March 27, 2008
One question that was asked by Eric on another post really got my attention and I wanted to spend a bit of time thinking about the best way to answer. The question was:
I was always wondering what it took to achieve certain levels of success… ie: $25/day, $50/day etc.
So… how do I answer this question effectively? It is a very hard question, in which the answer relies COMPLETELY on the efforts you put forth. Here goes…
You all know me by now, there are no hard, fast answers… Sorry for the long response…
Let me start this explanation with… it will NOT happen overnight! Many of you who read this blog regularly know that if there is one thing I constantly repeat… it takes time! Specifically, 1-2 hours a day, 4-5 days a week and it may be several weeks or even months before you start to realize how effective your efforts have been!
Rule #1: Spend ONLY as much time as it takes to Install, configure, set your 10-20 main categories, optimize them, get some links… walk away! In total, I can safely estimate 1-2 hours to get this done on a single site.
So… lets assume you start today, and develop only 5 new niche stores each week for a total of 20 after the first 30 days. At this point, you start revisiting these sites at the rate of 1-2 hours per MONTH (versus week) and spend the time promoting, massaging, making small changes etc. On ALL sites, you review the logfiles, do some keyword research and develop a few more product pages with unique meta based on your research.
At the end of the first 30 days… ONLY if you have taken the time to make your site unique, done your keyword research and get your inbound links, you might earn $1/site, or a total of $30 for the month. Sucks huh? Read on….
Rule #2: The MOST important thing you can do to your site is Make It Unique!
This is all very much repeated throughout this blog… if you develop a site about widgets, and eBay sets a category name of widgets, and with BANS, you keep the same category name of widgets, and 3000 other people are ALSO targeting widgets… why in the world would your site be listed on top of search engines before theirs? Answer… It won’t!
During your research, if you find that people are searching for “Deals on Widgets”, and you also find that only 25 of those other 3000 sites actually target “Deals on Widgets”, why wouldn’t YOU target them also? Even though you are not alone with your target, you have narrowed your competition from 3000/1 to 25/1. Taking it a step further… what if only 5 were targeting “Good Deals on Widgets” but the number of searches was only 5 less than the others? You got it… success!
I have used this same analogy before and it fit well… Imagine you need a new lawnmower, specifically, you want a “2007 John Deere 380B”…. so off you go to your local hardware store, except now, just like on the Internet, EVERY store is on the same street… We’ll call it G-Street. So as you turn the corner, you see 20 hardware stores in front of you, all in a long row, 10 to the left and 10 to the right… but you can read the signs on top pretty clearly!
If you are like most people, you know EXACTLY what you want and you are going to choose one of the two TARGETED stores with exactly what you need!
That is exactly what optimization and long tail research does for your niche store. Even though you are not alone…. your chances of being rewarded with buyers is greatly increased if you build your sites around what people want. Just like life, If you are unique you will get more attention!
Now how do you spread the word to those looking for your specific or Niche Products, you get inbound links! You submit to directories, you participate in blogs like this, you use signatures in forums, essentially, you use every means you have, to get the word out that you have sites specializing in “This Niche Product Category”… Next month, you do the same thing but you focus on a different part of your store, or “That Niche Market Also”… rinse, repeat…
Rule #3 - Focus on Rules 1 & 2, Don’t get Hung Up on Stats!
Mark and The Dolla’Green Farm
Building Niche Websites (BANS or ANY Type of Website) is like growing a garden from the dirt up! ( I was gonna say ground up, but that is just too duh-obvious! LOL) Well, we aren’t just building a small garden, we are building a large farm that grows one type of green veggie year round. For the sake of this story… we’ll call them “Dolla’Greens“! DollaGreens have a germination time (Initial indexing) of 5-10 days, and an initial growth cycle (from launch to $ earned) between 30-90 days, depending on MANY factors like weather, which is completely out of our control! But once they start growing… man, watch out!! Once the DollaGreens are growing, they continue to grow upwards and rarely die! About every 3 inches of the DollaGreen plant, there is a small bud… that bud is your reward for growing!
Our farm (the Internet) is endless in size and we could choose to grow one large garden, or several… lets say 30, small gardens, all growing DollaGreens… Since our time is limited and we can only sow a finite number of seeds in a day, it looks like we need to divide this section of our farm into 30 workable sections, that can each be completed in less than 1 day… this way, we can get all 30 done in 30 days, at the rate of 5+ each week! Makes sense so far huh?
Week 1- You plant your seeds on days 1-5 and put a little water on them… what do you do next? Do you take the next week off, stop and wait to see if they are going to grow or how high they might grow? Do you stand there on top of them, constantly playing with the dirt around the seeds to see if it helps… OR, do you go to the next section and plant 5 more mini farms? That’s what I thought…
Week 2- You are now developing a pattern on getting the sowing process down and you actually get the next 5 DollaGreen mini-farms planted in 4.5 days this week! For the remainder of Day 5, you go back to the first group and see if they have started germinating. What do you know, 3 of the first 5 have sprung a little DollaSprout from the ground and look like they will be starting to grow over the next week or two! If there was anything, no matter how small, you did to these three … you need to repeat it on the other 2 immediately!! So… once again, you have a choice to make, do you over-analyze what you did to these three plant and just sit there watching them grow slowly, again playing with the dirt… or do you head off to another section of farm and plant some more?
Week 3- Man, you are on the spot! ALL 5 DollaGreen mini-farms are planted in less than 4 days… and you actually have enough time to go back and check both of the previous weeks plantings! You check the first week and ALL 5 are growing now!! The sprouts from last week are getting bigger and the ones that didn’t even sprout, have now broke ground and almost matched the size of the originals! Good thing you took notes about what you did and applied it to ALL of your newer mini-farms as you have been planting!! As you are checking the plants this week, you also see a little Logfile guide on the side of them, telling you which soil nutrients are working best, which fertilizer seems to make a difference, etc! In less than 2 hours, you have checked ALL of your mini-farms and even taken a taste of one of the DollaSprouts… man it was only a small nibble, but it sure was sweet!! You got your first taste of success with your farm and cannot wait to do more!
Weeks 4 & 5… by now, you are able to plant the seeds of a DollaGreen in less than 30-45 minutes and you decide that you are going to focus on getting all your seeds into the ground over the next 2 weeks… you know the others are all growing, so why not give them time to really put some good info on their own logfiles, and get this planting section done!
Week 6… Man, am I tired of looking at dirt! Oh well, you go back and start reviewing the growth rate of your first 10-15 DollaGreen plants and you are finding all kinds of great info in their little logs… Which nutrients have made it to them from the farm soil, which fertilizers are helping…. how much water is best, etc. You decide that these first few weeks of Dolla’s are doing great, but you still want to fertilize them a little, and why not burrow a small path of dirt around the base, so the all important water can get to them easier?
6 Weeks into your farm and you can now walk up to any of the first few mini-farms, and snatch off a full size bud to eat every now and again!! Not quite enough for a meal yet… but definitely getting there!! Your earliest Dolla’s are now a foot or two tall and they seem to sprout a new leaf every day now! Granted, they are small leaves, but they are tasty!! You also notice that as they continue to grow taller, if you just leave the top sprouts alone… they grow into BIGGER sprouts and eventually start start dropping into your veggie basket every day when you walk by!
So here you are… at another point of trying to figure out what to do with your farm. The first 30 mini-farms are growing well, but really enough to feed a family of 4 and pay the morgage on your farm. You can see that most of your first few groups of plants are still thriving and growing steadily each week… and before long, they are dropping Dolla’s to ground EVERY DAY! The last group, only a week or two old… well, they are still small and need several more weeks to grow into full fledged DollaGreens.
What do you do at this point? You have an infinite amount of farmland in front of you… Do you sit back and watch your existing Dolla’s grow, or do you restart this exact process over again, planting 30 more seeds? If you decided to KEEP PLANTING… several months from now, your farm now looks like…
I currently have about 40-45 of my OWN BANS sites, all of them are NOT even fully optimized! Kim has about 50-75 sites. Kim had developed MANY of her sites before ever learning about menu and tag optimizing etc. Her first group of BANS stores didn’t really do too well for earnings. Since she started developing them following the 12 week method… I would say she is 5-6 weeks into it and on pace to earn $75-$100 by the end of the month.
I hope this post helps some of you get a gauge for what you may earn with BANS. BTW… I don’t know why, maybe another blog… I registered www.DollaGreens.com already!
Mark
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31 Responses to “Does Build a Niche Store Really Work? Lets Grow some DollaGreens!”
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May lots of spring showers bring lots of dolla’green flowers to all of our BANS farms!
Another great post, Mark. Great analogy to help us see what it takes to thrive from BANS.
This was one of my favorite posts! Great job Mark! And no, it wasn’t a direct, set in stone answer to what it takes for the $25/day benchmark.
But, I was FULLY aware that there are so many determining factors that go into it, that it was virtually impossible to answer that question! I applaude your efforts, though!
And, the part about how many stores you have vs. monthly earnings is priceless information! I hope that it gives newbies some REALISTIC expectations as to what they need to accomplish for BANS to be successful.
When Mark gets done w/the forum, I’d like to see a couple categories: (you guessed it..:D)
1. Level of Success: $25/day average
2. Level of Success: $50/day average
3. Level of Success: $100/day average
…and so on. It would be a great place for many of us to post our techniques, how many sites we have, how long we’ve been “in business”…. Whichever benchmark you’re at, that’s where you could post your info! Hey!!!…we could even have little “titles” or “stars” for acheivement under our forum avatars that read “I’m at $25/day!” ..or something like that! ;)
To me, this would do 2 things: 1) help people getting to that next benchmark and 2) be a great modivation tool!
…alright, my hands hurt!
Thanks Mark!!!!
Eric
Eric,
I hate to say this but I think you need to add at least one lower range category:
Level of Success: $5/day average
As much as I’d like to be making more I’m afraid that’s where I am right now.
Rochelle
I know, I know….I was getting a little excited after reading Mark’s post!
Thanks for the ag. review.
It also reminds me of commission sales that I spent 30 yrs doing.
It’s not about the money it’s about the numbers!
You keep going to the next door.
Keep leaving another pamphlet.
Thanks again.
I’ll provide a bit different perspective that might be helpful to folks. My first BANS site was an add-on to an existing deep content site about western saddles.
It’s a pretty narrow niche and not many good relevant affiliate programs out there. There’s a huge interest in used saddles on the web that I wanted some way to capture, so I turned to BANS. My store is now about a year old and I average $500-$700/month in commissions from this one store. I also use ebay ads threw ShoppingAds.com to add another $200 or so per month.
So, BANS store can generate significant earnings if you take the time to create unique and truly valuable content around it.
Beth,
That is truly encouraging to hear. Thank you very much for adding your comment.
Rochelle
This is a great article to get the Big Picture of building a Niche Site Empire. I was thinking 10 sites as a goal but now I see I’m thinking too small. Thanks Mark for once again broading my vision!
Jamie
Mark,
Thanks again for your great content.
For myself, I was somehow led to believe when I purchased the BANS software that the individual store potential was much greater. Even though I realized where the money was coming from I just assumed this was so.
I now realize that unless I have the type of success Beth has had that I will have to get really good at this by doing and doing again until I have a system down.
More materials with continuity from start to finish like we discussed earlier would still be very much welcomed.
Like in sections of the blueprint where is says “get links” a more descriptive explanation of what that means would help newbies immensely.
Jeff
@ All -
Realistically… This CAN be done with one single site! Like Beth was saying above, if you decide to focus on a content based site, and add or use BANS as an alternative form of monetizing the site… you absolutely CAN do just as well.
The methods I refer to in the 12 weeks series are based on using several sites, each contributing smaller portions, thus spending less time on them individually.
If you decided to use one single site to do the same thing, you could easily do so by spending the 1-2 hours each day focusing on creating unique content for the site, interlinking your content with your product pages, and promoting the one site versus many.
In the DollaGreen images above… just view the individual DollaPlants as different pages of your website.
Mark
Great article Mark. I think I must not be the typical BANS worker. I have spent 9 hours today maximising my main store categories and even researching keywords to use in the meta descriptions and the content prior to the ebay products. I am using nichebot and I must say it feels like hardwork compared to what I see others achieving on wordtracker. Are there any other nichebot users out there, that can shed some light on how to effectively use there databases. How does everybody else fair on the timescales laid out above particularly the 1 to 2 hours to create the 10 - 20 main categories. I would think I am putting in approx 40 hours a week on BANS work .
I use nichebot I’ve been using it for a long time, I’m no expert on it or anything like that but I use their Keyword Discovery Keywords to help drill down my websites main catagories and to find sub catagories. Example:
I type in “ACEO ART” and I find “horse aceo race racehorse racing art” “folk art aceo” “aceo horse art” “aceo altered art ” “crow aceo art ”
All these can be found in ebay.
Does that make sense?
I hope that helps shed a little light.
-David
I am a nichebot user, and I’m pretty new to all this. (Only have two sites thus far). However, I’ve found my best use for it is NOT to use everything. For example, if I’m looking to expand my keyword list with similar terms, I’ll use Wordtracker Thesaurus, or spend some credits on the LSI tool. Looking for long tail, low competition words I’ll generally stick to the Wordtracker 4-1 tool, and use filters to weed out high competition words, so that I’m left with a list of usable words, and not just 1000’s of keywords to become overwhelmed with.
I’m not sure that completely answered your question, but that’s been the best use I’ve gotten out of Nichebot thus far. Since I can’t afford Wordtracker right now, I’m finding it to be a signifantly better, and quicker tool than using the free wordtracker and google tools alone!
A few more thoughts on my earlier comments about my western saddles BANS site. I don’t want anyone to get the idea that I was contradicting Mark in any way. I’m a huge BANS fan and Mark fan.
In addition to my main store, I’m starting to build out a number of stand alone BANS stores and expect to turn them into smaller, but decent earners. There is money to be made here, but as Mark consistently makes clear, it takes work and knowledge. But that’s the secret to everything, isn’t it?
I have an ecommerce site in addition to a number of content and affiliate sites. While they all have their differences, the secrets to success for all of them are the same - qualified traffic and conversion. I approach every site I build with those two goals in mind. Follow Mark’s plan and you’ll be leagues ahead of most web marketers.
Odd that my revenues also took a dive after the eBay/CJ announcement. My clicks are up about 50% and my sales are down about 50%. That’s a real head scratcher.
I’m gratified to see that I’m ahead of your schedule, however. Thanks for the encouragement.
I love Dolla’Greens , this was a great post Mark, I like the farm comparison.
David,
Don’t feel bad about taking so long to accomplish each task. I also take much longer than Mark says it takes him. In fact, I can count on it taking me at least 2x or even 4x as long as his 1 - 2 hours! Regardless of how many sites I make, I doubt my time will ever get that low. Everyone works at their own pace … and I have accepted that mine is much slower!
Having said that, I would encourage you to re-watch Mark’s video on how he chooses his categories. I also was spending HOURS on researching and picking my categories for my first couple of sites and knew I had to be doing something wrong … and I was.
Your initial research should be based on what EBAY has to offer … not what the search engines show. I little contrarian, I know, and hard to change the way I’d always done things … but that made a huge difference in my research time. Later, after you have traffic and start expanding your site, then you use the search engine info.
HTH,
Cindy
P.S. I never could figure out NicheBot … WAAAAAAY too much clutter and options for my taste!
Re Nichebot….
I’m with all of you on it!!
The best thing I learned from nichebot was that the owner sent me a personal Thank you letter, and about 2 emails a day with a new offer!
Dont get me wrong.. it does have a place in keyword research, it was just too much for me to take in. I may just be a victim of habit and too used to using wordtracker.
Mark
Great post Mark - it is so easy to get caught in the over-analyzing your traffic / tweaking constantly spiral if you are not careful. Your post shows the importance of a proper plan / road map to avoid the dead ends on the way.
I use Nichebot and find it a good way to get lots of keywords quite cheaply, which I then export and analyze outside Nichebot. However, as a professional software developer, the interface does make me shake my head in disbelief!
This was a great post. I find myself overthinking everything, and then getting stifled in the process so that I end up doing nothing. Thanks for shedding more light on everything.
Mark, you have a great talent for teaching. you have certainly made it possible for me to continue in this business. But, i am getting the impression from reading your blog that the better share of the people doing the bans have years of experiance with a computer and web design. I am sure there are a lot of followers out there ,like my self, that have tried to keep up with the empire posts but have fallen behind , due mostly to lack of computer skills and terminology. So…. where in hell am i going with this? don’t know…. I guess i am crying on a shoulder, well ,back to work. Oh, also., i am a dedecated follower of your series, keep up the great work!
@ John -
I feel your pain… and know it can get overwhelming at times! One thing I can say though is that MANY of the people with BANS have little to NO experience with it!
Otis for instance, knew nothing about all of this back in November of last year… since then, he has several niche stores… and can customize them fairly well!
Just focus on what works and what doesn’t!! You will be right along with it in no time, repetition is the key! The more you repeat an exact process, the easier it gets.
Mark
Thanks for the article Mark! It made me realize that I do far too much non-productive fussing over my stores. It is a numbers game, you can develop a store that from your research “should” do very well and it bombs…I’ve got one like that, and instead of constantly fussing and worrying about it, I’m going to let it ride…maybe it’s an oak tree instead of lettuce or radishes! LOL
Thanks again,
:-)
Adrienne
PS…I’m also much slower than Mark at time spent just to put up a store and the main categories and sub-categories, but then, I allow myself to get side-tracked way too easily!
I too get discouraged but the encouragment that i get just from Mark’s site greatly outweighs the discouragement…
One way i look at it.. I would sometimes spend 8 bucks a week on lottery and scratch off tickets.. so why not take that money, which is a waste on lotterys, and use it for something productive.. and all the hours this 42 year old man spends on the XBOX, i put those hours into this now.. So it’s a no brainer.. No more than it cost to buy domains and even 15 bucks for directories.. I’m sure it’ll end up paying off in the long run!
Great Article,
Makes perfect sense.
Best Wishes,
Stewart
Hey Mark, thanks for the encouragement,sometimes that is all that is needed to keep going!! Jeff hit it right on too….. Keep your site way out front!!
Mark
Excellent material you provide like always.
Thanks for let us peak into your brains and see how a bright marketer (webdesigner,family man,entrepreneur, online business and many more hats…..) works.
Dolla’Greens post is one of your best, very inspiring, show me a clear view were I am heading.
Also let me mention that I am with you on the loss of your Dad. I lost my Dad when I was 10 years old and completely change my life for the worse. Life goes on but he always be with me….
Your Dad did a great job and you are a clear example of his work.
Mark please allow me to be your follower. I will be happy with just a fraction of what you know.
I love this post and keep coming back to it and rereading it again and again. It helps me stay focused on the long-term goal and not be so impatient.
Thanks again Mark!
Jamie
[…] You think Affiliate Marketing will help you Get Rich Quick! Face it, there are no Get Rich Quick schemes… everything takes time! Read more about Growing DollaGreens! […]
Great post!
It really breaks it all down into a simple and doable process!
[…] You think Affiliate Marketing will help you Get Rich Quick! Face it, there are no Get Rich Quick schemes… everything takes time! Read more about Growing DollaGreens! […]