Introduction to Build a Niche Store

Before setting up your site with Build a Niche Store, you should first know what the program does and how it works. Build a Niche Store is a program that you upload to your web site, which creates a database and admin area for you to easily create an eBay auction resource type site, the program costs $97. (Other alternatives to BANS is PhpBay, which is a wordpress plugin and costs $47.) The Build a Niche Store program is focused and aimed towards new comers to web site design, marketers and anyone that doesn’t want to program or play with eBay’s API system. In short, the $97 cost on this software is to save you time and pay for the time spent on creating this product and to access their active members forum.

What is BANS and how does it make money?
Build a Niche Store is a program that you install on your web server, which easily creates sites based on eBay auctions. The basic platform and concept for earning revenue with a BANS site is through the eBay affiliate program. Every time your web site generates a new user to eBay or a winning bid for an auction, you earn money. Through this guide I will cover many different ways to monetize a BANS web site, in addition to listing eBay auctions.

What do I need to create a BANS site?
If you currently have your own web site or knowledge on setting up domains and new sites, you are set and should have no problems creating a new site for BANS. If you are new to creating/hosting web sites, you will need a host and a domain name. I recently setup a new hosting account with HostGator ($7.95 a month / unlimited domains) to house most of my Build a Niche Stores. I also order domains through GoDaddy. Once you have your web site hosting and domain available, BANS comes with a very easy to understand guide for uploading and setting up your BANS site.
If you need a web host, used coupon code “SPRING” at HostGator and save 20%.

How long does it take to go live with a BANS site?
If you are completely new and need to setup your own hosting and purchase a domain, you should be able to go live with your store in less than an hour. (HostGator had my new account live within 20 mins of ordering) If you are already established and know what to do, you’ll have a store up in minutes. Figure two minutes to register a domain, another 5-10 minutes to upload and setup your BANS store, then spend a couple minutes to link/submit your new site to a few indexes or partner sites. In addition to how quickly you can have your site setup, it shouldn’t take long to get indexed in the major search engines as well.

What type of site do I create with BANS?
Without sounding to cliché, the possibilities are really endless. However, from a marketing standpoint, it would be best to target to niche markets that offer high end priced products, or are sold in volume. The more traffic and bids/sales your site generates, the more revenue you will receive. Another crucial factor to think about when creating your niche store, is to choose a topic you are interested in. The advantage to being interested in your topic, is that you will be more motivated to work on the site, and you can write content pages for the site, which will help it index in search engines and give your site users something to read.

Can I see examples of current BANS sites?
When you visit the Build a Niche Store web site, on the right column you will see a section called “Customer Stores”. This area profiles a select group of BANS customers and the stores they have setup. You will see that most of them are just utilizing the eBay affiliate program as a source for revenue. In the next follow up post this guide, I will show you actual BANS sites that I have created and am promoting through search marketing, articles and linking to drive traffic through the site, as well as many different revenue sources added to the site.

Targets towards almost any niche with eBay Auction content.

How do I promote eBay auctions on my BANS site?
eBay has their own affiliate program called the eBay Partner Network, which gives you linking access to all auctions currently running on their network. With the integration of BANS and eBay, your site can easily link up hundreds of auctions and will update automatically along with eBay. Once you setup your BANS site, in the admin area you can provide your eBay Partner Network account information and it will track all existing campaigns and referrals through your site. Depending on your site’s traffic volume, you will earn 50-75% of the revenue for each winner bid placed through your site. You will also earn $25-$35 per new active user sent to eBay.

Who should use BANS and why?
Build a Niche Store was created to make the ease of setting up niche auction stores simple and fast. After setting up your first site and going through the process, you can whip these out pretty fast. Unfortunately, making money isn’t so easy… anyone can create a ton of stores with BANS and hope for the best, but site promotion and monetization are key. I will provide you with many stats and real life examples on how to make the most of your BANS pages.

As for who should use BANS, anyone can use the program to create site, however most will find that it is very simplistic and could be a very good intro for anyone starting out in the web marketing and affiliate space. Though the program is simple, even veteran marketers can make use of the program. If you currently have an existing network of sites and traffic, you can easily setup new niche sites to bring new traffic to. Once establishing your new niche area, you can focus and build it up to a new residual revenue source.

This has been a quick intro the the Build a Niche Store program and what/how it works. While there has been some skeptics on the potential of the program or feel that I am wasting everyone’s time by even writing about it, I feel it definitely has potential and I have been working in niche markets for years and know they are profitable. In the next post on Build a Niche Store, I will use a site I setup with BANS as an example and show you how to target to niche markets, while monetizing your BANS site with more revenue sources besides eBay Partner Network.

As much as I would like for everyone to make money with the BANS program, it just isn’t likely. The program itself WILL NOT make you money, you need to dedicate yourself to put in the time to market and monetize your site. This program makes it super easy to install and setup a new site, but how many people stop there? I wrote this tutorial and guide to inspire and motivate you to go beyond the norm and put forth the time and effort to make money with your BANS store, than move onto bigger and better projects.

In the next follow-up post, I will cover how to focus on niche markets and break down one of my BANS created sites, including how to add new revenue generating sources to your sites.

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19 Comments

  1. Great series! I am just starting out and looking for a good way to learn the basics and work toward bigger and better things (as you suggest). BANS seems like a great way to learn the ropes. Looking forward to the next post.

  2. Zac, thanks for providing such a thorough and informative post on BANS. I’m just getting into more niche blogging and sites and this definitely will help! I agree completely too, that just throwing a site up isn’t enough these days..It’s such a competitive online market, so you really need to put in the effort and work to promote/market the blog or site, or else you won’t see results.

  3. nice nice – I have a special release coming soon for BANS – making sure everyones BANS stick out than the rest! nice intro

  4. i have been promoting bans sites for about a year now…

    last month, ebay pulled out of CJ.com and made their own afflilaite network EPN.

    since then, revenue for BANS users (and all EPN users) have been a FRACTION of what we were making with ebay through CJ.com.

    this could spell the end of BANS success, but without ebay revenue, BANS is pointless.

    do you use bans?

  5. Great post… Niche marketing is a great way to capitalize on different audiences… you have a vast territory and that leaves a lot of room to make money! You are sharing some good info here.

  6. I really like the BANS look and feel. I bought it quite awhile back and joined the forum. I started building one site. Nothing against the program because good information like this is being published around the web for entrepreneurs to get involved with these types of site. This program actually inspired me to hire my own programmers to create my own mashup sites. Had I not bought BANS in the first place the ideas would probably have passed me by.

  7. BANS has been around forever already. You are a full YEAR late with this post. Hardly the cutting edge. Where have you been? Is it just lately you have figured out that you are missing affiliate income by not pushing BANS? Kinda lame. Everybody and their brother is already doing BANS.

  8. Ruck, you going to start selling your script anytime soon ;)? I’m sure you would rather keep it all to yourself and not flood the market but I’d be more interesting in using something you made the blueprints for than BANS lol.

  9. Ahh, I can sell it, both sites are profitable :),

    I can probably shoot some resources to ya though and help you get one for yourself. I’m kinda of against sharing those things because then a lot of them start showing up, leaving footprints, rankings go down and eventually it just becomes a bunch of work trying to make it unique again. I’m no techie but I can help ya get started in getting your own.

    On another note I keep hearing BANS. Wondering if it’s time to hire some more labor and just start pumping these out and hiring some link juicers…hmm.

    1. Would definitely make for a good case study, whether it be for public or personal use. The power with these sites are they can pull in some residual earnings once they are setup and listed in the search engines. If you manage to get some good placement, theres no reason why you couldn’t earn an extra few thousand a month.

  10. I’d highly recommend the PHPbay Pro rather then BANS. It’s simply a plugin for wordpress (which we all use anyway). So all you have to do is install the plugin and adding stuff is easy. Plus it’s free. I don’t see the advantage for anyone who actually knows anything about wordpress to use BANS. It’d be way smarter to use phpbay Pro.

  11. BANS is really new for me…Thanks for this info. I'm considering to try it.

  12. Zac, I also got the phpBay Pro plugin and have been putting up my first site AppleProductsDepot and it has been fairly easy, but time consuming and I have yet to see any revenues from the site.

    Any idea how long it takes before a site starts to get traffic?

    I may try BANS also. It looks pretty easy to modify the templates.

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