We’ve been building niche websites monetized through affiliate links and contextual programs like AdSense since 2004.

It’s how we got started online, it’s how we managed to switch from going to work to working from home, it’s how we learnt the majority of the practical internet knowledge we have, it’s what gave rise to the concept of BANS, it’s what enabled us through finance and understanding to move into more complex internet projects.

They were our way in to the internet and they have played a part ever since – for a long long time they were our “bread and butter”.

Our new product isn’t a guide about BANS – it’s a guide about affiliate marketing through content driven websites.

That’s the opportunity.

For as long as consumers research and buy products online and for as long as the companies that sell (or facilitate the selling of these products) have affiliate programs that enable you to make money by promoting these products there will be space for committed affiliate marketers to make a lot of money by building sites which connect the two together.

All BANS is is a relatively simplistic content management system for developing such sites with a focus towards the eBay affiliate programs.

Until we built BANS we use to hard code all our content websites in Dreamweaver.

Despite the fact that it’s been said numerous times by people who have actually seen this model through – ie have been successful with it – the amount of times we’ve seen people give up or point the finger when they haven’t taken the time to break down what it is that they are actually doing has been unbelievable.

If you don’t truly know the model (the requirements of the model) how can you successfully develop sites to profit from it?

This has always been a shortfall for BANS.

It’s always been just a tool – some of you have loved it, some of you have outgrown it and some of you have abandoned it.

With no direction the idea of the “quickest path to success” is the one that many followed which meant the rapid development of poorly chosen, poorly planned, poorly built, poorly marketed and poorly managed sites.

The result of that process is inevitable – regardless of platform.

If you can’t see that you’re wasting your time.

Another group of people went into over-development – design rather than research and content creation became the focus.

Both have got it wrong.

The GameImprovementIrons.com site has sat on the front of BANS for over a year.

It cost us $500 to put together (we outsourced the content) and it has been consistently making between $200 (out of season) and $400 (in season) per month for the past couple of years.

It’s not one that we’ve paid any attention to – it’s not had any new content added to it in over a year and a half – it’s not had any active marketing – it’s not even structured perfectly (we don’t recommend this level of neglect) – but it’s sat there in prime position on Google and the other major engines for the last couple of years for many of its target keywords connecting golfers interested in Game Improvement Irons to different sets of clubs listed for sale on eBay.

All this while thousands of affiliate marketers both inside and outside of BANS have become hysterical about the future of niche site building.

There’s also no reason it won’t continue to do that for the forseeable future – who’s competing with us???

The search engines fill their indexes with relevant data – our site is the only site dedicated to Game Improvement Irons on the internet and with the exception of a high level and comprehensive series of guides on improvement irons on an industry leading Golf website our own site is the most complete representation of that market segment online.

With little competition and with a site structure and written content (that has been thought out and not copied) which mirrors the collective demand it ranks – it’s as simple as that.

If we wanted to sell that site we’d expect to receive around 24x the monthly income on a website aftermarket like Sitepoint so we’re talking around $7,000.

A $500 investment and we’ve got well over $10,000 back – there aren’t many ways of doing that in this world on or offline.

“Relevancy” is the only word that matters when it comes to niche affiliate websites at every part of the process – from researching, planning and building all the way through to marketing and management.

We’ve seen sites built to target golf putters (ie with a domain name targeting golf putters) full of reviews of golf balls.

What’s happening here?

If you’re targeting putters build a site about putters, if you’re targeting golf balls build a site about golf balls.

If you’ve got it in you to build a site covering all golf equipment then sure cover everything but before you start down that road you’ve got to be honest about the requirements to pull a site off that covers a market segment of that size.

The higher up a market segment you go the fiercer the competition – move up the ladder too high and you’ve moved out of niche affiliate websites and into resource websites which is a completely different game and which requires much more advanced sites and features – forums, reader reviews etc etc for success.

It’s “niches” for a reason.

A small site called something like golfputterguide.com which is full of golf ball reviews is a “conflict” and your rankings suffer as a consequence.

Have a look at your own sites.

Do they properly “mirror” the demand they have been built to serve (not just in page structure but in the “answers” these pages provide) or are they a mix-mash resulting from poor planning?

We’ve looked at thousands of BANS built sites over the past couple of years. 99.9 times out of 100 any “problems” lie with the site and any problems with the site are a consequence of the perspective of the person that developed it.

Like it or not – that’s the reality.

In October 2008 (post the mid summer eBay and Google drama) we put around $15,000 into content for the development of a new network of golf equipment related sites.

Built with BANS V3.0 according to the basic principles outlined above they’re all indexed, all gaining rankings, all getting relevant people and all converting a percentage of these relevant people into eBay affiliate commissions.

There’s no rocket science here, no mystery – just basic method and procedures which result in the relatively quick development of a new site which “matches” a particular demand and which then generates money connecting that demand to the supply.

Build them with BANS, build them with Wordpress, build them with Joomla, hard code them – if you want to make a go of this just make sure you build them and that you build them “right”.

And so that’s what this new guide is – our answer to the question:

“How Do I Build Niche Affiliate Websites Successfully”
What About The Future Development Of BANS?

We appreciate that this will be a dissapointment for many of you but for now we’ve taken BANS as a tool as far as we want to take it.

We’re not software developers – never have been never will be – we took BANS from the 1 page setup file it was when it launched back in 2006 to the CMS it became in V3.0 through the use of a PHP book bought from a local bookstore – this was a huge task and an intensely pressurized extended period of time – all done for free for existing BANS users.

We remain happy with both the progress we have made with BANS as a product and the level of site you can build with BANS V3.0 in the context of the opportunity that exists and if you want to develop more advanced sites then there are options open to you that will enable you to do that (the reason a Wordpress section was added to the forum).

We have had 2 enquires over the past few months from development teams wanting to take over the project and further evolve it – something that we do appreciate there is room to do and something that we would like to see happen.

This is something we’ll be considering over the next couple of months as we see the release of this new product through and evaluate our own future online.

BANS as a project, however, is neither dead nor vulnerable to dissapearing.
With all that said (and we appreciate it’s a mouthful) – here’s the link to what was the initial purpose of this email – the “Full Guide Summary”:

To download please right click your mouse over the link and choose ‘Save Target As…’

http://www.thenumber1waytomakemoneyonline.com/full-guide-summary.pdf

The new product will be released from the following website:

http://www.thenumber1waytomakemoneyonline.com

And within the next few days we’ll be in touch with final details of the actual release day.

For those of you interested in seeing “this” how we see it – we truly hope it serves you well.

There’s an awful lot of room online to make money from affiliate marketing via content driven websites.

We believe that it’s simply not being looked at properly.

Thanks for taking the time to read this through and we’ll be in touch again shortly.

Best,