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February 10, 2008
Hi Everyone,
This is Erik, one of the guest bloggers. Since we’re still in the early stages of the series, I thought I’d share something I’ve been thinking about–a budget for new Build a Niche Store owners. I am just starting out with it myself so I’ve set up a basic list of the costs I’m going to allow myself. Now, I’m basing this on the assumption that I’m going to try BANS for a year and create at least a dozen sites. So I’ve calculated the costs over a period of one year, and I’m also noting what you would need to average in order to break even.
Option 1: A single store. If you were to try only a single store, you’d be looking at the following costs:
Domain Name Registration (1 year): $10
Web Hosting (1 year at $10/month): $120
Build a Niche Store Script: $97 (one time fee)
Wordtracker: $330 dollars (1 year subscription)
Total: $557
Spread out over a year, you’d need to average about $47/month in order to break even within a year.
Option 2: 5 stores
Domain Name Registration (5 domains for 1 year): $50
Web Hosting (1 year at $10/month): $120 (since you can use Hostgator to host unlimited websites)
Build a Niche Store Script: $97 (you get a license for unlimited sites)
Wordtracker: $330 (1 year subscription)
Total: $597
What this means is that with 5 sites, you’d have to average about $50/month in order to break even within a year. However, you’d have not one but five sites, which means you’d really only need to average $10 dollars a month per site in order to break even. In other words, the more sites you create, the more chances you have to make money. And each additional site only costs you an extra $10 dollars.
Option 3: 12 sites
Domain Name Registration (12 domains for 1 year): $120
Web Hosting (1 year at $10/month): $120 (since you can use Hostgator to host unlimited websites)
Build a Niche Store Script: $97 (you get a license for unlimited sites)
Wordtracker: $330 (1 year subscription)
Total: $667
So if you have twelve sites, you need to average about $56/month in order to break even in a year. But notice–that’s only an average of less than $5 per site per month. And of course these are very conservative estimates–what you need simply to break even. The basic point is that if you’re going to try BANS, you might as well open as many stores as you have time to create, since each additional store only costs you $10 dollars, and also spreads the financial risk across more sites.
Let me know if I missed any costs. Some people use other paid keyword research tools in addition to or instead of Wordtracker. Based on what I’ve read, I’m going to purchase Wordtracker for now and maybe in the future (once I hopefully make money from BANS sites) purchase something else.
9 Responses to “Niche Store Budget for Newbies”
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Erik -
You are spot on with this post! My youngest son (The Fenton Glass Boy) earned about $40 last month on the single site I am letting him work on. The first thing he asked when he heard about the earnings was: Can I get more domains?
Even if you only build 1 site a week for 26 weeks, you will have a great residual income within months!
Mark
Hi Erik,
I Have been building bans sites for around eight months now and thoroughly enjoy it. I have also spent quite a bit of money on tools, some which were great and some not so great, I note that you are going for wordtracker; can I suggest you look at nichebot as it is cheap in comparison, yet includes a full version wordtracker together with full versions of keyword discovery and a few others it also has management tools built in.
Hey Den,
Why don’t you write a review for NicheBot on the 50 Ways to Discover and Research a Niche Market post?
Personally, NB overwhelms me … so I’ve never been able to successfully use it. I was a member at Keyword Avalanche (now Niche Rockets) for over a year and accumulated a lot of NB points that I never used. They are still on my account if I’m willing to pay the monthly fee. But since I’ve ever figured out how best to use it, they just sit there … and I occasionally pay for WordTracker and may try Wordze this time.
I would love not just a review but more importantly some “best practices” tips also.
Cindy
Erik,
GREAT post! I love working out the numbers and breaking things down into small bite-size reachable goals.
One variation I might suggest instead of putting out the large WT commitment. If you’re going to be building 1 site a week, then it probably is the best way to go. But if you will only be building 1 site a month, then why not just take out a one-week subscription to WT for $30 and do research on the 3 sites you plan to build over the next 3 months? Or use the 1-day option at Wordze for $7 and do that every time you get ready to build a new site?
I’m not going to re-work the figures above because the monthly cost savings are not the point here … just not having to cough up over $300 at once. Having access any time you want would be nice but maybe not affordable to all.
I liked it better when WT had the one-day option. I did the one-week option recently and spent the entire week researching … which was draining! Next time I think I’ll try the one-day option at Wordze and see how it goes. With a little planning, you can make good use of the shorter options and still research several niches. Then the next time you take out a short subscription, just do another run-through on your existing niches and see if you find any new terms you need to include on your sites.
Thanks for taking the time to plot all this out for us, Erik.
Cindy
Hey Erik,
Great post I love working the numbers as well. However I did have a suggestion. Not as a substitute for Wordtracker because it’s great but as an added tool have you or anyone else tried the Google Keyword Tool? It’s free and gives you a good idea of what your competition is for words and phrases. It’s always nice to know how many other sites you are up against and how many of them are in Google.
I honestly believe that any “niche” you choose you can succeed at with the BANS stores. Having the ability to add keywords and descriptions and content right in the back end and have the products there with every changing content is a real big plus for the BANS store users.
I have been using BANS for a few weeks now and have had what I would call great success with it. I have been using Wordpress blogs and BANS stores ing them together and creating new content as often as possible in the blogs and this seems to be fairing well with Google as well as AOL and Yahoo. I looked up one of my sites yesterday and was surprised to see that I had gone from a big fat 0 links in Yahoo to over 40 links in less than a month.
Just some notes …
Thanks for the post …
Ernie
If needed you can stretch your budget even more by using a more generic domain for “search tasting”.
If the site is reasonably indexed and you link to the subdomain, your new subdomain will get indexed pretty quickly.
Just set your new store up on a newly created subdomain. IF the traffic is promising after a few weeks or a month, then go ahead and purchase the new domain and set up a permanent redirect from the old subdomain.
It is much easier to justify spending money on ANOTHER DOMAIN, if the store for the new domain has laready made enough to pay for the domain registration;-).
Great post. I never did a budget. It might have stopped me from buying so many domains. Nope
After I have tried almost all domain providers, I ‘ve found the best and cheapest is http://www.1and1.com/
They always have great deals where you get up to 5 domains registered and hosted for the price of one with other providers. Check it and you’ll realize I ‘m right.
http://www.1and1.com/
Hi BANSERS,
I’m not a banser yet, but almost there. I’ll definitely get thru Mark’s link.
He deserves it. He is a good man for helping others.
I liked the numbers, but they don’t reflect the reality.
If we’re going to concentrate to much on the small numbers, it will have a negative effect on the focus. How can you focus on developing BANS if these numbers are in your head ?
They are irrelevant, because the more you focus, the faster are the results, and the better is the income.
About domain registrars. Would be really nice to have more options for registering 5+ domains for a discounted price.
Is 1and1 reliable enough, like GoDaddy ?
What about Sedo, Moniker ?
Moniker has some discounts, but I couldn’t figure out.