www.affiliateconfession.com

In part 4 of the Build A Niche Store series we’re going to look at making your eBay affiliate store appear different than just an out of the box version of a BANS store. Some people have expressed concern that BANS stores will saturate the market, look like duplicate content to Google and at some point not be a viable income producer any longer. And I have to say I agree with that thinking 100%, if you build a crappy store, but we aren’t going to do that.

Yes, that will happen to those that put up stores and try to spam the search engines with nothing but pages full of auctions, but it won’t happen to you if you build a quality store. So in the next couple of days I’ll be explaining how to do that and some of the options in BANS you can tweak to keep that from happening. Unfortunately I see lots of BANS stores that haven’t had that much effort put into them, but this isn’t a reflection on the tool, it is a reflection on the user. People spam search engines with useless content by using Wordpress and some will do the same using BANS, but if you don’t, then you won’t have anything to worry about.

Basic Tweaks To Your BANS Store

One of the most basic things you can do to give your store a unique look is to change the color of the background, nav bar headers, nav bar text, search bar background and create a simple logo. With just those basic tweaks and about 30 minutes worth of work on a logo, I’ve transformed my air purifier store from this:

To this:

In all, those changes only took about 45 minutes. These modifications can all be done in the styles.css file in the template you are using. There are presently 9 different templates (more on the way) you can pick in the BANS interface and I like to be sure about which one I’m using before I make these changes, because once you change templates you have to make all these changes again.

Making these changes are extremely easy because there are nearly 50 tutorials accessible within your control panel explaining every aspect of modifying the look of your store. You can literally change everything you see in your store and customize it to look the way you want. All text, borders, backgrounds, links, boxes, headers and more can be changed. I don’t recommend tweaking everything, because it’s way too much work, but a few minor changes can make a lot of difference in the way your store looks.

There are also many tutorials on keyword research, niche research and adding income streams to your store. There’s even a tutorial on how to create permanent search results pages and link them in your nav bar as well. In about 2 minutes you can create a page and have it linked in your nav bar for any search term in any category of your store.

Uploading Your Logo

The header or “logo” as it is called, is an important part of your store so if you don’t have a graphics skills or some kind of a graphics program, it’s best to have one done for you. There are only 2 sizes of logo to make for a standard BANS template. The 2 column template logo is 780 x 180 pixels and the 3 column template is 968 x 180 pixels. They have to be this size unless you modify the height, and there’s also a tutorial explaining how to do that.

One you have a logo for your store, it has to be named logo.jpg, not Logo.jpg, logo.jpeg or banslogo.jpg. Anything other than logo.jpg won’t do and your logo won’t display. Because I have so many BANS stores I have a separate folder on my computer for each one. If I didn’t, it would be hard to tell exactly which logo.jpg went with which store if I ever wanted to modify one.

After you get the logo and name squared away, all you have to do to upload your logo is to go into the template area of your store interface and select Upload Logo and you will be taken to an interface where you can search for the logo on your computer and then upload it. Once you do that, it will appear at the top of your template and you now have a nice looking BANS store ready to add some content and H1 tags to, which I will cover in the next installment of the BANS tutorial series.

You can get Build A Niche Store here if you are interested.

One of the better things I like about Build A Niche Store is the ease of installation. You can actually set up your own BANS eBay store in literally 15 to 20 minutes, no joke. Now, it is a basic store when you first set it up, but the installation is about as simple as it can be. You can then tweak your store from there giving it a unique look.

Uploading Files

In version 3 of Build A Niche Store all you have to do is download your zip file after purchasing and after extracting it you will need to locate the country folder for the eBay store you want to build. We want to build a US store in this example. You then want to upload the files only (not the folder) from that folder and ftp them to your domain (I’m assuming you already have a domain name and a hosting account). Unless you have HostGator you will then need to CHMOD a file named cont.php to 777. This is no big deal. All you need to do is right click on the file in your ftp program and after you click Properties you will see a screen similar to the one below. Make the check boxes look like the example and you are good to go.

Creating A MySQL Database

This is another simple thing to do and all it requires is for you to go into your hosting panel and look for something that says MySQL Databases, MySQL Database Management or something similar to that and follow directions for setting up a new database. Most any hosting account will let you do this, but the ones I recommend are HostGator.com (Recommended by BANS developers) or 1and1.com (The one I use). I definitely do not recommend DreamHost.com to host a BANS store. I set up a test store on my account with them and I couldn’t get BANS to work. You can probably get it to work at DreamHost, but I couldn’t get my store to write to the database correctly, so it’s really not worth the effort in my opinion.

Installing Your Store

Once you get your database set up, it’s time to install your store. After taking all the above steps, go to your domain and your screen should look like below:

Click the obvious button and then you will see this screen:

Then enter the database info it asks for above. Most likely if you are hosting with anyone other than HostGator you will have to change your Server info from localhost to the actual host address. All your database info should be viewable in your hosting panel. Click Continue and you will see a screen that tells you your database connection was successful, you then click Continue again and you will see the screen below:

Make sure to follow the directions on that screen and delete your install file so no one can hack your site and so it will work correctly. You can modify and delete the necessary files via your ftp program.

Setting Up your BANS eBay Store

After installing your store, log in and immediately change your password and your user name by clicking the the button on your interface that says Security. This is an immediately necessary step because all newly installed BANS stores have the same password and username.

Setting up your store is very easy, but there are several minor details you will go through to do so. The Build A Niche Store manual is very comprehensive and all of the steps are easy to follow with the manual, therefore I will only cover the main points of setting up your store.

The only things that you absolutely have to do to set up your store are:

Give your BANS Store a name
Choose your eBay category or categories
Choose one of 5 different product layouts
Add your affiliate details
Set up your Store Navigation

And that’s it.  You can choose your eBay category by clicking on the View Categories link from inside your store control panel. That page displays all of eBay’s main categories with the numbers you will need to add to your store. If you want a more specific category, then you can click on the link at the bottom of each heading that says See all Such & Such Categories… and that page will list hundreds more. There are over 28,000 individual categories to choose from on the US eBay site. You can even create a store with multiple categories if you wish, giving you an endless number of niches you can exploit.

Another important part of setting up your store is entering in your affiliate details. You will need to get a Publisher ID (PID) from Commission Junction for each BANS store you set up.  All you have to do is go into your CJ account and add your new domain under Account > Web Site Settings > Add A New Web Site and you will get a PID for that site. Take that number and add it to the box under CJ PID Number.

I never use the next box below that says ClickBank ID. This your affiliate ID from ClickBank and although you can earn a nice commission for selling the BANS software, I do not want the phrase “Powered By Build A Niche Store” showing up on every one of the pages of my site just like tons of other BANS users have. I don’t want to give Google any reason to see this as a footprint of my BANS store and ever penalize me, so I don’t use it. I will create a seperate content page to explain the benefits of creating your own store for those that may be interested.

You then set up your Navigation by choosing how you want your sidebar to look. You can either have your navigation Open or Closed. This means sub categories will either display or not display under your main listed categories. You can set it up so your home page  and content pages display one way and the rest of your store pages display another. I like to set it up so my content pages display a closed navigation bar and my store pages display an open nav bar. This way the home page will display just the main categories and when you click a category link and go to that page, it will display any sub-categories below it. I do this to keep from possibly getting a hundred or more links on the home page if you choose a broad category.

After you do all that, you just click the save button and, presto, you have a fully functioning eBay affiliate store from a few pages to maybe hundreds of pages. Again, this is the basic shell of a store and you will want to tweak it somewhat to make it look different than another BANS store out there that might be in your same niche.

My plan was to explain how to tweak your BANS store to give it a different look and how to upload your logo in this tutorial, but as you see, it has gone on long enough, so look for that info in tomorrow’s tutorial on Tweaking Your Store. The overall tutorial has now become a 7 part series instead of a 5 part one.

The beauty of Build A Niche Store is that you can set up your basic store in about the time it took you to read this tutorial.

In part 2 of the Build A Niche Store series we’re going to look at brainstorming a profitable affiliate niche on eBay using my favorite free keyword tool and the eBay search function. We will also be looking at what you want to get in a domain name. This post won’t be much about BANS itself, only about the foundation of your store.

It may come as a shock to you, but I don’t do very involved keyword research. If I were to create a monster site, that might be a different matter, but at the level of what I’m trying to do, extensive keyword research is a waste of time. To locate a niche as I did for the store I will be building in these tutorials, I just think of a product people need and head over to the Keyword Discovery free keyword tool to see what comes up. I like this one because it is a lot like the old Overture keyword suggestion tool. I really hated to see that one go.

Normally what tells me if something is a good niche is that the root keyword has more than 25,000 searches per month. What I mean by root keyword is something like watches, air purifiers, shoes, etc. Obviously you will probably building a more specific store with more targeted words, but you want to have the overall category be one that is fairly active and popular.

I’m building a site about air purifiers so I put in the word air purifier at Keyword Discovery and get all sorts of results. This is a great niche because the main keyword generates more than 37,000 searches per month and there are all sorts of more specific keywords under the main word. And these are great words too because they include a manufacturer or a specific brand that the manufacturer makes. When you get keywords such as this, where people are being very specific, they are doing involved research or are ready to buy. Consequently I will be building many pages that feature these specific names of air purifiers. EcoQuest, Oreck, Sharper Image, Honeywell and others are all brands I will be putting up individual pages for.

I then go over to eBay and use their advanced search feature to scope out my keyword and see what kind of auction activity is going on. I won’t go deep into how I use the advanced search feature because I’ve already written an extensive tutorial on it here. By using advanced search and the keyword air purifier, I found that at the writing of this post, there are 147 items (mostly air purifiers) in the Heating, Cooling and Air category on eBay that have at least 2 bids with more than half a page of auction items priced at more than $100 and 20 items that have 10 or more bids. This looks like a very active niche and one that I want to take advantage of.

Next we’re on to choosing a domain name. I like to use my specific keyword in a domain name because I think it’s descriptive to your niche for the people you are trying to reach and I tend to think it does give you some advantage in the search engines. Now, there are a lot of very successful sites that don’t have a keyword in their domain name such as Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, YouTube, etc., but we aren’t even close to competing in that realm. Remember, you are building a niche store that will probably never get more than 2,000 visitors a day if you are very lucky and more like 500 or so per day is good, so we don’t want to go cutesy on the domain name. You want niche recognition, not cute. I also always get a domain without dashes and always, always, always get a .com name. You can read more about what to look for in a domain name here.

I use Godaddy.com to look up my domain names just because I like their suggestions if your domain name is already taken. Now, I would never host a BANS site with Godaddy because there have been way too many problems reported in the BANS forums with them. I use 1and1.com for hosting and I purchase my domains through them as well because it’s a simple process where you buy your domain and set up a directory within your control panel and you’re good to go.

These are the basics of setting up the foundation of your store. Next on the tutorial agenda will be installing and tweaking your store and uploading a logo.

You can get a copy of Build A Niche Store here if you are interested.

Alan