www.affiliateconfession.com

Build A Niche Store users received an email a few days ago outlining some major changes to the main BANS website and forums implemented recently. The design of the BANS site has changed completely to better reflect a more professional look and feel to come into line with where the developers want to take the product.

The forums have also been changed with better organization of topics, updated rules, no signatures at the bottom of posts any longer, no affiliate links allowed and unfortunately, no discussion of products that compete with BANS. Also, name calling and derogatory comments in the forums won’t be tolerated. It’s too bad that it happens, but many forums I’ve belonged to have deteriorated into a free-for-all and the developers of Build A Niche Store aren’t going to let that happen.

Here’s a selected snippet from the email that pretty much sets the tone of how the developers feel:

Like we said - BANS is in many ways at its beginning. Whether it evolves into what it can be rests with the collective user base as much as it does with us.

We will take BANS as far as it can be taken IF it remains a supported product amongst its users.

If that dies or doesn’t evolve BANS as a project and platform is over. It either becomes what it can be or it sinks into oblivion.

With a project like BANS there is no middle ground.

From the tone of the email to the changes to the web site and forums it appears that BANS is being targeted to a more serious affiliate audience than it has been in the past. While BANS is a great product and the earnings potential is very high (people have reported in the forums making over $10K per month), it is not a product for everyone. Frankly, there are lots of BANS websites I run across that shouldn’t even be taking up bandwidth on the net. For whatever reason, the concept of content just doesn’t see to sink in with some people. Throwing up an eBay affiliate store shell with nothing but auctions will earn you exactly nothing.

It’s possible that the way the product has been advertised in the past by affiliates and the way it has been represented on the main site that too many of the wrong kind of people have been attracted to BANS. Any product that assists affiliates and makes it easier to make money online can certainly fall into the hands of the get rich quick types of people who are looking for more reward with little to no work.

On a more positive and exciting note, there are now 12 new BANS templates with 3 layouts each, for download in the forums. While several people have developed some nice templates for a nominal fee, these new templates are available for free when you become a member of BANS. They actually look pretty nice compared to the stale looking ones that have been around for years and will give users many more options. 

It is great to see the changes on the main Build A Niche Store website, in the forums and the new templates. Again, BANS is not a product for every one, but if you’re willing to put the effort into it and build a decent eBay affiliate niche store, you can earn some pretty good income with it. My BANS websites earn me around 25% of my income.

You can check out the new web site and learn more about Build A Niche Store here.

PS - This will be the last post for several days as I’ll be on vacation celebrating my wife’s birthday. I’ll try to approve new comments and check my email once a day, but if you don’t hear from me till next week, it’s because we’re chillin’ on vacation. Peace.

There comes a time when you have to put away the facts and figures, forget about the costs, stop trying to figure out how many people are doing the same thing you are, quit trying to analyse the code underneath the latest WordPress or BANS template and just jump in with both feet ready to do battle.

When I used to train people in the mlm group I was in, there was this one guy that came to our training sessions who always came with the biggest ideas, the nicest graphs and charts, the best marketing materials and he would go over his ideas, charts and materials endlessly, and guess what, he never made a dime, nor did he attempt to. I knew from the second time I met the guy, he wasn’t going to do anything. He analysed his business to death and killed it.

While it is important to do your due diligence in the niche you’re going into and research keywords, competition, offers, payouts, affiliate companies, available tools and a few other things, all the research and the statistics in the world aren’t going to sell products for you. My personal philosophy is that if you have a good idea for a niche or business on the web, you should have started it yesterday. Because of the time it takes a site to get indexed and start bringing you organic traffic, your new idea can’t wait for you to spend 2 or 3 months analysing all the minute details. It’s better to put that site up as soon as you can, get a few incoming links into it by writing articles and tweak it as you go.

Obviously, you want to have the framework of a site in place before you launch it and if you have a more interactive site or membership site, you have to have enough material that your readers will find interesting and encourage visitors to come back. But for the general affiliate site such as a Build A Niche Store site there isn’t any reason to not launch your site immediately after you find your niche and decide on a domain name. All the other work of writing and adding content and making your store look pretty can come later.

When you put your web project out there for the world to see and hopefully stop by and make a purchase, you can always work on the code later, you can always add more content later, you can always buy more advertising to bring more visitors, you can always add an additional revenue stream and yes, you can even change that sucky logo later. But if your site is still in the design and analysis phase, or the someday phase after 3 to 6 months, you can’t do any of those things and more importantly you won’t be taking checks to the bank to cash them any time soon.

It’s much better to analyse and tweak an already existing project than it is thin air. Thin air doesn’t pay the bills.

While there are several great niches on eBay to put together a Build A Niche Store for, there are some that just aren’t worth it. There are 2 niches you especially want to stay away from because of the way people buy things on eBay. I’m sure there are more as you will probably figure out from reading this post, but I’ll just cover 2.

First, understand why eBay is successful and why people love to buy from an auction. Not only are people able to find just about anything they want on eBay and purchase it, but they can also win it. That sets up a whole different mindset to making a purchase for your customer. It’s exciting to win and people will go out of their way to do it. The desire to win drives many to make a purchase they might not otherwise make.

With that in mind, one of the niches that doesn’t do well on eBay is travel. While travel is a great niche to earn some good Adsense money from, it is terrible for a BANS store. Probably the number one reason for that is because the travel niche doesn’t involve a physical product and people like to win physical products on eBay. I can also imagine people buying a cruise or reserving a vacation rental probably want to speak to someone when they make a reservation and are very hesitant to transact travel business on eBay.

Case in point, a travel based BANS store I run generated 1,045 clicks to eBay last month, yet only 8 people placed bids, meaning only 1 out of every 130 people placed a bid after reaching eBay from this travel site. On the other hand, on my best BANS store that sells a fairly popular high priced item, I sent 1,829 clicks that produced 311 bids, meaning 1 out of every 5 clicks produced a bid. All is not lost with the travel site though because I’m modeling the rest of it off of my best Adsense producing site and adding more content. I already earn more from Adsense on this site than I do by sending traffic to eBay.

The other niche I would never build a BANS store on again would be a business opportunity site selling ebooks. I have a fairly good domain name I bought and it had been sitting for about a year or so and I thought I’d throw a BANS site on it and see what happened. Nothing has happened so far. The business opportunity niche is so unbelievably saturated and the competition is so fierce it’s not worth getting into any longer. While ebooks can still be sold on eBay if they are delivered via CD through the mail, selling ebooks via eBay is dead. You rarely see an ebook going for even as much as $9.95 on eBay and you aren’t going to make any money as an affiliate selling items priced below $10. The only exception to this rule may be if you have a site selling hugely popular items such as some iPhone or other cell phone accessory where you may be able to convert some of those sales to new member sign-ups.

To be fair I probably could add some content and build out this ebook selling BANS store a little better, but it wouldn’t be anything I would spend much more time on.

There are plenty of very good niches for BANS stores on eBay so it’s really not worth your time to work on something that’s not going to pay you well. Don’t take the magic of eBay out of your buyer’s hands. Physical products will always win out over something an eBay shopper can’t touch.

You can get more info on Build A Niche Store here.

I found out yesterday that the interview I did with Elance.com had been published on Wednesday 5-28. I assumed it would be published on June 2nd, but I guess it came out early. The interview was conducted back on 5-5-08 and had to get approval, be revised, releases signed and a couple other minor details. (I never knew these things were so involved.)

In the interview I discussed the criteria I use when hiring writers and how to communicate what you want from them so as to avoid any misunderstanding. Elance included 3 tips in the blog post based on what I told them during the interview and what was in a previous post on getting the most from Elance.

The interview probably came about because I sent a general email to someone at Elance letting them know about the previously mentioned post on April 16. It wasn’t anything to strongly self promotional, I just mentioned that the post might be of a benefit for people using their services and looking to hire writers. They must have liked what they read, because I got an email a couple of weeks later asking if I would agree to an interview. I wasn’t seeking an interview, I was just hoping they would link to the post, but you never know what will happen when you touch base with others around the web.

If you have more than you can handle on your own or are wanting to expand your online business and need content, web design help, coding or just about anything you can think of, Elance.com is definitely the place to outsource your work.

Read the Elance interview here and find out how to get the most from Elance here.

I find it interesting that there are people on the net who literally scrape out a living day to day. I guess that’s what you’d say about those individuals who seem to think the only way to earn money on the web is to copy other people’s content. I just can’t get my mind around that kind of thinking, at least not in today’s era of more algorithmically (yes, that is a real word) advanced search engines.

I was alerted by a commentator yesterday about my post on the Moped niche where a scraper site ranked at the number one spot for a couple of search terms I suggested people look at. However, as I checked this morning, they are no where to be found. The weird thing about this particular scraper site in question is that it isn’t monetized in any way. No Google ads, banners, affiliate links or anything are on this site, yet it consistently outranks me for several of my keywords for a short time and then it’s off into obscurity again. Most splogs like this are monetized in some way, this one is the exception to the rule.

I also see big name bloggers getting scraped on a much more frequent basis. I’ve written a few guest posts for John Chow and won a couple of contests on his blog and every time I get a link from him, in my WordPress dashboard I see links coming at me from probably 10 scraper blogs before I see the links show up from John. It’s amazing that there are that many people who can’t, or won’t, do something original.

I saw a similar thing in an online forum where someone asked for a review of their financial blog and allthough it wasn’t a scraper site, the person had copied every bit of content from financial news and information sites. Every snippet of content I checked by copying and pasting it into Google was from another web site and this person had 20 or 30 posts already. What did they think they were doing and where did they get the idea they could make money long term with a blog built this way?

One of the cruelest things the Nazi’s did to prisoners during WWII, besides the heinous experiments they did on them, was in giving them meaningless work. Nazi guards would one day have prisoners move a huge pile of bricks across a 100 yard field, only to have them move the pile back the next day and and repeat that action again for several days. Or prisoners would be told dig a deep trench only to be told the next day to bury it and again the next day to dig the trench in the exact same spot. Madness soon set in for the captives.

I’m beginning to wonder how far behind the captives these scrapers are. There’s really no end to the work if you think your going to scrape your way to the top. You’ll never get there.