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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.

May is turning out to be a very good month for my Build A Niche Store web sites and the eBay affiliate program. The final numbers won’t be in until Monday or late tomorrow, but it looks like earnings for my BANS stores should be around $900 for the month and earnings for the best performing BANS store around $650.

I did spend some money driving traffic to one of these stores this month, but only to the tune of a little over $100 and it has apparently paid off fairly well. Last month my top store produced $246.68 in revenue and I spent a whopping $2.90 in PPC traffic, this month $101.97 has been spent on PPC and revenue is at $629.44 for the same store. PPC search traffic this month has produced 304 clicks to this store resulting in 314 bids and 97 winning bids. Last month with virtually no PPC traffic, there were 139 total bids with 53 winning bids at the same store.

A little closer examination needs to be done on organic search traffic versus paid traffic to see where the real gains are coming from, but initially it looks as though paid search is paying off for this Build A Niche Store site. I’m working on another BANS site that I will be trying some paid search on, the earnings probably won’t be as significant for at least one reason. The store I’m sending paid traffic to right now is based on products that sell for between $500 and $1,000 and sometimes even more.

It is questionable as to whether paid search would work on a BANS site with items selling for much less than $300 to 400. The reason being is that you earn about 2% for a sale at eBay and earning anything much less than $10 per sale is hard to make work with PPC. Of course there’s always the chance of selling multiple items and earning a few $25 new member bounties which would make paid search worthwhile. The new store I’ll be sending search traffic to will have items ranging from $100 to $300 in price so it will be a little experiment to see if this theory holds true.

One last note is that the store bringing me good returns with PPC is a fully built store with substantial content in both articles and content on auction pages so I’m getting very good quality scores from Google on the pages I’m sending traffic to. PPC probably won’t work on pages that have nothing but auctions.

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

If you’ve been following me on Twitter for the last month you may have noticed I’ve been dropping little hints about a super secret project in the works. It is now completed, but the results might not be available for a few days or so. I’ve been pouring myself into this thing for a month now and I hope I haven’t burned myself out.

It’s not what you think though. It doesn’t involve a web site, a blog, a BANS store, the eBay affiliate program or any of the things I normally blog about, but it could have an big impact on those things. It’s been a project more from the standpoint of trying to see how hard I could push myself rather than much of anything else.

Some may even be able to figure it out because there have been little hints left here and there on this blog. If the results turn out as I plan, then I’ll be posting about how I was able to accomplish what happened, if the results aren’t what I had anticipated then the posts will be more about how to persevere when you put just about everything you have into something and you don’t get what you expected out of it. Either way I’ll have something to blog about.

So stay tuned, results will be in soon.

Some days the the eBay affiliate program pays off in big dividends. Sunday was one of those days. Too bad this isn’t a consistent amount, but earnings for my Build A Niche Store sites came in at $278.01 for a single day and earnings for my top performing site were $273.52 and that was on 40 sales for a single site. But as big of a payoff as it was one day, it’s back to normal the next as you can see from the chart below:

Sunday’s earnings from eBay were 20 times what Monday’s earnings were, coming in at $12.04. Yes, consistency would be great, but at least from this example you can see the potential earnings you can get through eBay and BANS. Now, this isn’t some anomaly where The eBay Partner Network is paying back for missed commissions (even though some are wondering if they’re getting things right) because after downloading my eBay affiliate report for Sunday and spot checking some of the winning bids, these were all auctions than ended on Sunday and were paid for on Sunday.

Build A Niche Store really works.

Tags: ebay partner network, ebay affiliate program, build a niche store, bans

Well the first full month’s report is in from the new eBay EPN affiliate network thingy (I’m still not sure how to refer to it) and with the inconsistency of earnings it reminds me of the movie Jaws. As you can see below there’s not any more than 2 days of steady earnings:

I find the up and down roller coaster earning levels a little weird. I mean, what’s going on here? Is there an effort on the part of eBay buyers to only make good on their payments just every other day? Is eBay not correctly reporting and still working on getting EPN up to speed? What’s weird is that if you average out my clicks per day, discounting a couple of 3,000 clicks per day anomalies, I come in around 250 to 300 each day and that’s a pretty consistent line. So why the inconsistency in earnings?

Well anyway, just to be goofy, I took my earnings line through the 26th and made a little illustration. I hope there’s no truth to this? The shark’s teeth match up perfectly with revenue:

Anyone else seeing a roller coaster ride of eBay affiliate earnings like this?