Recommended BANS Blogs

Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel from this point on, I recommend checking out Mark Hansen’s blog – The Foundation of Building a Niche Store Empire in 12 Weeks which ended recently, but you can still follow.  I subscribed to his blog when I first bought BANS and find it to be the best resource for information on researching your niche, keywords, and SEO I have come across.

He started the series on February 1st and has step by step tutorials from the first step to the end.  The information and is geared toward beginners as well as anyone who wants to improve their BANS business.  He chose participants to make posts on their progress and results as well.  A lot of his tutorials are videos where he shows you how to do what he’s talking about.

I highly recommend checking it out, but start with the first post and complete each step before going on to the next.

Tags: bans, BANS for Beginners Series

Set Up Hosting Account and Install Your BANS Software

There are a lot of places that will host your website and offer a variety of features and prices. I had no idea which one to go with when I first started with BANS, however, there were a lot of recommendations on the forum for Hostgator because it is BANS friendly. With a baby hosting account, you can add as many domains as you want for the low one yearly price.

Whichever host you decide to go with, you will need to change your DNS nameservers from GoDaddy to that host. When I registered with Hostgator, they sent DNS nameservers by email. You will need to keep them so you can make the change each time you set up a new account. There is a video tutorial on Hostgator that takes you step-by-step through making the changes. Easy.

Once you have your domain name, your hosting account set up, and your nameservers directing to your host, it is time to install your BANS software and upload it to your host. To do this you will need FTP software. I use CuteFTP 8, again because it was recommended by BANS. There are other programs including CoffeeCup. You can dowload a free trial version, of both and see which one you like better, or search Google for other programs. An FTP program is used to transfer files saved on your computer to your hosting account online.

Before you go any further, open your BANS software file that you downloaded to your computer, and open the installation manual. Take 10 minutes and read it through completely. Now, following the manual exactly, step-by-step, install your niche store.

Tags: Affiliate Niche Stores, BANS for Beginners Series, Blog, Build a Niche Store

Step 4 – How to Register a Domain Name

After you have researched and found your niche, the next step is to register a domain name. I use GoDaddy because their registration process is easy to follow and they are reasonably priced.  Most of the time you can do a search on Google for GoDaddy coupons or promos and get an even better price. I have used this promo list for the last several months and save at least $3.00 on every name I register.

On the first page of GoDaddy, you’ll find a place to search for domain names. Just type in the name you want in the search box, press enter, and it will tell you if the name is available.

It is good if you can find a domain name that also has your main keywords in it. Sometimes you can put a word at the beginning or end to make it work. For instance, if myniche.com is not available, try buymyniche.com or buy-myniche.com.

Tags: Affiliate Niche Stores, BANS for Beginners Series, Blog, Build a Niche Store

Step 3 – How to Find a Niche

I got a little ahead of myself a few weeks ago and published a post on finding a niche. To read it, go here Finding a Niche. I have been following a series called The Foundation of Building a Niche Store Empire in 12 Weeks! by Mark Hansen at The Niche Store Builder. In it, he has a video tutorial with step by step instructions for researching a niche. In the video, he uses the paid version of Wordtracker, but you can use the Free Version.

This step is really important. If done carefully and correctly, you can see earnings from your niche within the first week of launching your site. When building a niche store, you want to stay focused on that one product. For instance, I recently launched a website – Pocket Watches for Sale. I could have built a broad website based around the general term “watches”, but that would have been a large broad niche and I wanted a small, tight, focused niche.

When you are researching your niche, you want to first, look for a product that people are searching google and the other search engines to find. If no one is searching for the item, you won’t get much traffice. Secondly, you want to see how many competing web pages there are using that particular search term. Pocket watches, for instance has a lot of competition and it will be difficult for me to get in the top 10 of Google search for people searching for that term.

However, when you search for “pocket watches” in Wordtracker (you can also use Google adwords keyword tools), you will be given a list of terms people are searching for that include the words pocket watches such as Elgin pocket watches. Usually the longer the search term, the less competition you will have. You are looking for terms people actually type into the toolbar to search. An even longer keyword phrase would be antique Elgin pocket watches. You will want to use these phrases to build your store page categories.

But I’m getting ahead. For now, I recommend you watch Mark’s video a few times and perhaps practice doing a little research to see what you come up with. It all sounds complicated and I struggled with it in the beginning, but a light bulb went off for me while following this series and niche research is really very simple.

Tags: Affiliate Niche Stores, bans, BANS for Beginners Series, Build a Niche Store

Finding a Niche

When it comes to niche marketing, finding a niche seems to be the step people find to be the most nerve wracking. Building a BANS website is easy and fun, but before you can get to that point, you have to do a little work to make sure the website will be successful.

To get you started, here are a few of the places I use to get niche ideas:

Shopping.com – Consumer Demand Index lists the top 100 items people are searching for under each category.
eBay Pulse lists the most popular items in each category.
Terapeak searches eBay for the item you select and returns the number listed, number sold in the last 7 or 30 days, and the average sale price.

Once you have a niche in mind, you need to do some research to find out how many searches are being done for that niche and how much competition you have for that niche. More than likely, the niche words you start out researching will have a lot of searches and a lot of competition. That doesn’t mean you should give up on the niche. It does mean that you need to do deeper keyword and keyword phrase research to come up with terms that are used for searches, but have less competition. Those are the words and phrases you want to target on your niche website site to get ranked in the top 10 searches with the major search engines.

There are free programs online where you can do keyword research and that’s the way I started. I used Wordtracker FreeKeywords and SEOBook Free Keyword Tools. These tools will give you a list of the top 100 searches for any given term, but their other research functions are limited.

If you’re serious about niche marketing and want to make sure you’re using the keywords that will give you the most profit in return, you will probably want to invest in a keyword research program such as Wordtracker. I recently bought a one year membership and have found that I have more targeted keywords, it’s not so intimidating to select a niche, and it saves me a ton of time. They have weekly, monthly and yearly memberships, and you can try the full version before you buy with Wordtracker Free Trial.

Tags: bans, BANS for Beginners Series, Build a Niche Store, niche