IronMan Comics Build a Niche Store – Phase 2

It been a little over a week since my last post on using Build a Niche Store, and that’s really only because of a lack of free time on my site. Today I decided to take my existing IronManComics.net BANS site and make it look like a real site and not an out of the box BANS site. There are several ways for your to recreate your Build a Niche Store so it doesn’t look like the thousands of other stores out there. The two most popular ways, are to design and create your own template, or simply purchase one from a designer. I called onto my good friend Ian Fernando, who has been playing with BANS for some time now. Ian recently released a few BANS themes from his blog and is selling three custom themed designs for only $37. I used one of his template designs to recreate the IronMan comics store.Below you can see the original out of the box design for the IronMan comics BANS store. The only thing I had modified in the original design was the header image. The new design on the right, not only looks extremely better, but it allows for me to target to niche advertisers and fill the design with more IronMan content. I also added a few more content pages into the site since the original design. There is still a lot more than can be done to monetize the site, I will continue to add new content pages, products and find relevant advertisers for the site.

Out of the Box Design vs. Custom Design. An Amazing Difference!

Earnings Potential
After going live with the IronMan BANS site early in the month, I just didn’t have the time to work on the site like I intended to. As for promotions, the only thing I did was mention it in my previous “Focusing on a Niche Market: IronMan” post. Since then it was indexed into search engines and received some traffic here and there. Right when I had the idea to create the site, I was anxious to work on it and build it into the great resource site and work heavily on the design. Even though I hadn’t touched the site (until today), I was logging into the eBay Partner Network every once in a while and checking my stats. As of today, it looks like the site has earned $10.13 in commissions. Yes, this is nothing compared to anything in the long run… but keep in mind, this money was generated with the crappy out of the box design and with no paid promotion. If you can create a few sites that make $1 per day (like this site), you can earn a few thousand dollars a year with just 10 sites. (1 site X $1 a day = $365… multiply that by how many mini sites you can create). With a little promotion and more custom written content pages, it should perform much better.

$10.13 in Earnings with No Paid Advertising… Small, but with residual potential…

I was excited about the idea of putting together an IronMan site to take advantage of the hype surrounding the movie and it’s massive earnings potential in the beginning, but now after playing with the site and design a bit more, I’m even more so. The addition of seeing that the site is actually earning a few bucks is pretty cool too. If nothing else, it just makes for a fun side project that makes a few dollars. Depending on your niche area and interests, you should easily be able to create a few Build a Niche Store sites and earn some residual dollars. It will be interesting to see if the site can bring in any new eBay members ($25 commission) and bidding activity since it allows for a 7 (bidding) to 30 (new member) day cookie on all eBay activity.

UPDATE: Incredible (Hulk) Build a Niche Store Themes