I thought I’d give BANS (Build a Niche Store) a try a while back. It didn’t get off the ground as I was a busy guy. Oh wait, I’m still extremely busy. So just recently I made a BANS store for a pretty hot toy item this year. I’ve spent some dollars and so far nothing. So sad.
I probably need to quit promoting my site with PPC and start finding free advertising. It’s tough to make money off of Ebay auctions when the auction may not be over yet or people don’t want to buy these items from Ebay. I’m going to go with the route of free marketing for now.
Have you tried BANS? What are you stories or helpful tips you can give me and anyone else reading this?
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BANS seems like such a good idea but… There are two things I hear, 1). Google has caught onto to the store sites, penalizes them in the SERP’s. 2). EBay did a huge house cleaning of affiliates last summer, so I thought it would be hard to get approved.
The first one doesn’t bother me so much because I don’t believe in just relying on SEO to bring in traffic. If that were what I relied upon, I would be waiting a long time to be net positive. Two, I would like to know the current status on EBay accepting affiliates.
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I didn’t get deleted. I have been on ebay doing zero business. I don’t know how it all works but tonight I look at tit says Dec. 4th I earned $27 on ebay. I still lost cash but maybe if I can stick with cheap traffic that might help.
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I have several BANS sites up too, and I didn’t get canned either. I’ve only put them up and did some custom graphics, but haven’t had the time to add content to them. They’re also still in the Google index. Google did at one point de-list tons of sites because they were a .INFO TLD… thanks to the spammers. I believe they also went after some sites that had the ‘Powered by Build A Niche Store’ footer, so make sure you turn it off. I think that most of the affiliates that got canned were probably buying traffic where they bid on keywords like ‘ebay’ or other trademarked keywords. I have about 30 BANS sites set up and haven’t really made any money, so I don’t think you get canned based on performance. Probably, just for not playing by the rules…
-Disclaimer: I haven’t made any real money with BANS because I haven’t really promoted my sites, and not because of the BANS scripts. I do believe it’s a good product and would recommend it to anyone interested in getting started in affiliate marketing.
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