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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.

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.

Article marketing is one of the fastest ways I’ve found to get a new site indexed and traffic coming to it almost immediately. With the techniques I’ll describe in this post, I’ve seen most of my brand new sites get indexed in Google in about 3 days and have organic keyword traffic coming to those sites in about 10 days from the time the article is published.

There is a right way and a wrong way to do article marketing and one of the most important aspects of it aren’t followed by even the best writers. I’ve read articles by Doctors, Lawyers and Indian Chiefs or similar professionals and if they adhered to one simple principle, it would probably make a huge difference in their traffic and rankings. And this principle has absolutely nothing to do with your writing ability.

I’ll get to this super secret technique in a minute, but first, let’s talk about what an article that you submit to an article directory is. An article has nothing to do with the specific site you’re trying to promote. When writing an article, think about your subject, not your site. An article should never be written to tell your audience how terrific your site is and how they should visit it because you are the super guru in your specialized field. Never sell your site when writing an article.

The purpose of writing an article is threefold, one, to give the reader some general information on a subject, secondly, to position yourself as an expert in your field, without selling, and thirdly, to get links back to your site from authority sites and hopefully more sites as other webmasters pick up your article to used as content on their site.

For a good article example, let’s say you have a travel site on San Francisco and on it you talk about great places to eat, places to visit, museums to see, places to shop, etc., and you have the site filled with Adsense and TripAdvisor links to all the top hotels and B & B’s. When you write and article you don’t want to describe pages on your site and try to sell the fact that you site is the place to go to find the best rates on hotels and places to stay.

What you want to write about is maybe the history of San Francisco and the nostalgia of cable cars, or maybe about the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge or possibly the history of Alcatraz and how only one person in the history of the prison escaped from it. You then want to place links to your site in the writer’s box at the bottom of the article.

So what’s the big secret to article writing that most people miss? It is in how you place those links in your writer’s box. Most article directories will let you place up to 3 live links at the bottom of your article and some will even let you place links in the body of the article as well. The biggest mistake I see writers make is in not using all 3 links and not using anchor text to link back to their web site. They instead just use a simple url as a link and while this will get you a link back to your site, it will not give you the full SEO benefits of having a keyword link instead. It’s not really a super secret technique, it’s just being smart about your article marketing.

The three article directories I use that give me the quickest results are:

EzineArticles.com- This is the best of the best in article directories. It is a PR 6 article directory and somehow your articles are immediately ranked as a PR 6 page getting you the benefit of a quality keyword link to your site. Once your article is approved, your site is usually spidered and indexed in about 3 days to 1 week. Until you write 20 articles it may take up to 5 days to get your article approved.

GoArticles.com - I like this directory because you can place links in the body of your articles and it is one of the only top directories that will let you do this.

ArticleBlast.com - The reason I like this directory is because your article needs no approval process except that you are a member of the site. Your articles are published to the site immediately and will appear on the front page under your chosen category within 5 minutes of publishing it. You can’t get publicity any quicker than that.

My normal process for getting a site indexed quickly is to write an article and submit it to all three of these directories the same day. Some would suggest to change each article around a bit to avoid duplicate content issues between directories, but I’ve personally never done that and haven’t had any problems with this technique being a big benefit to my sites.

Now get to work on writing a few articles and see if you don’t find out the benefits.

Alan