May 6, 2008
May 2008 Featured BANS Site Review for the Cactus Products for Sale website.
Site: http://www.CactusJax.com/
Target Niche: Cactus, Cacti and Succulents
Date Reviewed: 05/02/2008
By: Mark Hansen
Overall Score: 3.2 out of 10 (10 being the best)
In addition to the measures above, the site has a total of 23 inbound links to the domain. While this factor is important, it is not measured in the overall score of the site.
Lets get into the review and reasons for the scoring of the Cactus Plant Store.
…Read more about Build a Niche Store Review - www.CactusJax.com
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May 5, 2008
Well - 30 days ago, I wrote a post about my Custom BANS Template with the Build a Niche Store entry and a Blog incorporated into the backside. In the post, I promised I would provide follow up for the next few months so we can see how the combination works together. I am very happy to say… it has been wonderful thus far!
First 30 Day Report of the Fine Designer Shoes site
Just to refresh everyones memory, the site in question is the Fine Designer Shoe site I used as one of my 12 week empire stores. The site uses a custom template I put together along with several code modifications to eliminate any footprint of the BANS code to search engines and makes use of several basic SEO strategies that were built in to take advantage of the page titles. Not counting the 8-12 hours I put into the template itself, I have a total of about 3 hours into this site! I installed it, built the first group of main store categories, installed the blog and template and walked away!
Today, being day 30 of the site… I am revisiting the site and adding a group of subcategory pages, focusing on one of the brands in the main store menu. Along with adding more store pages, I am going to start manually posting to the blog from here forward. 3-5 posts a week, related to the new store pages and the niche in general, should help this store with more traffic and higher rankings over the next 30 days!
Key Metrics
Combined CJ/EPN Earnings: $44.90
Traffic:
Total Costs: $31.86
30 Day Net Gain: $13.04
While it is still too early to know much for sure, the first 30 days of metrics on this site tell me it should be a high performing site within the next few months! It has seen a high rate of indexing already and the spiders seem to come several times each day. The site ranks well (top 20) for several of the terms I am targeting, and has a wide range of words I can use to form custom categories.
My short term goal for the next 30 days is to increase sales by 50% to $70.00. Along with the earning increase, I want to increase my visitors from 66/day to 100/day. I will do that by:
My long term goal for this site is to achieve $1000/month in earnings within 12 months. If I follow this plan, success will follow… I’m sure you have all noticed that my goals are very small and very achievable at this point! This is done on purpose and meant to increase the site popularity and earnings slowly. Just like a solid foundation on a building, one step at a time is the best methods for growing your Build a Niche Store Empire!
On a completely separate note - I have received more than 500 requests from people wanting the template set (BANS and Blog) I used on the site. I have tried to explain to everyone that this template is very customized and requires quite a bit of code work to function 100% the way it is designed. That said… If anyone wants this template, the cost is: $300.00 - I think I just heard all of the gasps out there…. so I should explain what you get with this template.
I am limiting this to only 15 buyers so I can limit the footprint of the template on the web. As a buyer, if you choose to reconfigure this template and use it on other sites, you are welcome to do so. All I require, is that you do not resell any of the code or template anywhere else.
I truly wish I could provide this as a free template… but along with the category rotator images, the amount of coding required to make it all work seamlessly with another site is pretty indepth. If you prefer to wait for some free templates, I will have a slow trickle of BANS/Blog templates released soon.
If you are interested in purchasing the site template, customized to your niche site, send me an email via the contact page. I will send along payment information and the timeframe for the completed project. (Usually 4-7 days)
Mark
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May 3, 2008
On Weds, I discussed a few ways to know when it was time to turn a growing store into a top performer! Over the next several days, I am going to cover many of the steps you can take to do just that! As I stated in the earlier post, before you do start making the changes, you want to be sure the site is worth the added time you are about to invest into it. Review the metrics in the earlier post to learn more… So, where do you start?
All the experts say… fresh and useful Content is The King, when it comes to ranking higher in search engines! Regardless of which engine you achieve top 5 rankings in first, chances are pretty good that your site is providing something they feel is not being found elsewhere. Whether your site is about tiny green men or fine designer shoes, you need to find a way to provide fresh, non-bans content to capture more visitors that can be converted into buyers!
The quickest and possibly easiest way to start building content is by adding a wordpress blog. The wordpress platform is included with every HostGator account and can be added using the Fantastico panel, located in your main cPanel of your hosting account. When you install the blog, there is an option about the directory you want to use. If you leave this blank, it will get in a fight with BANS and neither application will work right! For almost all of my blog installations, I use “discussion” or just “blog” to install wordpress. This will leave my BANS install intact and resolve the blog platform to an url like: mydomain .com/blog or mydomain .com/discussion, and is the easiest to work with.
After you have installed wordpress, you need to set yourself a goal of 2-4 new posts each week and stick to it for the first 30-60 days in order to give the search engines fresh content every day. After the first few months have passed, you can slow your posting down to just 1-3 times a week to maintain your results.
The hardest thing about posting to a blog is that you have to figure out how to provide fresh content with each post and the answer, is to subscribe to others! If you find 5 other blogs in your same niche, subscribe to the writers’ feeds and simply use that info as a brainstorming resource for your own topics! Always refer back to the original writer as your source of inspiration for the daily post, and never copy their post. Just put your own spin on the same bit of news…
The true benefit comes when you start linking to the items or categories for sale in your BANS store! Now you have an article post about very relevant content AND a link or two to the actual products inside your money maker! Just like your category keyword research, your post should use the terms that are likely to deliver targeted readers. Always keep your keyphrase research handy when writing on your blog and you will be rewarded with both general AND buying visitors!
Before the end of the week, I plan on testing some basic BANS/Blog templates with a few other readers. Once we have worked out the bugs, they will be available here for your site work. I should state right up front, these templates are not plug and play and will require some code work in order to function seamlessly with your BANS install. Fortunately, I will provide instructions and a video to try and ease the process.
Do you have a strategy for turning an average BANS site into a top performing authority site? Please share…
Mark
Popularity: 7% [?]
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April 30, 2008
Looks like it is that time again… Google is updating the toolbar PageRank! I saw it first VERY late last night over at Courtney Tuttles blog. Court’s site is another very good source of reading when you want to break into earning good money on the Internet.
If this is like any other PR update, it will likely be a 24-36 hour process of seeing some pages change immediately and others over the course of a day or two. Don’t make the mistake of checking ONLY your main page, check some of your deeper pages like your sitemap and any other pages you have linked into for ranking.
A few notables of my own thus far:
PR is only one small factor, but it seems to carry so much weight in the world of optimization! Congrats to all who gained!
Did you have any notable gains? If so, post them in the comments… lets have a look!
Mark
Popularity: 9% [?]
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April 29, 2008
In yesterday’s post about dumping some of my BANS sites, I purposely left out the complete opposite aspect of your Build a Niche Store efforts. You have to remember I am not a “visitors per day” person, but instead, I look at the pageviews/visitor as a better picture of how effective a site is working for me. For example, if I see 100 daily visitors and only 110 pageviews, that tells me real quick that these visitors are either not finding what they want, or they don’t like the site and what it has to offer! On the other hand, if the same 100 visitors return 700 pageviews, that tells me the site is not properly setup to get the visitor/cookie passed to eBay and they are browsing too much! My own preference lies somewhere in the middle… 2.5-5 pageviews per visitor is right in my sweet spot! Looking at the basic site metrics in AWStats brings up the next important question…
When Should You Take your BANS Site to the Next Level?
Let’s face it… most of us do not care about repeat visitors when we launch our niche stores. Our goal is, and always has been, to attract a search engine visitor… shake their hand and show them where they can find the item they are looking for, send them to eBay, and forget about them. Truly a middleman! I see several sites out there using social bookmarking code and a few other methods to attract repeat visitors, but what if… what if you found your niche was popular enough to turn into an authority site?
I’m sure most of you are asking yourself… well Mark, what ISthe next level, I thought a BANS site was just an affiliate site I could build, optimize and walk away from?! Well, essentially it is… and before you decide to try and take it farther, you need to know that it also requires a bit more of your time, but the rewards will be five-fold in the longrun as your basic Build a Niche Store website makes the transition from a weak affiliate site to an authority site!
Since this is the first group of sites I am going to take to the next level, I want to outline my determining metrics and explain why. In tomorrows post, I will tell you all the changes I am going to make to those sites in order to get more “Targeted, Converting, Traffic”. It may have only taken 5-10 hours to develop the original niche store, but the next step will likely take a bit more!
Looking at the 5 metrics above, I have a way to accurately measure my efforts to this point with a niche store. I know it has Aged beyond the Google age filter (more than 6 months old) and come out with a steady flow of visitors. (More than 100 visitors) I also know that the visitors coming to the site are actually interested in buying (mid-range number of pageviews and sending clicks to eBay) and most importantly, when they get to eBay, they are buying! Not only are they buying, they are generating higher amounts of revenue from my referral (higher average selling price) and most of them, found the exact items I created this site for! (High number of Targeted keyPhrases)
Now that I know which sites to target for further growth, tomorrow - I will outline a few simple steps you can take to attract more visitors! Between both Kim’s and my own sites, only about 15-20 (about 10-15% of our total store inventory) are worthy of taking this next step! How many sites do you own that are worth stepping up?
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