    i like the way you teach us the way to implement it, very clear and straight forward.

  38. Good Comment?
    Affiliate Marketing Podcast

    Pretty much, but the best ones utilize other affiliate programs, and provide unique content. It’s all about the content as usual.
    ~ Dave

  39. Good Comment?
    Affiliate Marketing Podcast

    I reckon the SEO is done pretty well. Wordpress is just superior in every way SEO-wise to everything though.
    ~ Dave

  40. Good Comment?
    Affiliate Marketing Podcast

    And a heck load of SEO (luckily out of the box BANS does this quite well).
    ~ Dave

  41. Good Comment?
    Affiliate Marketing Podcast

    I’ve been using the BANS for the past 15 days. It’s made me $95.16 so I’m definitely happy with it. If I can get a passive $100-$200 a month I’ll be happy.

    ~ Dave

  42. Good Comment?
    Ray Rivett

    Hello All,
    Just a question and some input I am based in Australia and our domain names are ex penises up to $35.00 for 2 years How important is it that I use a ( com.au ) domain being in Australia against using a( .com ) Also here in Australia you have to have a resisted business name to get a( com.au ) domain. that would mean a new business name for every site.at $ 75.00 each.
    Does any one use a sub domain for the web site. That way I could just change the sub domain for each site.
    Second Quest is it better to use wordpress than Niche store,
    as there are more templates for wodspress
    Does any one use WordPress for all there sites
    Thanking you all

  43. Good Comment?
    Life is Colourful

    Well, it looks simple from what you say here… but I have a big problem… I dont have anything to sell as of now except my advice – anyone wanna buy? ;)

  44. Good Comment?
    Naomi Campbell

    Hello…Thanks for the nice read, keep up the interesting posts about naomi campbell mystery..what a nice Wednesday .

  45. Good Comment?
    commandos

    only if u live in the usa

  46. Good Comment?
    Mary

    cj.com really stinks.

    Do you know that they have included in their terms that they can cancel your account at any time WITHOUT NOTIFYING YOU? I found that out when I signed up with them before my site was completely done. I got decent traffic about 3 months after signing up with them (fundraising site) and thought I had sold dozens of items, because I had several groups signed up to shop through my site. WHen I tried to sign on, they had deleted my account, just like that, without even an e-mail. When I called, I was told “you should have read the terms, it’s in the terms…” blah blah. They suck!

    So ebay is with mediaplex.com as well? I might just try that.

  47. Good Comment?
    Paul

    not as easy as I thought. You have to have a tax ID to be a ebay affiliate

  48. Good Comment?
    Paul

    Not as easy as I thought. You have to have a tax ID to be a ebay affiliate.

  49. Good Comment?
    deano

    The trick is simple – If you buy a .net/.org that directly competes with a .com of the same name, then consumer confusion will ensue… And that .com might get business that was meant for you.

    But, if the only similarity is the name, then worst case, you’ll lose a percentage of browsers who are too lazy to hit google once their first attempt fails.

    But the others are right – especially for any kind of indirect traffic (search engines, referrals), it’s a non-issue. The only thing you’re jeopardizing by not getting the .com is someone typing the URL in directly (because we’ve all been trained to type .com).

    Just make the best site you can, with the best domain name, and don’t stress over the TLD too much – but, you know, make sure every .net you own outranks the equivalent .com – push that bastard off the first results page if you can.

  50. Good Comment?
    commandos

    Wohoooooooooo just made my first sell :D

    Thank’s Shoeeeeeeeemoneeeeeeey !!!!

  51. Good Comment?
    Kelvin

    The reason it is like this is because BANS utilizes the eBay rss feed which doesn’t allow you to bring the actual final product pages onto your site.

    However, using the “store page” feature inside the admin panel will enable you to create new store pages for as many of your target markets search queries as you like – types of products, brands of products, individual listings of products,

    If you do a bit of optimization and link building and then check your traffic logs in a couple of weeks I’m sure you’ll be surprised at the amount of long tail keyword search queries that come through to these stores pages.

    You should also find that conversion is higher than with the Amazon script as the site visitor is being directed to eBay earlier in the process. The most important thing is to get your affiliate cookie on the browsers computer – if you analyze your CJ stats you’ll often find you have eBay commissions for items which aren’t related to your niche.

  52. Good Comment?
    James B.

    I’ve been thinking about making a niche store to compliment my hunting blog but i haven’t gotten around to it yet.

  53. Good Comment?
    Al

    I’ve just created a couple of BANS site and am pleased with the ease of setup and the look of the sites. However, I am very disappointed about the following:

    When search engines crawl a BANS site, all the product/item links end up on eBay and do not get indexed as pages of our site. If someone is seaching for a particular item, it will never be found as a page on our site. The only way into our site is via the home page or other store/content pages. As a result, we must work hard to drive traffic to our sites, so that visitors will see the eBay listings.

    I’m comparing this to another product I use, Assoicate-O-Matic, which is an Amazon affiliate front end similr to BANS. When a visitor (or seach engine crawler) clicks on a listed item or product, the resulting page is still on my site. All the pertinent information and images are extracted from Amazon and recreated on my site. This is important because it creates thousands of search engine-indexed pages on my site. Nearly all of my seach engine-driven traffic comes through a specific item page, not through the home page or content pages. I get natural organic traffic for all the items pages without having to work to drive traffic to the home page, as is necessary with BANS.

    Maybe, in a future release, BANS can find a way to create item pages on our sites so that we can benefit from natural search engine traffic for each item.

  54. Good Comment?
    Ken Savage

    that’s $97 not $47

  55. Good Comment?
    Fred Krager

    I’ve been using bans for the past few weeks. At first I was going to code something similar, but for a slow coder like myself it was better to buy it. Looking forward to hearing how shoemoneyshoes.com performs.

  56. Good Comment?
    mike

    This seems Like a great idea and is worth trying. thanks for the tip Shoemoney

  57. Good Comment?
    Dot Driven

    I’ve wanted to grab BANS for a while now but never felt the push enough to spend the $100. But would be fun to play around for the holiday shopping season.

    Anyone interested in giving me a deal through clickbank lol?

  58. Good Comment?
    lyricsreg

    There’s a lot more freedom of customization with the payed version

  59. Good Comment?
    Brian

    Agree that it’s going to take some unique content to get it moving. If you buy BANS and don’t do any extra work, then you’ve wasted your money. Unless you have an awesome bog to link to it like Shoe does, then you’ve got a pretty awesome chance!

  60. Good Comment?
    JennyHow

    yea, i have been trying this ebay affiliate program this month too, makes some easy money with it, probably it’s the holiday season.

  61. Good Comment?
    Stuart

    There’s a cheaper Wordpress plugin that you can use to the same effect, it’s got a few cooler options but take a bit longer to set up.

    I did a brief experiment with it here:

    http://www.earnersblog.com/dominate-ebay-affiliate-program/

  62. Good Comment?
    Dan

    I may be missing the mark entirely but why would you not signup as ebay affiliate and then use their store building tools directly?
    It’d save us those $90 something setup cost and that needs to be done is cut/paste the ebay provided coded onto your website. Or what did i miss?

  63. Good Comment?
    Vermilk

    I did something similar on my boxingmadness.com website. If you go to the main page and click on the “Buy It” tab at the top you will see ebay ads related to boxing.

  64. Good Comment?
    Dave1167

    This is similar to Affilistore which is free but uses all types of product feeds not just ebay. Here is a site which I built using affilistore The next version of Affilistore is rumoured to include loads of new features but may be a charge for it

  65. Good Comment?
    mike

    Competition as in affiliate.

  66. Good Comment?
    Neon

    Saw this build a niche site some time ago. it is currently only using ebay feed. will be better if they are also able to include some other feeds.

  67. Good Comment?
    Gecko Tales

    That’s what I wonder too Jim

  68. Good Comment?
    MyGoodFinds

    Thanks for this post! I was thinking something like this but all the updates to do by hand is a full time job! I’ll look into it.

  69. Good Comment?
    30 Day Man

    That was a great post Shoe, lashing out on an affiliate product like the man on the street and reviewing it in detail. Love it.
    Good to hear it was useful, for someone who struggles with the ‘deeper’ code side, this could be much more convenient.

  70. Good Comment?
    jim

    Thanks for bringing up Zlio, I didn’t realize BANS was ebay only, thanks iLan.

  71. Good Comment?
    jim

    Incoming links! That’s the key! :)

  72. Good Comment?
    jim

    Are all these “stores” just eBay filters?

  73. Good Comment?
    jim

    You either learn or you pay someone to learn

  74. Good Comment?
    jim

    I think she meant how do they get the store… and the answer is by linking to it from shoemoney. :)

  75. Good Comment?
    Jason Brailow

    Wow, it looks “search Engine Friendly” too! I may buy a copy! Great review..

  76. Good Comment?
    James Pegram

    Wow, cool app. Thanks for the heads up Shoe. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen anything on clickbank that’s actually worth the money. This sure is and kudos to Kevin & Adam for putting together a solid app.

  77. Good Comment?
    Iantrepreneur

    just make your BANS not look like a BANS – I edited the layout a bit to suite my needs and not make it look like a BANS store – there really is not competition for uniqueness

  78. Good Comment?
    Affiliate Confession

    BANS is just a script and you can customize it as much as you want, there aren’t any limitations. I’ve added it as another directory to websites I’ve had going for 4 years now.

  79. Good Comment?
    Iantrepreneur

    you can customize your layout the way you want put multiple amazon zone on there if you want – but BANS is strictly an ebay feed – but that does not limit you to sell amazon related things

  80. Good Comment?
    Iantrepreneur

    that is why you learn – and read :) the best part of doing something is not knowing what you are getting in to

  81. Good Comment?
    Iantrepreneur

    why would they be slapped?

  82. Good Comment?
    Iantrepreneur

    mediaplex.com as well

  83. Good Comment?
    Tyler

    What other store fronts would you recommenend if you do not want an Ebay store front. Looks like you are limited to Ebay only with BANS. Will they let you sell other things?

  84. Good Comment?
    Tyler

    Are you goig to add this store to your shoemoney site?

  85. Good Comment?
    Bulbboy

    Anyway to integrate BANS with AuctionAds to get the higher affiliate tier?

  86. Good Comment?
    Bulbboy

    Wow! Amazing idea.

    Sounds a tad familiar. ;)

  87. Good Comment?
    Affiliate Confession

    This script isn’t useless! Someone put together a great product that’s easy to work with gee, I would call that pretty useful. Do you have to market it? Absolutely! But you have to have something to market. I could care less about the $97 cost because I’ve already earned that back many times over. BANS is a great product.

  88. Good Comment?
    Ed

    Because a script is useless. Setting up “a niche store” like this is going to get you no results, as ultimately your ability to market it is what gives you results.

    The script is irrelevant. Anyone looking to setup something like this is better off going to hotscripts.com, entering “ebay” into the search bar and hitting search. BANS is on that list as well, but so are a few other and free scripts.

  89. Good Comment?
    Joeychgo

    I figured this was a paid post. I had pointed BANS out to jeremy months ago and suggested he create a similar script that uses auctionads instead. I have suggested this to the new owners of AA as well – to no avail. I have no clue why this hasnt been done since it makes so much sense to me.

  90. Good Comment?
    Joeychgo

    Yes – cj.com

  91. Good Comment?
    Joeychgo

    I agree to the extent its easier to brand a .com – but you can do just as well with a .org or a .net. I dont like .info personally, and never bought one.

  92. Good Comment?
    Joeychgo

    I believe its an unlimited license, so you can use it on as many sites as you like

  93. Good Comment?
    Ed

    I’m intrigued, how much did you get paid for this blog post? Or did you get a deal with them where they do server side check on whether a visitor comes from shoemoney.com and then assign you commission based on whether or not they bought something. If this blog post gets 50 people to buy their product, you’ve made $2.2k with just a post. Now that’s pretty ingenious.

  94. Good Comment?
    Chip

    Great stuff! I had a similar article on the list waiting for December. I really want to have an article about how to start your own online store. Yours is a great source of inspiration.

  95. Good Comment?
    ms danielle

    that’s pretty tight. i’ve seen their aff program but never tried it as a user. was this just for example, or will you be optimizing this site some more? looks like it will make some cash…

  96. Good Comment?
    lyricsreg

    You are right, Shoe … it took a few minutes to setup a good looking website. The question now is : how long will it take for that website to earn 100$ ? Months ? Years ?

  97. Good Comment?
    CatherineL

    Thanks. That looks really straightforward and easy to use. I may give it a shot sometime.

  98. Good Comment?
    GemViper

    Learned from the best shoe. It was a worthy link too, I copied and pasted it in no time flat. An affiliate link on a thread promoting internet spam.. err… affiliate sites = bad. Got it.

  99. Good Comment?
    Will

    wow it doesn’t seem too hard to make either. I’m surprised I haven’t seen more people do this.

  100. Good Comment?
    commandos

    by the way why you dont add referals in ur posts ? and what is the difference between adding referelas in a post and the ads on the left ?

    Maybe later you will make a blog post about it

    http://www.shoemoney.com/2007/10/10/if-you-dont-place-ads-on-your-blog-now-youll-hate-yourself-later/

    but instead if you dont place referals on your blog post now youll hate yourself later :p

  101. Good Comment?
    belowapound

    Now here is a cool BANS site:

    http://www.belowapound.com

    Nice original idea huh? :)

  102. Good Comment?
    David Weinrot

    Shoe, you should drop in your Shopzilla code and build a store with our listing. For example, here is an XML Request for women’s shoes from Zappos.

  103. Good Comment?
    Crazy Schemer

    Shoemoney, why don’t you just manually set reader’s cookies to CJ instead? :b

  104. Good Comment?
    ClarkeW

    I’ve actually used the wordpress plugin phpBay and I’ve had some good success with it so far. I’m sure it’s nowhere as easy to setup as BANS, but I’ve found it to be very customizable though. I think that I’ll give BANS a try and see how it compares.

  105. Good Comment?
    commandos

    Thanks shoemoney for this great post , will get mine soon :D

  106. Good Comment?
    commandos

    You still can integrate it into your existing site , no ?

    do you really need a new site … ?

  107. Good Comment?
    commandos

    is it hard to add ? or its like wordpress u just choose the category and it will be added ?

  108. Good Comment?
    commandos

    he just launched it .. give it some time ..

  109. Good Comment?
    JoeTech.com

    There’s a few people on ebay using similar programs to put together sites pretty quickly and turn them over for a few hundred bucks all day long.

  110. Good Comment?
    Rita

    Oops, forgot the site. “This is my lastest store, something FUN for the holidays that my husband and I do each year. The BANS store is integrated into the site. You’ll find it just under GIFT IDEAS. ” http://www.Jolly-Holiday-Letters.com

  111. Good Comment?
    Chris Jacobson

    What company runs the eBay affiliate program? CJ.com?

  112. Good Comment?
    David Smit

    I clicked on the Buildanichestore link and I got antivirus spam pages.

  113. Good Comment?
    Christine

    Right, you need to add unique content on each page. But there are many ways to get traffic for free not dependent on organic search traffic.

  114. Good Comment?
    Christine

    There are at least 2 people that I know of that make over 1k a month with their BANS sites. One guy did over 5k last month with 13 sites. He does work on getting traffic though from free sources. About 5 to 6 hours a day he works on it.

  115. Good Comment?
    Christine

    Yes it sure did. I earned $50 in the first week. That was from 2 new ebay signups. I use Adwords to drive traffic to each page. The CTR is always very good due to each page on the site has it’s own ad group. I pay .01 per click on the content network and .08 and less for the search network. There are lots of ideas on how to get traffic in the BANS forum.

  116. Good Comment?
    Christine

    It was an expired domain with a PR of 3 so I snapped it up.

  117. Good Comment?
    Christine

    Nope. Buy it through your Clickbank id for $47 and you use for an infinite number of install.s

  118. Good Comment?
    Christine

    It’s a stock photo that I cropped and added text to it in Photoshop. I’m sure any free image editor could do it.

  119. Good Comment?
    Affiliate Confession

    You can customize the tags on every page of your site and I haven’t had any trouble getting my site indexed. I’ve had BANS for 2 months and made over $500 with it so far. It’s working pretty darn good for me.

  120. Good Comment?
    Affiliate Confession

    I set up this store http://www.usgoldcoinauctions.com/ two months ago and made $100 on Sunday in eBay commissions. I have 6 stores. I have also sold 6 copies through their affiliate program. I have definitely earned back my investment many times over.

  121. Good Comment?
    Affiliate Confession

    I set up this site http://www.usgoldcoinauctions.com/ 2 months ago. I made $100 on Sunday in eBay commissions and I’ve made nearly $500 so far this month with this one site. I have 6 stores. I have definitely covered my $97 investment.

  122. Good Comment?
    tony dee

    Really smooth integration with this program. However I use a WP derivative for all of my own ebay specific niche products at my site.

  123. Good Comment?
    Lazlo

    How long before a trillion new BANS get slapped by the Google Gods of Nor Cal?

  124. Good Comment?
    Lazlo

    How long before the rush of a trillion BANS get slapped by the Google Gods?

  125. Good Comment?
    GemViper

    I’m REALLY looking like a dumass trying to slip in my affilaite link

  126. Good Comment?
    賃貸 大阪

    The thing I don’t like about Ebay is that it is more difficult to do international transactions.

  127. Good Comment?
    賃貸 大阪

    I had the same question. A lot of the out of the box tools are in bloated code (xcart, monstercommerce, etc.)

  128. Good Comment?
    Common Sense

    Reading their site, it looks like a good starter system. They provide the hosting for you, so there is already some sort of existing traffic for you to pull from. I might try it tonight. Thanks iLan.

  129. Good Comment?
    iantrepreneur

    I use BANs too and I customized everything on there – the horrible gay 3 column layouts to the internal tables for the ebay layouts – I just didn’t like it too much – I even wrote about it on my blog on how annoying it was – BTW my name is my BANS store

  130. Good Comment?
    Common Sense

    Fabian,

    Similar question I asked Christine. Have you covered you investment with this site?

  131. Good Comment?
    Common Sense

    Christine,

    Can you give us a sense of your return with your sites? Have you covered your investment through sales already?

  132. Good Comment?
    nate

    It seems like BANS stinks for SEO. If you look at a lot of sites in Google that use BANS they don’t get a lot of content or pages crawled. The only other pages that seem to get crawled are the category pages and they don’t seem to have very good meta tags.

  133. Good Comment?
    Rita

    I have been using BANS successfully for about a year and, like many others, am absolutely ADDICTED to BANS! This is my lastest store, something FUN for the holidays that my husband and I do each year. The BANS store is integrated into the site. You’ll find it just under GIFT IDEAS.

    As for ideas on finding niches, there is some great advice and marketing help availabe at http://www.TheNicheStoreBuilder.com. Follow those suggestions and you will have a winner site!

    And be sure to let me know once you are http://www.BANSaddicted.com!! ;-)

  134. Good Comment?
    Niche Stores

    hmmm nichestores…. shameless plug…. a concept that I had an attempt at a while back

  135. Good Comment?
    SonicReducer

    Great point. Building a site is one thing. Getting traffic to it is something else completely.

  136. Good Comment?
    Mike Seiler

    Yep… look at all those low traffic sites like botw.org, wordpress.org, php.net, wikipedia.org, etc… ;)

  137. Good Comment?
    iantrepreneur

    shoe your site is ok – site template is the same as everyone else – I too bought it and I implememted and fixed the script a lot and even removed some of the dumb qwerks, you can take alook at mine, click on name

    I even blogged about my 2 days of creating the BANS store
    http://www.ianfernando.com/2007/build-a-pos-store-update/

    I wanted to to be different and I have market it over the weekend with ok results so far – let me know what y ou think about my new BANS store! :)

  138. Good Comment?
    James

    I will be trying this out as I have spent some time this last working on what I want to promote with Ebay.

    Anyone here ever had an luck with using the data from Terapeak to get ideas on hot selling products on ebay. I think the interface is terrible and slow but seems like you can extract some data.

  139. Good Comment?
    Tom

    Damn, Now everyone is going to be playing in my sandbox… lol

    It really is a good piece of software but you will need to also be a marketer. It is not a put the site up and not touch it tool.

  140. Good Comment?
    GemViper

    That bans store has zero chance of front page rankings naturaly, there isn’t any unique content, so prepare to shell out some money on ppc campaigns if you don’t have a mega blog like shoemoney to promote it with! If you expect free traffic with insta site scripts you’re out of luck, otherwise, great product!

  141. Good Comment?
    o2smedia.com

    I totally did a blog about this last night at 2am..LOL I think IM starting to be shoemonized in my way of thinking that I could sense where your blog was headed!

  142. Good Comment?
    Chris Jacobson

    I read about this on a forum. I’m going to get it tonight!

  143. Good Comment?
    arowanna

    how much are you making using bans and where is the majority of your traffic comming from ?

  144. Good Comment?
    Denis

    Why don’t you contact them directly? They might want to reconsider their decision..

  145. Good Comment?
    Derek Baker

    Looks real nice I have to agree with you. I have heard only good things about BANS.

  146. Good Comment?
    brad

    that’s hog wash, if you brand it right.

  147. Good Comment?
    Mike Huang

    This is a great way to make some quick money for the holidays :)

    -Mike

  148. Good Comment?
    Jake

    MY question is how does it do for SEO?

  149. Good Comment?
    Jake

    Jeremy I have been looking at this for some time now. Tossed it around when I had time. Thanks for the review. I will pick a copy up.

  150. Good Comment?
    iLan

    Hello,
    BANS is with eBay products, Zlio.com is with 110 merchants (apple, buy, zappos, …). I tried both, and believe me you make more money with Zlio, and the software is neat!!
    Look at my ZlioShop: http://iloveny.zlio.com. You have different skins to customize your shop, can pick products from 7M items, and Zlio is providing you a lot of ways to promote your store… I made my choice!

  151. Good Comment?
    Smaxor

    Found a great way you can promote these using google local pretty easily. There’s a guy doing it with payday loans which is very tough niche. But things like stereo + store would be easy to make this work for.

    I wrote a post on it on my blog, check it out and let me know what you think.

    http://www.oooff.com/php-affiliate-seo-blog/affiliate-marketing/making-big-easy-money-with-google-local-search/

  152. Good Comment?
    Dio

    I started using BANS earlier this year. I actually haven’t tried out the new version with the admin bits – the old version was a lot easier to use if you like making your own templates and plugging it into it. I’m not sure what the new version is like with its query strings, but one thing you can do with the older version is make nice landing pages by refining the search query on the page.

    It’s ideal for adwords as you then have a page with with unique content and it also means you’re able to filter out rubbish items by the query string. I don’t know how easy it is with the new version.

  153. Good Comment?
    Ryan5billion

    Super Sweet Post ShoeMan.

    Muchas Gracias.

  154. Good Comment?
    Dangote

    http://www.onemanknifefight.net ?

    One of the basic lessons I learnt about driving traffic is to always buy the .com (even if you want to use the .net, .co.uk or dot whatever ) . Why get the .net if the .com is already taken?

  155. Good Comment?
    Affiliate Confession

    You buy the sofware once and you can use it for as many sites as you want.

  156. Good Comment?
    Affiliate Confession

    I am working on an ebook, well just beginning, but article marketing works wonders and I wrote a review for BANS that they published on their site. Getting incoming links works wonders.

  157. Good Comment?
    Guadagnare

    Unfortunately it does not support Italian.
    I will be open to collaboration if they need!
    Awesome software though!

    Francesco

  158. Good Comment?
    Gecko Tales

    I like your site. Nice and clean. Are you having any luck yet organically, or are you just doing PPC now?
    My wife used Nikons for film. She went Cannon when she jumped to digital.

  159. Good Comment?
    Gecko Tales

    Ken – that’s always the question. How to get traffic? With enough traffic even Adsense is highly profitable.

  160. Good Comment?
    Ken Savage

    Did you have to buy a copy for each domain, Christine?

  161. Good Comment?
    Ken Savage

    It’s all in the marketing of it. It’s easy to setup the store with lots of links and products.

    Who going to find the store is the big question.

    Or how are you going to drive traffic to it.

  162. Good Comment?
    Steve

    Sweet site. The image at the top is awesome. Did you use photoshop to create or something else? Details would be great……

  163. Good Comment?
    Ken Savage

    that’s called online marketing, Shirley. Isn’t that why you’re here?

    Now if I can just figure out how to attach a Wordpress blog to it too I can do some niche Social marketing just in time for the holidays. As if I had time, right?

  164. Good Comment?
    Affiliate Unleashed

    Perhaps you could write an ebook about how you achieved this (drove traffic) :)

  165. Good Comment?
    johncjackson

    I hate Zappos because I used to be an affiliate and had a shoe site that was going nowhere. I pretty much abandoned the site for a few years. Then I decided to work on it and now rank very high in google for many shoe related KWs. Because it was inactive my CJ account got deleted. I signed back up and Zappos declined my app. So now I have a shoe site with traffic and sales but all for low paying junk.

    I mean, I don’t hate Zappos. I actually BUY my own shoes there- every shoe I have bought for the last 4 years. But it sucks they wont let me sell for them.

  166. Good Comment?
    Affiliate Confession

    Umm, all the links go to eBay.

  167. Good Comment?
    Affiliate Unleashed

    I have BANs and it works great. :) It has brought some great returns! hehe

  168. Good Comment?
    Affiliate Confession

    Yes, Build A Niche Store rocks! I’ve been using it for 3 or 4 months now and I’ve made about $1,000 with it through the eBay affiliate program. Probably the best thing I’ve ever spent my money on businesswise.

  169. Good Comment?
    RB

    This really sounds like a great tool. I’m tempted to start up my own store!

  170. Good Comment?
    Rick

    BANS rocks! I use it on several sites.
    Click on my name if you wanna buy it
    (but not here)

  171. Good Comment?
    Reverse Funnel System Blog

    Very good idea and nice site.

  172. Good Comment?
    Fabian

    I’ve been using BANS for a while and is great! Is really easy to use and very well written. I higly recommend it. Check it out http://www.nikonmarket.com

  173. Good Comment?
    Denis

    The problem with BANS is that it is not as SEO-friendly as niche stores designed in Wordpress (of course, after a bit of work and some plugins, including the eBay plugin). On the other hand, a niche store in Wordpress requires a bit more time than 10 minutes :)

  174. Good Comment?
    Mike

    Great, here comes the competition……

  175. Good Comment?
    Nick

    Looks great might give it a try. The layout is a bit messed up in IE6, the right column drops down below the content.

  176. Good Comment?
    serge

    you made that look so easy…I think I am going to set up something. I will keep you updated. How do you find affiliates for products in a niche, like auto parts or hair products? do I just google it, or is there a better way?

  177. Good Comment?
    Phillip

    It looks great and definitely beats the time and effort building your own site linked to Ebay. Thanks for the resource.

  178. Good Comment?
    tyler dewitt

    Great post and very educational.

  179. Good Comment?
    Hustle Strategy

    seems interesting. let us know if it gets any business…

  180. Good Comment?
    Free Discount Coupons

    It will be interesting to know how it works out. I’ll be following it with interest.

  181. Good Comment?
    Blog Contests

    Let us know how it does man

  182. Good Comment?
    Christine

    Yeah I just started using BANS a few weeks ago. I have 4 sites so far. I’m using adwords to drive traffic to the individual pages. Here’s my first site onemanknifefight.net

  183. Good Comment?
    Worknplay

    hey thanx for the info Shoe. By the way whats up with listing all the shoes thats over 2000 dollars. Big checks in commission eh? ;-)

  184. Good Comment?
    Gecko Tales

    Thanks for that. I need something simple to use. I’m always afraid to spend money on this sort of service b/c I don’t know what I’m getting.
    another bookmark

  185. Good Comment?
    shirley

    Setting the store up looks easy and simple… but how do you get people to actually GO there and BUY something?

  186. Good Comment?
    John Loch

    So where’s the Shoemoney Tshirts (deliverable to Australia ???)

    AND the hats ?? :)

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