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If you haven’t already heard about it, Winning The Web is running the biggest blog contest I think I’ve seen since I started blogging seriously. Gyutae Park started his contest with around $5,000 in prizes and it has grown to an incredible cache of prizes totaling more than $12,000.

I’m not sure how Gyutae managed to secure all the valuable offerings, but some big name players have donated prizes to the contest such as:

AzoogleAds - $650
PepperJam Network - $500
NeverBlue Ads - $250
Shoemoney- 8GB iPod Touch
Affiliate Summit East - 1 $949 conference pass
Seomoz.org - $249 6 month membership
The Secret Classroom - By Joel Comm valued at $497.

And tons of other prizes are up for grabs including memberships, Internet marketing service, ebooks, affiliate marketing tools, blog themes, web hosting, consulting, and lots of advertising. I’m even getting in on the contest by giving away a 2 month advertising spot on my sidebar valued at $70. Winning cash or any of the other prizes in this contest could help you and your blog get more exposure. If I win any of the cash prizes, it will all be spent on advertising.

It’s pretty amazing to see all the big name people and companies donating prizes to Gyutae’s contest. It really legitimizes these kind of contests as one of the best ways to promote your blog and increase your readership and Winning The Web is the perfect example of this. Since the beginning of the contest couple of weeks ago I’ve watched as his rss subscribers have increased by more than 250 and I now see Gyutae’s blog mentioned on many of the blogs I visit. Many of the top bloggers and internet marketers have rocketed themselves out of obscurity by using contest as a means of promotion and I see Winning The Web getting ready to bust out of the gate and make a run for the top with this one.

If you’d like your chance at winning a cut of some incredible prizes valued at over $12,000 this is one blog contest you don’t want to miss!

The 7 part Build A Niche Store tutorial series ended yesterday and showed you how to do nearly everything to set up a BANS eBay affiliate store. The series covered how to brainstorm a niche, how to upload your BANS software, how to set up your store, how to add valuable content, how to get links through article marketing and much more.

As I was thinking about the series of BANS tutorials, I thought that there wasn’t one place you could go to get a summary of all the posts and have a link to each one as well. So, to make things easier, here’s that list below starting from the oldest post first:

Part 1 - What BANS Does And Does Not Do - A prequel post clearing up some misconceptions about BANS and what you are able to accomplish with it through the eBay affiliate program.

Part 2 - Niche Brainstorming And Gettng A Domain Name - All about finding a profitable niche for your BANS store, using keywords and what to look for in a good domain name.

Part 3 - Installing And Setting Up Your BANS Affiliate Store - a basic guide on how to set up your BANS eBay store that covers uploading your files, setting up a MySQL database and building your store. It is a simple process that takes about 15 minutes.

Part 4 - Tweaking Your eBay Affiliate Store- Some guidelines on how to make your store stand out from all the other BANS affiliate stores. A little work in this department can bring your store a long ways.

Part 5 - Adding Some Content To Your eBay Store - Content in the lifeblood of your store and this tutorial shows you how to not only have your store look different, but be different by adding unique content,and headings. Don’t miss this one.

Part 6 - Article Marketing And Getting Links - You can do lots to build your BANS store, but if you don’t have any incoming links, you won’t get any traffic. Read this to learn about one of the most important off page things you can do for your eBay affiliate niche store.

Part 7 - Using USFreeAds.com For Traffic And Getting More Links- This is one classified site I use quite a bit to get a little traffic and more importantly, links. This BANS tutorial shows you how to use USFreeAds to your advantage.

I wrote this series of Build A Niche Store tutorials because it is the number one product I use to make money online through the eBay affiliate program. It is easy to set up, easy to use and can help you earn a pretty good income through one of the best affiliate programs on the net.

I hope you enjoyed the series and please let anyone else you know who is thinking about getting BANS or already has it, about these tutorials.

If you are interested in starting your own eBay affiliate empire, you can read more about BANS on their web site.

In the 7th and final installment of the Build A Niche Store tutorials I will be covering how I use USFreeAds.com to get a trickle of traffic, but more importantly to get a few more incoming links to each and every BANS store I build.

I like using USFreeAds because with a premium account ($9.95 per month) you can place as many classified ads as you want on their site. With other classified sites such as CraigsList, it is against Commission Junction’s (CJ) terms of service to drive traffic from CraigsList to a page with CJ links, mainly because it is against Craigs List terms of service to place commercial or affiliate related ads (this may change with eBay managing their affiliate program starting in April). With USFreeAds there are no such restrictions and you can place ads till your heart’s content. You can place an ad and link to every page in your BANS store if you wish.

USFreeAds won’t drive the traffic that CraigsList does, but it will get you links coming into your store pages and a couple of weeks after placing your ads, you will start to see them show up with fairly good placement in Google for some of the keywords terms used in your ads. In other things I have done I have seen CraigsList provide almost instantaneous benefits. That, more than likely, isn’t going to happen with USFreeAds. This classified site is one of those set-it-and-forget-it kind of strategies. If you are looking for immediate results, don’t even think about trying this because you will be disappointed.

With that said, here’s how to write an ad on USFreeAds.com that will benefit your BANS store:

I consider my ads on this classified site as mini web pages and treat them as such when writing a good one. I have experimented with several different formats of ads, but the ones that do best, start out by having an H1 tagged headline at the top that has some sort of keyword combination in it. I then write 2 to 3 paragraphs of text explaining the product and include one to several links in the text, and even direct those links to different pages on the BANS store.

Here’s a screenshot of what a possible ad for my air purifier store may look like in the USFreeAds interface. You will only see this WYSIWYG interface if you have a Premium account.

I then always include a picture of the general kind of product featured in the ad or may make an eye catching graphic that gets the reader’s attention. Using pictures in your ad is a must, just as it would be if you are trying to sell something through an eBay auction. Ads on USFreeAds are listed in categories as they are in eBay and have a little thumbnail picture to the left of each classified. If you don’t include a pic, you will get about 15% of the views an ad with a picture does. Here’s a screenshot below to see the listing layout with and without a picture:

Again, using USFreeAds.com is a slow process, but it has more than paid for the $9.95 monthly cost in bringing me traffic to my BANS stores. If you want a little more in depth look at making even more money with USFreeAds and ShoppingAds, look here.

Thus ends the Build A Niche Store tutorial series. Look for a post tomorrow or Friday summing up the entire series and linking to each tutorial.

Fantastic, we’ve set up our first Build A Niche Store, but what good is it if it doesn’t get any traffic? In the 6th installment of the BANS series I’ll be going over the fastest way I’ve found to get a web site indexed and have a trickle of traffic coming in. I’ll also show you how I get a few more links coming into a store from sources other than article directories. What we’re going to learn here will work for any web site, not just a BANS eBay affiliate store.

Article marketing can help you get your BANS site indexed in Google in approximately 3 days to 1 week. This doesn’t mean you will have any favorable position or be the first page for your best search term, it just means Google knows you exist and they will rank you as they gather more data and see more incoming links. There are other ways to get immediate incoming links, but I like this way because at least 2 of the article directories I use are very authoritative sites and rank well.

Getting Links Through Article Marketing

Many times one of the hardest concepts for the new article writer to understand is that you will not be writing an article about the web site you are linking to. I’ve seen many forum posts with newbie writers trying to figure out why their articles keep getting turned down. The secret is, you should not be writing about your site, you need to write about the subject of your site. Promotion of your site is considered a no, no and you will never get articles published if you go about it this way.

So what subject are we talking about? Well, since my site is about air purifiers, I’ll write an article on air purification and title it something like, “The Best Kind Of Air Purifier For Your Home”. I’m actually working on the article as I’m writing this post and it will end up being 500 to 750 words and will be submitted to the three articles in this more comprehensive post on article marketing.

The main point of writing articles is to get keyword links coming back to your site from the author’s box at the bottom of each of your articles. We may also get some links coming in as others pick up the articles and place them on their own site for content. Don’t worry about duplicate content with this, as sometimes the question is asked. These articles will never be published on your site, and if there is a question about dup content from someone else using them, Google will penalize the site that borrows from the article directory. 

Getting Even More Links

Getting incoming links is not a do it once activity per site, and then forget about it. It is an ongoing process that really never ends. I suppose if you are making big bucks from a site you can probably forget about getting links, but it’s up to the individual what the term “big bucks” really means.

One of the things I like to do to get a few more links is go to BackLinkSpot.com and search for blogs that have do follow comments. Of course, you want to look for blogs in your niche and make relevant comments on a post. Use your BANS site as the name and url link when leaving a comment.

Directories are also a great way to get back links although the talk is that Google is giving less authority to directories as of late. One of the most comprehensive list of free directories I’ve found is at OneWayTextLink.com. As of this post, there are more than 1,600 directories in this list with a page rank of 1 or above. I’m sure you can find plenty of good places to submit your site to of the 200 listed on page 1 that are ranked from PR9 to PR4. When I can find a few minutes a couple times a week I’ll submit a few of my sites to the directories on this list.

If you want some more info on link building, I highly recommend Collin LaHay’s Link Building Cookbook. It is one of the best and most comprehensive series of posts that covers the gamut of link building tricks. I particularly like using his link building with Flickr idea and have even figured out a way to find photos with good PR to get links from which I may cover in another post.

The info should keep you busy for some time writing away and getting links into your BANS stores.

We’re almost at the end of the Build A Niche Store series and the next and final segment will focus on placing classified ads on USFreeAds.com to get a little traffic and even more incoming links.

If you are interested, you can get a copy of Build A Niche Store here.

Okay, it’s not as bad as the headline indicates, but all eBay affiliates received the news this morning that the company will be moving away from Commission Junction managing their affiliate program and they will bring it in-house, running it themselves. The change is due to start on April 1st and all present and new eBay affiliates will have to sign-up through the eBay Partner Network. CJ links to eBay will still work through the end of April and must be migrated by May 1st.

As you can imagine this has cause quite a buzz on blogs and the major internet marketing forums around the net as eBay affiliates panic at the amount of work they they are facing replacing links next month for the transition. I will personally have several hundred pages of links to migrate over to the new program and I’m a small player compared to some of the big guys. There’s a guy in the eBay affiliate forums saying he has some 75,000 links to change and there are even bigger players to the tune of $1 million per month facing this transition as well.

I’m not at all worried about any of my BANS stores because everything there is automated and will probably just require a minor file update and possibly changing an affiliate number in all of the store interfaces. What I am concerned about is all the text links I have in blog posts, on web sites and who knows where else. I honestly don’t know if I can find every single link I have out there and can change it over, much less if I had tens of thousands or more such as the big players do.

There are a few positive things to look at though with eBay handling all their affiliate matters. You will be able to register with all eBay countries affiliate programs throughout the world simultaneously, no more individual country sign-ups, there will be more detailed reporting available to affiliates (I’m sure this will help you target your efforts better), the commission structure won’t change, there will be new landing page optimization options and a few other changes for the better.

I don’t know how all this will pan out and it seems like a daunting task for some affiliates however, eBay owns the redirect url for all their affiliate links (rover.ebay.com) so it may not be as bad as we think. I’m sure eBay has thought this through and how much it might affect their business and we know they want to do something positive as the final outcome. If eBay affiliates don’t make money, eBay doesn’t make as much money. More details will be coming out shortly.

Meanwhile, if you have a BANS store, just keep building.