If you have researched business ideas for creating an income from being an eBay affiliate, you have probably heard of
Build A Niche Store (BANS).
Now making money with this business idea is different than actually selling on eBay.
You will leave the selling to someone else and you make money on the commissions they earn instead.
Like so many other companies today, eBay has an affiliate program, which means they are willing to share some of their revenues with people who promote eBay and drive traffic to the site.
And one of the most popular ways to do this is with a BANS store.
A BANS store is basically a website that you build that targets a certain category or niche of products on eBay.
You build a website with the BANS software and then you must get traffic to your site which will hopefully click through to eBay and buy something within 7 days.
If that happens then you get a percentage of the seller’s commission on the completed auction.
Now this seems like an easy way to make money and people are putting BANS stores up all over the internet.
But I don’t recommend this approach. And I recommend BANS only with a few caveats.
Go ahead and check them out, I'm pretty proud of my handiwork actually, especially the headers.
Building these sites were my first experience at building websites, and it turned out to be not that difficult and an excellent way to learn a little more about the process.
After I put the sites up in the Spring of 2008, I did some bookmarking and wrote a few articles. That is about the extent of the promotion I put into the sites, and after a few months I was making around $50.00 a month in commissions.
I still visit the sites every now and then to do some tweaking and marketing, but they have mostly been left as is.
I'm sure I could increase the income from those sites if I had more time to do search engine optimization and add more content, but I have been putting all my energy and effort into this site since I started building it.
Now this is many people’s experience with BANS and so they compensate for the low earnings by putting up tons of stores, littering the internet with useless sites that they will put very little care and maintenance into.
Basically it comes down to one of the main ideas I try to get across in that article...
You are not really building anything of long term value with this approach!
But some people are successful with their BANS sites, and I will tell you why.
They treat the store as part of a full fledged site, and commit to maintaining and marketing their site, and adding quality content that pertains to the niche or category of goods they are featuring in their store.
Many add a blog to their website, and post articles and new information about the market they are covering.
Let’s use designer shoes as an example. Blog posts about the newest designer trends, news in the world of fashion and related content would keep the site relevant, and add value in the eyes of visitors and the search engines.
And here is another caveat when it comes to a BANS store.
You can’t just put it up on the web and hope the search engines will rank your pages highly and send you visitors. You do have to do some work to get that to happen, just as you would when building a regular site.
Another problem with BANS is targeting too large a niche or the wrong niche. This is where you need to do your research and find categories on eBay where people are always buying.
And I will let you in on a little secret...
I found that I have much more success with my two sites that target vintage and antique items than I do with my water filter site.
Why? Because people can go to the store and buy a water filter, so while they might look on eBay for a deal, they are probably going to go to the store so they can actually compare brands and see what they are getting.
But with vintage and antique items, these items are not going to be available at the local big box store!
You might find a few items at a local antique store or flea market, but not in the range of availability that you will find on eBay.
So if you do decide to pursue building BANS stores, the best thing I can recommend is to find niches of goods that are not readily available through regular shopping outlets.
This doesn’t mean the goods have to be vintage or antique, just not readily available in stores.
Some examples would be specialty items from other countries (such as French milled soap), luxury goods, recreational niches and more.
I have seen stores that target sushi chef items, Beatrice Potter collectibles, the list is pretty endless of the ideas you could come up with.
In Business Idea -
Vintage Clothing On eBay,
we talked about the hot vintage clothing trend on eBay. That would be a good niche to research, and should give you some ideas to target your research from there.
Building BANS stores can be a way of learning how to make money on the internet.
I think building a website with SBI has more long term potential and value, but if this overwhelms you right now and you still would like to get a foothold in the world of internet marketing, BANS might be a good choice for you.
But you basically will get out of it what you put into it.
If you commit to the process and work to see it through, it can be a way to earn money online.
BANS currently costs $97.00 to purchase.
You will also need to purchase web hosting for about $10.00 a month and domain names for each store you build.
I use
Hostgator
for webhosting and GoDaddy
for domains, and I can recommend both.
If you do decide to try your hand at building BANS sites, be sure to do some research on the internet for more help than what is available in the manual.
The BANS forum is good, and there are some great blogs with helpful information, free templates and more that will help you do it right - or even better.
