New Test Business Makes $222.73 Per Hour
This Article was last updated on April 27, 2009
As I mentioned at the end of my last post, I’ve been testing a new mini business idea the last few days. Personally, when I set out to make money on the internet, I tend to build businesses rather than little money making machines. I just have higher expectations for the online businesses that I build, so if I can’t make at least $10k per month with a business, I typically won’t work on it.
But, I realize not all my readers have the same mindset I have. Not everyone has 30-50 hours per week to work on building their internet business. Not everyone wants to make six figures plus per year online (or at least is not willing to put in the work to make it happen).
So I set out to find an EASY internet business that had the potential to make somewhere between $500 – $1000 per month. This seems to be the magic number that people say would make their lives a lot easier.
You’ll notice I rarely promote affiliate offers on this site. In fact I haven’t promoted any affiliate products since I took over this blog. The reason for this is, I will never promote a product or service unless I fully test it first, AND am able to get the results the product says I will get. Sadly, I’d say about 90-95% of the products people are promoting in the make money online niche are complete scams and garbage.
I’m not willing to sacrifice my reputation by recommending garbage products!
Long story short, I tested 4 different products claiming I could make quick cash. Three of them bombed terribly, one of them is doing pretty well. Below you will find a video that talks about the experiment business that is making decent money, and how this “quickie business” is on pace to make me about $222 per hour this year…
(Press The Play Button Below To Watch The Video)
Links To Websites Discussed In The Video Above:
1) Build A Niche Store Software
2) Ebay
For those of you who do not like to watch videos, I’ll write a summary of the video below so you can get a rough idea of what I’ve done (you should watch the video if you want the full details of the income potential).
One of the product ideas I tested is this Niche Store Builder Software. The idea behind it is pretty simple. It’s a software program that lets you build an ebay affiliate store very quickly and easily. Basically, all you have to do is buy their software (about $100), but a domain name (about $8) and buy some web hosting (about $100/year), push a few buttons, read a training manual, and you are in business.
So, that’s exactly what I did. I bought the software on April 16 and then followed the instructions exactly as written in their user manual. It took me no more than 1 hour to get the first site created and posted online. I spent another hour getting a couple links to the new site as the training manual stated and then I left the website alone to see what would happen.
To my complete surprise, my new website got a little bit of traffic the next day (April 17th). From that traffic, I was able to send 8 clicks to ebay’s site via my affiliate links on the new website I built. Unfortunately, none of those clicks generated any money. (See the video for full income stats of the website).
I pretty much forgot about the site after the second day not seeing any income, so I got busy with preparing for my “website buying and selling class” I’m putting together. Fast forward 5 days later when I checked my ebay affiliate program stats again and lo & behold, MONEY.
Nothing earth shattering, but it was free money that I did minimal work for. Finally, a money making idea that actually made money! Here’s the commissions earned from this one little stupid website I built in an hour…(all verified in the video)
4/17 – $0.00
4/18 – $2.08
4/19 – $4.55
4/20 – $7.30
4/21- $4.11
Total income over 5 days = $18.04
Average income per day = $3.60
(side note, ebay’s affiliate program is pretty annoying, they delay the income stats by about 30 hours, so it’s frustrating when trying to review your stats).
Now some people would look at $3.60 per day and say “big deal”. But, it’s actually not that bad. Let’s look at it from a business owner/investor’s perspective…
In this experiment business I started, I spent a total of $200.35 for the software, hosting and domain name. I also invested 2 hours of my time getting everything setup. That’s my total investment. As a result, I have a website that is making $3.60 per day. Over the course of one year, that will add up to $1,314 in income for me, or $1,113.65 PROFIT (in other words, I will make 6 times my investment)
That profit will be made from 2 hours of work, which is $556.83 per hour. Now I don’t know if this amount of income will continue for a full year without any additional effort on my end or not. I’m sure I’ll have to spend a little more time on marketing to get more links, etc.
So I’ll add in an extra 3 hours of “work” over the course of the year to maintain the current results. Even with 5 hours invested in this website, it will still be earning me $222.73 per hour…not bad! Keep in mind, this is just one website. The other thing I liked about this money making idea is the scalability of it.
Once you buy the software, you can make as many websites as you want without any additional cost. Also, with the web hosting plan I bought (the “Baby” plan from hostgator), you can host an unlimited number of websites for no additional cost as well.
So, to scale this business up, your only cost for additional websites will be the $8 or so for a domain name. Now, rather than making $1,113.65 profit per year with your website, each additional website would be making $1,306 profit per year assuming the same amount of earnings per day.
I have no idea how much these types of websites can earn if you actually spent time marketing them rather than just letting them sit like I’ve done. I’d imagine one single website could make well over $50 per day without too much effort.
It doesn’t take too many sites before the income really starts to add up. As shown in the video, 10 sites earning $3.60 per day would be a profit of $12,800 per year (just over a grand per month) I also showed what you would earn if you wanted to get obsessive over this stuff and build 100 sites (over $130,000 per year).
The niche site software is perfect for complete newbies to internet marketing because it gives you full training. It’s also great for experienced marketers because it’s a huge time saver by using their templates and software. Out of the 4 products I tested, this is the ONLY ONE that actually made money. I know it’s still early in the test, but so far it’s on pace to earn me about $222 per hour this year…
If you currently make more than that, then you can ignore this post. If you don’t make that much, then you need to seriously check out the Niche Store Software. (They have lots of great examples on their site for your review too)
I hope you’ve enjoyed this personal Build A Niche Review (aka BANS Review), and I’d love to hear your results once you get your sites up and running…Now get to work!
An ebay affiliate store was the first thing to make money for me online. Still kicking at $50 per month with no work. I’m slowly scaling to additional sites when I’m bored.
I love this – thanks for pointing this out. A short while ago I had someone spam my forums with a link to a site that I thought had fantastic eBay integration, and with a little content development, that spammy site could have been excellent. Now I think I know how the site was built.
I may just have to pick myself up a copy.
Very interesting idea, Max. Will definitely be one to watch. Will you keep us posted as to how it pans out?
Max…nice job but something isn’t sitting right with me. Getting traffic to a newly created website organically is very, very difficult and I would have a hard time believing that this site was producing organic traffic on day two.
Did you use an adwords campaign of any kind? What’s the rest of the story?
Bill,
I’ve gotten up to 100 visitors per day from google within one week of putting up a site before gettin gput in the sandbox, but even then it only went down to 10-20 per day.
You just have to have the right link strategy in place. Free blog sites, social media, article marketing, etc, combined with superb on page automation.
But it’s definately possible. It just takes some initial work.
@ Bill – I used a couple of techniques to drive the traffic…submitted an article to a couple directories, made a couple comments on related blogs without nofollow links, etc. I have not used Adwords, although that’s a pretty good idea. Keep in mind, I used to own an SEO company, so getting organic traffic is my specialty. It’s not as hard as most people make it out to be…
Hey Matt, guess we were writing at the same time! We’re on the same page…
Do you have a screenshot of the referral links that this traffic was generated from?
If you were able to generate not only organic traffic but organic buying traffic on day 2 then that’d be about as impressive as parting the red sea.
Max,
I have been thinking about giving this a go for awhile now, but you have finally inspired me to take the plunge.
Thanks!
P.S. Looking forward to the class tomorrow.
Quick tip to save a bit of money on your domains at godaddy.
Use coupon code: OYH3
That can be used on registering OR renewing .com domain names for only $6.95
Great video by the way. You did a great job of explaining everything.
~Terry
Hi Max,
great post, and a very reviewable tool and video… I´ll try it.
Just a couple of dudes… can you integrate the output of this tool with a blog?… just to benefit of your current traffic.
The other question is, the niche tool website offer an affiliate program to sell their tool?
I´m willing to try this out!
Great post. I have been using BANS for a while and love it. It’s so easy to use and once you have one site built the others are even easier.
I really only just got my sites setup when the news commission junction would no longer be the affiliate manager I put things on hold.
I was a bit nervous to make the changes as there were a few glitches but when I finally made the change to eBay affiliate partners it wasn’t any longer than a half hour and all my sites were upgraded and I had no errors at all.
BANS is a great way to make money online.
Today I am putting up at at least two more sites on domains that have been just waiting to be put to use.
That is very good conversion ratio! I tried a similar thing, but using phpbay and sent 400 odd clickers over a few days and only received 1 bid, to your 37 from fewer clicks!
hey max, which business model did u choose when signing up for the ebay partner network?
Any thoughts on how to best select an eBay niche?
I tend to agree with Bill in that I’d like to see how the traffic was generated. All the niche stores in the world are no good without traffic.
Thanks for the post Max. This definitely looks interesting, and is something I may try out. I believe Allen at affiliateconfession is also quite big on these ebay niche stores. Please keep up informed as to your future results.
– Dave
I just figured out how to do the same thing with WordPress. I’ll let you know how I make out. 😉
Hi Max,
I just thought of another question. Perhaps you can post on the 3 other systems you tried that didn’t work. I would be curious as to what they are, and your thoughts on why you think they didn’t work.
– Dave
Sorry, been busy making videos for the training class I’m working on…
@ Bill – The traffic referrals are pretty diverse, here are the last 10 referrers (Yahoo Answers, LoveToKnow, Wikipedia, EzineArticles, 4 from random blog comments, Goarticles, Google). Last I checked, I couldn’t part any seas…
@ Matt/Mark – I used common sense (no surprise). I thought about what kinds of products people want to buy, popular products at discount prices (the main purpose of ebay) and then I focused on typically expensive products (higher price, higher final value fee ebay takes, higher commission to me).
@ Brett – I chose Natural Search/Website
Hey Max,
Very good post, but you didn’t post the full story. I hope after one or two months you’ll come back to this with another post showing:
1. How things went (did the site continue to generate money without you spending time on it)
2. What niche you chose, what exact options in the partner network etc
3. Exactly how you managed to get traffic (not things like “posted a couple of posts on forums” but posted this post (link) on this forum, this here and this there etc).
4. Where did you get the traffic from, on what search terms etc.
5. In other words, what exactly did you do in those two hours of work on the site to make it successful within a day or two.
Yes everybody would probably try the exact same thing the next day but your “higher purpose” is to show people EXACTLY how to make money online right?
To me (as to several readers who commented above), it looks like the big thing here is to drive traffic, not to create the site and buy the software and the domain and the hosting (btw hostgator is really the best).
I hope your site continues to make money and you’ll share another (or is it the same?) success story with us after some more time passes.
Also, I’d like to say that I think you’re doing a great job as a blogger, I’m always looking forward to your posts and I’m almost always surprised by the originality and quality of the content you write.
Cheers!
Ion – Great idea…how about it Max…can you link us up with some of these articles you wrote? No harm in that right?
I am surprised you could get articles published the same day? Mine always require an approval process and can sometimes take as much as 7 days just to get published and then longer than that to even be indexed by Google, then even longer than that before Google starts sending me any traffic.
Ion those are some great suggestions!
It would be good to know how it did over a longer period of time as well as what niche was used.
~Terry
Nice post Max, but I struggle to fully believe it. I’m not saying that you’re lying about your own success with this business model, but just saying that if it was this easy then literally everybody would be doing it and creating thousands of sites and living in the Caribbean. Given the apparent 100% success rate of this model you’d be mad not to devote all of your time to it… The problems lie in:
how to drive the traffic (not everyone has SEO experience)
how to maintain traffic
how to not appear spammy (there are tonnes of these kinds of websites, many receive no traffic and serve no purpose – offering no unique content)
how to pick the right niche (all the good niches become saturated very quickly)
hosting – ‘unlimited’ doesn’t actually mean unlimited, if you read around you’ll learn that such hosting companies clamp down on you pretty quick if you strain their resources. It’s all down to the fact that the only way they can offer you ‘unlimited’ packages if by overselling and therefore potentially over-straining their own servers (causing everyone downtime and forcing them to cut off those people with a lot of websites or traffic).
Basically I think that I could easily replicate the average model for this kind of site and it would involve a lot more time, a lot less traffic, less conversations, less money, and several hosting packages over time (so greater expense).
Honestly though, I’m not trying to disagree with you completely, merely showing the flipside to your idea. I love your posts, and please keep it up
Wow, gotta love the negativity and skepticism in this MMO market!
It’s strange to see the polar opposite responses to a post like this. Half the comments are saying “wow, great idea, I’m going to try this”. The other half say “prove to me your video test results are true”. I wonder which half is going to make money online? Ok, maybe there’s no wondering about it…
I could see if I made a claim that my test business made $5,000 it’s first 5 days, then I could understand all the skepticism. But for a website making $3.60 per day, I just don’t get it.
I’ve been sharing more valuable information than most other MMO blogs out there (for free mind you), and the thanks I get is “I don’t believe you”.
Let me ask you this. If you have a profitable website, will you share every last detail about it with 1,300 complete strangers each and every day who are eager to rip off and clone your every move? Maybe I should post my social security number, cell phone number and visa card number on the blog as well?
I understand the desire to have all the answers handed to you on a silver platter. I’d love for someone to stop by my office, tell me to click these three buttons, write this article and money will fly out of my computer.
Unfortunately, I’m yet to find anyone to do that. Which is why I TEST things and find out what works. Like I said, 3 of the 4 products I tested DID NOT work. The one that did work, is making a whopping $3.60 per day in income.
Put yourself in my shoes for a sec…
On one hand, you have 17 people who just paid you a reasonable about of money to teach them EVERYTHING you know about a business that’s made you over a million dollars in the last 5 years.
On the other hand, you have 1300 people reading your free content, developed with the intent of HELPING them make money, and they nag and complain over a website making less than the cost of your Starbucks that morning.
Which group of people deserves the most amount of attention? Who are you going to share all your secrets with?
There are two reasons why only 1% of people make money online.
The one percent of “successful” people…
1) Take action.
2) Don’t waste time (ie – whining over nonsense issues).
If I lose a few readers as a result of this comment, so be it. I don’t have time to “defend” my case studies for people who obviously don’t get it…
Max,
Great response to the skeptics. What’s so hard about believing that someone is making $3.60 per day? I don’t get it either. I use something other than BANS, but it’s similar enough and I’m making fairly strong income on two of my sites. It will only get better as my SEO gets better.
Allow me to act the sycophant for a moment. I love your blog, I love your ideas and I think the fact that you give so much away for free is amazing! People should appreciate this more.
It used to be “Those that can, do! Those that can’t, teach. You’ve successfully combined the two.
Max,
great response, it´s obvious you shouldn´t teach the golden pot for free… having us taking your gold.
I think your post are incredibly valuable, and I´m not agree with loosing readers by counter-comment, in fact, I think it´s valuable your oppinion in every way…
With more and less valuable (at least for me) post, you say a very clear think underlying… work hard, test new things and believe that you can…
The rest… well, ways to try all this out…
Please, go on in the same way.
Max,
I am very grateful for this case study. It prompted me to check out my eBay affiliate stats and make some immediate improvements to a site where I have eBay Ads integrated.
I am using the latest listings but with some php code to modify the search term in response to detected search engine keywords after people land on my site. But I would guess it’s better to create a niche site with fixed keywords and pages optimized for those words such as ipod etc.
Short term, I think new sites get a ranking boost in Google so related and fresh content will be important to sustain the results I think.
Thanks again for taking the trouble to try this experiment.
Andy
Further to my prior comment:
I just realized that a reprint of the latest eBay listings is the freshest, related content possible. I was using the affiliate program Javascript where this may not be the case.
@Max. I think that you slightly misunderstood my point. I wasn’t doubting your results, in fact I completely believe you. I don’t demand video evidence or anything either. All that I was saying was that obviously it’s not quite as easy as you’re making out (partly because people don’t have the knowledge that you seem to have). You’ve proved this yourself by not wanting to share this info for free. I’m not going to stop reading your blog just because you stood up for yourself either, I respect that, but I just wanted to clarify my position.
Best Regards,
Tom.
@ Mr MultiVar – glad to see you putting in effort to become successful!
Here’s a tip for you regarding ebay and affiliate marketing…TOOLS.
Things like generators, power tools, welding machines, and other typically expensive products. Display the “newest” listings first, since they will be the lowest price, which will in turn get you more bidding action.
Who WOULDN’T bid on a $400 table saw with a starting bid of $9.99? When you get more bids, you’ll get more new ebay registrations, which pay you $25 per signup.
Optimize each page for one single product and MODEL NUMBERS. For example, if you build a page around “Makita Generator model G6100R”, there are only 1,500 results in google for that term. You can get a top 10 ranking in about 2 hours, even for NEW websites.
Contractors looking online for that product will land on your site, see similar generators on your site for 50% of the price the generators are selling at Lowe’s/Home Depot, and in turn place a bid.
This advice is only for Mr MultiVar. Everyone else, please ignore because it’s not true and I am completely making up this up like I usually do : -)
Thanks Max, I have a site about Wood working where I can turn this advice to great effect.
Thanks 😉
I’d like to clarify my previous comment as well. I didn’t mean to be skeptical or imply that anyone was being dishonest. I was, and am, interested in how to generate initial traffic. This is because I’ve started websites before and have had a very difficult time getting any traffic whatsoever. The BANS tool may do things much differently than what I’ve done in the past, and I suspect it does, but generating the kind of quality traffic in the first few days you did is hard to believe.
And to briefly address your lecture/rant. Isn’t the focus of this blog to provide the hints/tips/tricks required to make money online? That’s why I’m here and why I read. If this is going to turn into a way of enticing people to sign up for your classes, and treat those that do not as free loaders, you may very well lose me as a reader. There will be no hard feelings on my part, but I’m here because someone has offered to share their expertise on a subject I’m interested in, and that’s all. If I already knew how to do what you’ve demonstrated I doubt I’d be nearly as interested.
Max;
Your comment is right on the money — everyone wants something for nothing. I use “the other ebay software” and have success with it too. Your claims sound completely reasonable to me.
Regards,
Mark
@ Mike – Yes, this blogs purpose is to share tips/hints/tricks to make money online. That’s why I made this post in the first place (to show people how to make a few bucks online).
This post had absolutely nothing to do with signing up for my class (which is currently closed and not accepting new members anyway). I’m here to help people the best way I can, but I have no tolerance for people who whine and complain.
If I offered $100 to the first person who posts a comment saying they wanted the $100, half of the people WOULDN’T respond thinking it was a scam. The other half would be posting a comment as fast as they could and one of those people would be $100 richer as a result. Who wins? Obviously the person with $100 in their hands. The skeptics stay broke…
I see it happen so frequently. Skeptics always look for “what’s wrong with this idea” and they fail to take advantage of the opportunity sitting right in front of them.
I guess that’s just the way it goes, I can’t change how people think…
@Max Please send me $100.
Great Post Max I’m not an ebay affiliate but I do have sites built on Amazon’s api and merchant datafeeds, it does tend to take me a few months to get decent (any) traffic tho but once it starts this sort of site is well worth the minimal effort it takes to put up.
@Max – I’ll stop invading this posts comments, but just wanted to say that you won me over. You backed up your post with good responses to comments and a little more detail. I don’t mean to be a skeptic, but you have to admit that the internet isn’t always the best place to believe everything you hear. I think that many people adopt the ‘if it sound too good to be true it probably is’ mentality.
Anyway I may well try out your strategy and blog about the results myself. Hey, the worst thing that can happen is I lose out on $100 (and even if I fail I’m bound to make at least that back).
Max, come on now. Seriously. You have a strong motive to appear to have exceptional results to your readers. I don’t want to hurt your game. I’ll just assume it’s true, but it sounds ridiculous.
Am I missing something here?
I think I’ll have to come back when I’m not so tired and re-read the comments.
~Terry
@ Tom Ross – Both the software and the hosting account have a money back guarantee, so my theory is at least try it, if it doesn’t work for you, then ask for your money back and move on with your life. I commend you for at least giving it a shot rather than claiming “you’re a liar” like some other people…
@ Tobias – You’re right, making $3.60 a day from a website IS ridiculous and hard to believe. Making money online is a complete scam and nobody ever makes a dime from the net. You caught me, I surrender…
@ Terry – You didn’t miss much. Just people saying my “astounding” results weren’t true, same old stuff…
Max,
I’m surprised at all the naysayers – the only reason I would be sceptical is that I’ve had poor ROI with other affiliate programs. Your ‘Astounding’ results seem very legitimate. I think I’ll have to investigate this software some more as well as the ebay affiliate program.
Thanks for passing this along!
This is fun to watch at least.
The 3 bucks a day is not what anyone has a hard time believing, for what that’s worth.
Dang, is it really that easy to make money off a website? I should create a lot of those BAN sites to get money 😛
-MIke
hummm why did i read allll of that ha… got cause up in the drama. Thanks for sharing what you know. I think I am going to take action now… tho I just wasted 30 minutes reading a bunch of random stuff
Thanks for gettin my gears turning. 3.50 a day is well not great.. but if it pays for me having coffee for free… what the heck in.
Pingback: Niche Affiliate Store builders - THIS BLOG WILL PAY MY MORTGAGE
Hi Max, i’m in the throws of trying out the affiliate site route. I just wanted your opinion on whether to set up a site based around a particular comedian. One that is very popular at the moment. Would this do as well as your example of the tools??
48 comments on this post before this one, so it seems a little disagreement can stir up the discussion which is not necessarily a bad thing or that maybe there are quite a few that are interested in this product and experiment.
~Terry
Ha, yea Terry,
How to get a lot of blog comments 101…
Step 1 – make a couple bucks online.
Step 2 – wait for a bunch of people to claim you’re not telling the truth : -)
Who, besides maybe Tobias, is claiming the post is not truthful? In case there is an confusion what I, and most of the others which have been asking questions, would like to know is how to generate the quality traffic that’s required to make *any* money from a site such as the one you created in your example.
We do not doubt that what you’ve presented is accurate. Our questions arise from the “I spent another hour getting a couple links to the new site” step, which is a bit mysterious. If the training manual explains how to generate these links then great, question answered. If not and this is just something that you’re skilled in from previous experience that’s fine as well just say so. Maybe that detail can be explained here in the comments or be the topic of a new post. Or you can tell us all to bug off and not explain it, your choice.
But please stop making it seem like your readers are persecuting you for trying to help out. All we’re requesting is some additional details about a part of your post that is unclear. Seems like a reasonable request to me, but maybe not.
To get traffic that converts to sales you need the general public to visit your site rather than blog readers.
So this requires Search Engine Optimization of the pages to get organic traffic which I think the script Max proposed is good at.
For niches, the words will be long tail so hopefully not hard to get good rankings for. Then you need relevant inbound links so you post articles to external sites containing links to your site.
These external sites can be your own blog, forum post plus signature, new blogger blog, Squidoo lens, comments on relevant blogs etc.
And if this fails then try pay per click which I don’t like to do.
Just a few ideas
MultiVar – Exactly right…
Mike, here’s another post you can use to learn how to get links to a website…
Mr. MultiVar and Max,
That’s the kind of info I was looking for. Thanks, I think I’ll give it a try.
Great stuff Mike
It’s not rocket science
> It’s not rocket science
That’s what I always tell others about what I do for a living. But to those that have no experience, getting started seems as daunting.
Thank you Max for this great post.
I rushed into this BANS business (sure used your referal links) and I’m learning all the details off building niche stores and trying to get backlinks to my site and learning SEO at the same time. No results so far but at least I’m trying and not wheeping 😉
I think you are giving great info for people to succeed at online. I hope this BANS really works for me and I can start more serious businesses online. You make this blog my fav at this time on the blogosphere.
Hi Max,
Great post, and interesting discussion in the comments…
I’ve taken your advises, and started a BANS site. Hope it goes well (with hard work, of course…)
Now THAT’S what I’m talking about Yossi, way to go!
Your power tools site looks great…there’s a free text link for you since you are actually taking action
Thanks Max, much appreciated
A couple of days ago I was sitting with some friends in a restaurant, and the tab was about 80$. It kinda put me in proportions – 100$ isn’t all that much for an experiment…
I’ll keep you posted of how it goes.
Max,
I appreciate the time you took to run the experiment AND give us a full report. I bought BANS last night and am doing the steps. I am stuck on choosing the nice market. Have you or anyone taken a look at Micro Niche Finder, also sold via ClickBank? Or can I do as well without it? Any free programs that do the same thing?
Looking forward to my own experiment.
Any updates on YOUR experiment, Max? How are the sites doing now?
Hi Diane,
For niche markets, just try to think of expensive products that people would like to get good deals on. Things like tools, baby bedding, strollers, musical instruments, golf clubs, medical devices, handbags, office equipment, etc. You don’t need to buy any other tools unless you want to spend the money, just think about expensive items that people might buy on ebay to save money.
My experiment is still holding steady at about $3.50 per day. I’d make another video, but don’t feel like having to defend myself again! In addition to the $3.50 a day in ebay bidding activity, I did get 4 new ebay customers, which ebay pays $25 each for, so that’s another $100 on top of the regular commissions.
I forgot to mention new ebay registrations in the video, but if you send someone to ebay via your niche store and they sign up for a new ebay account, you earn $25. Adding in the $100 from these registrations, that takes my test business up to an average of $11.19 profit per day…
Max,
Thank you so much for the great information! I am not going to delay.
No matter what you do, someone will criticize you. Please do not take it personally. I and many other readers appreciate you and this site.
I am new here and understand that you are, also! Change is not easy, so perhaps some readers were very accustomed to the persona of the former owner. Since I wasn’t around before, I have no one to compare you with! You stand on your own merit, and that merit is very high, as far as I can see.
I will go ahead and continue with my experiment in BANS and I will be reporting my own success as soon as I can.
Max, thanks again!
Max what are your thoughts on BANS compared to phpbay?
I’ve never used phpbay, so I can’t really say either way.
Hey Max. I have used phpbay, but I have never used BANS. LOL
My observation is that people either like one or the other and that sometimes they can get emotional about it.
When I was looking at the two products, I observed the BANS seemed more “turn-key” and phpbay seemed more flexible. Also, phpbay has a wordpress plugin, which is really cool.
Cheers,
Mark
Wow, I had no idea there was another software to use for this same idea. And with a wordpress plugin, too? I might have to try both. For me, this is an experiment, and I am out to learn all I can.
I have 18 days off work. I will try to build two of these sites per day over the next 18 days and see how it goes. Will report back!
Okay, bought Micro Niche Finder by JJJ through ClickBank, watched the training videos, used it to find several niches, then bought six domain names at GoDaddy all ending in .info because GoDaddy is having a sale and the .info domain names are 99 cents right now. Hope BANS will recognize them. Then bought one year at HostGator and am in the 24-48 hour “propogating around the internet” waiting phase. I did have to call customer service at both Go Daddy and HostGator.
Hours into my experiment so far: 10
Money spent so far:
GoDaddy (6 private .info domain names): $7.14 privacy was free when buying 5 or more domain names at one time
Micro Niche Finder: $67
One Year at HostGator Baby Croc level: $95.52 is 20% off regular price and a much better deal than first month free. use promotion code SPRING
But remember, I am a newbie!
So, everyone else who has decided to try BANS, how is it going for you?
So far I am very impressed with the BANS script. I did notice that impressions were not being tracked by eBay partner network so today added a text link generated in the partner area which I placed in the footer of the template. Click-throughs were being tracked.
It took me about 8 hours to set up my first site since I added a custom header logo, played around with the styling and added some text with keywords etc. This is for a UK fashion store linked to from my classified Ads site.
Then I converted another existing content site to BANs. This site now looks much nicer and is more monetized than before. This one is in the Woodworking Niche.
I have only just completed the sites, so now I need to work on building links to the inner pages to boost traffic. So it’s too early for me to report on results.
I think it’s important long-term to make your site not look like a BANs clone site by changing the style sheet colors, the header size and add some unique content pages. Along these lines, I decided not to display the powered-by link. You can always promote this link from your blog when talking about your BANs sites.
I chose the “Curl” option in the setup area since this should simulate a natural browser visiting eBay rather than a content scraper script.
Next I will develop my Weight loss site to have some BANs stores in sub-domains. All good fun.
Great work everyone. Not only are you taking action, but you are also documenting your work, which holds you publicly accountable (both of which will increase your results).
Mr. MultiVar said: “I did notice that impressions were not being tracked by eBay partner network so today added a text link generated in the partner area which I placed in the footer of the template. Click-throughs were being tracked.”
And to that, I say: “Huh?”
I will be returning to this comment thread when I get further along in the process, and then maybe some of that will make sense.
There is a lot to learn for a newbie. But it is great fun, as you say! I hope it will also be profitable.
I forgot to add $1.15 expenses yesterday for the customer service phone call to GoDaddy. They do not have a toll-free number and that was unpleasant to discover.
Diane Sontag
I have used eBay affiliate program for years, and at one point I did make over $500 in commissions in a one month period of time. Either side of that was a little lower, but not much.
Now, it has changed quite a bit, and especially now that they have gone away from CJ (Commission Junction) it will be interesting to see where it goes from here. I have still not changed over all my CJ links to ebay, guess I better get busy.
Just wanted to check in and say that I am busy getting my sites up and figuring everything out. GoDaddy has 99cent domains available right now with a dot info ending, and others tell me these can support BANS. I am busy finding niche markets and buying domain names right now.
How is everyone else doing?
Just a little feedback: I purchased the software, found a niche market I wanted to try out, installed the software in about an hour, did a little promotion on it, and left it alone. Since then, I’ve earned $18. Not bad!! Thanks for letting us know about this great tool. I plan to make additional sites and see how it goes.
Jeannie — can you say anything about the “little promo”?
Mark
Diane,
I went to GoDaddy but the .info domains come up as 1.99 and not .99. How are you getting them for .99?
@AC, I went to GoDaddy a couple days ago and the front page was advertising .99 .info domains, but when you clicked on the advertisement it took you to a page that was selling .info domains for 1.99.
I went back to the home page and refreshed and the advertisement changed to 1.99 (I must have gone to the site when they were in the process of raising the price). I’m guessing we may have just missed the .99 domain sale at GoDaddy.
Does anyone know if this is a promotion that GoDaddy runs on a regular basis? Maybe we just need to wait until they run the promo again.
Just bought Bans and I’m going through the set up now. I’ll post back in a day or two.
peace
Hi All,
Yes, I saw that price rise on us, too. Dang it! I do hear that they run that sale from time to time.
Wow, Jeannie, in an hour? I am such a newbie. I am at least 12 hours into it, and I don’t have a site up yet. Just did the ftp stuff tonight and I had to call HostGator for help. Their customer service is fantastic!
I will buy more domain names when the 99cent sale rolls around again. I will have done more niche research by then and will be ready to roll. Right now I am just trying to learn HOW to do everything. I have a lot of weakenesses, and one of them is choosing a niche.
Well, I have selected my niches and purchased the domain names for them. Now I need to get BANS setup. I will keep you updated. Unless Max has another place he would rather have us share this info.
AC
On the Bans forum, Affiliate Confession has a great example post on really nailing a niche, in his case Gold Collectable Coins. I went with a niche in the power tools area (thanks for the tip Max) for my latest site.
I haven’t driven enough traffic to my sites yet but got a winning bid on my fashion mega store paying me 0.02 UKP LOL. There may be some issues with the migration of eBay to the new partner network but I remain positive about this concept after reading so many diverse thumbs up for BANs around the web.
Folks, add your own content to the pages and work the list of SEO link ideas that Max posted in the comments. You have to dilute the canned, template signature of your sites and get the relevant inbound links.
So what dot info is 2 bucks, it’s nothing in terms of investment cost.
All the best folks in building your BANS sites and selling them later.
Hey Max, I have a doubt
Imagine we get to make the BANS site to earn $100 a month. Can this website be sold for about $2000 or it would be too much for an affiliate website?
Javier – If your BANS site consistently makes $100 per month for several months (showing stability), then yes, you can sell that site because it’s a valuable asset to someone who doesn’t know how to do what you’ve done. The longer the proven history of making money, the more you can sell it for.
If you site starts out making $100 the first month, and then you want to sell it on the second month, you’d likely only get about $500 for it because it’s still too risky for a buyer given its short history.
Glad to see everyone taking action. Thanks for the private emails sharing your success stories…
@everyone. Contratulations all of you on the massive action. Great journeys start with a little step (and all that stuff).
I’ve found a couple of little niche areas that I am going at and also several more that I will be setting up tomorrow. Will report back with the results.
By the way. How are you guys monitoring and tracking all this? Have you worked out spreadsheets?
I have followed the advice given here and launched the first of (hopefully) many niche based sites.
Huge thanks for showing me this opportunity, I will be sure to update with my success!
Max,
Are you planning to write any follow-up post on maximizing BANS? One question I have is about the homepage. Do you think it is better to have products on the homepage or use it more for branding (ie. http://www.bestqualitywatches.com) which I think aesthetically is the best Bans site I have seen.
Dannie,
That’s a great looking Bans site! It’s a good idea to make your Bans site different from all the others out there…
Pingback: My Experiences with Niche Stores
Just a quick update – my site has been making money for the last three days
It took a little longer than I expected, but once I got properly indexed by google, it seems to be rolling. Made about 80c the first two days, made 3.20$ yesterday. We’ll see how it keeps up…
My first store is up and running and I have made $5.16 so far. I plan on launching at least 3 more in the next month.
Max, I saw my site get index in Google pretty quickly and even was ranking on the first page for a few key terms early now it seems like I have fell back. Is this normal?
@ Bill,
I use Build A Niche Store, and I can verify that the sites can produce organic traffic in less than a week when set up properly. The item descriptions from the eBay feed produce wonderful long-tail keyword phrases that get you organic traffic very fast.
Hey Bill Post # 22.
I have my articles approved & published within 12 hours of submitting them and always have my sites indexed within 72 hours in Google …. if you don’t have the same success, maybe you should look at the quality of both your articles and your content sites.
May I ask why are you so negative to everything Max says …. maybe you have a better system … which I would find very hard to believe … so why not show us how you do things, so until that happens you should keep your negativity to one’s self … gezz there’s always one who gets it all for free and then has the gaul to complain.
Come on Bill … Max answers with conviction … now its your turn to put your money where your mouth is … I await with baited breath.
We are approaching the 100 post mark, so to help this goal I would just like to say that I got about $3 in income so far from BANS and I am not a newbie, so you guys should follow the idea of building a saleable website like Max is teaching here IMHO.
@ MultiVar… I’m honestly quite surprised at your lack of income. How many sites do you have set up?
I’ve been dealing with some back problems since I posted last so I haven’t been able to expand past the 5 sites I have up but my top performing site has made $27 in the last 7 days. My other sites are a bit slower but I certainly didn’t use any advanced techniques on these things.
Correction my account is in UK pounds so I should have said I made around $6 from 4 sites. However, I just checked my account and got a spike up to $35 overnight so it is not so bad after all.
I just checked on my little test website and it is averaging $4.18 per day since the beginning. The average bidding action/commissions is only about $1.80 per day, but the $25 registration commissions for new ebay users bump up the average nicely.
Max… nice to see that your BANS site is generating stable earnigns. Have you done promotion or any work to that site anymore?
Just for info I got my first commission this week from my first BANS store. Now that I have seen that this IS a working system I will push it forward big time.
Thank you Max for this great article!
I bought BANS and hosting the same week you posted this BANS review and started learning SEO and other stuff to promote new web sites. I’m total newbie in SEO and affiliate sales sites so it took me this long before I got any results. I would like to see some more SEO tips from your point of view on this blog.
It will be a interesting journey from this point forward and I’m very committed to push my BANS sites to a whole new level. I’m on my way to making money online at fulltime income
Thanks for the tips on Bans. I got my first one up and have the first $3 literally by the 2nd day. Have made $9 in the last two weeks, with only 4 links, no promotion, only 4 pages, no type of work whatsoever…
I didn’t even research the niche properly, I just wanted to try my hand at one and see what happened…Oh, and the design sucks too..lol it took me all of 5 minutes to upload the header and change the colors.
Here it is
http://www.portable-cement-mixer-deals.com
I’m planning to have a hundred of these babies up in the next 2 months. I’ll report back. thanks again for all the tips.
Rohan
That’s great Rohan! That site’s on pace to make you almost $250 this year for just a couple hours of work.
If anyone still hasn’t tried BANS, they are missing out…
Some great stuff, thanks Max and all for sharing this stuff
Found this forum when I was doing keyword research for my own blog, and like it very much. LOL
So will someone please tell me how to find great EXPERIMENT post’s like this one on this blog?
I don’t want to read simple stuff, only real ways to make money online.
Well let me know and great work!
@ Max
Max, great video and excellent information. Affiliate marketing is my first love. It’s wonderful to sit and watch the money roll in with little effort.
Love the spreadsheet. I’m a excel freak and always add my potential money but never thought of duplicating… i like.
Going to BANS now. thanks!
oh…loving this site, becoming strangely addicted.
@ Rohan- Interesting niche! I wouldn’t have ever thought of it.
@ everyone
congrats to everyone on your store’s success. Can you post the link to your store? I’d love to see.
I bought the Bans software but haven’t installed yet. I have to take back my request to see your stores. I see that it’s best not to disclose your store! I don’t know what I was thinking… good luck to everyone.
I’ve been looking for a BANS review, for sample BANS sites other than the posted ones, reading posts in the private Bans forum and trying to settle on a niche to start with.
Hopefully, I’ve have 2 up an running this weekend.
Hi Nikki, I think BANS is a great way to make the eBay affiliate program work. Otherwise, it can be difficult to send them converting traffic since eBay sells almost anything.
So far I made about $50 from about 6,300 impressions, so you need a good amount of traffic to make the money.
The concept of building membership sites is a much better one I think.
Good luck with your adventure!
Nice article. I am a novice when it comes to tech stuff. I have experienced that hosting companies like Host Gator oversell massively. You say that we can host unlimited websites on $100/year. Isn’t that misleading?
Host Gator and other over sellers will suspend the account as soon as sites start sucking resources. So practically we cant run dozens of sites with good traffic on such hosting packages.
We will have to go for dedicated or VPS solution for this kind of scale and traffic. Please let me know If I am right on this or have a missed something.
Max, is it possible to just use wordpress and integrate ebay feeds? Wouldn’t it be more SEO optimized?
Craig — that is essentially the approach taken by phpBay.
Mark
Hi Max
I have read all the comments and the article as well as the video.
I am wondering if this would still work as it did in all this time.
Already have a user in ebay and an ecommerce site, but as you well point my products are real cheap so they would not work with BANS.
Due to my geography, Ireland-Spain, I could make a good impact on this in Europe as it is just starting.
Thanks for all the comments and keep up with your blog it is great.
Buena suerte [email protected],
I am surprised that any one of those 4 actually worked.
Keep up the hard work.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, lately. I think it’d be interesting to try to find out how to make a steady income with a 50-article website with maybe a 100 links pointing towards it… and then outside the work to foreigners or something. Maybe build a “blog” empire that’s outsourced? I don’t know. It sounds like it might work.
Its a good mini idea. It does look possible to make nice money from it and ebay is the good option for it.
This is a great way to look at working online — another reason I keep track of every minute I spend working.
Well I am definitely someone who is willing to put the work in, just really don’t have a clear path on what to do. Anyway those are some really impressive numbers on your new business, congratulations, I wish you all the best.
Yeah, one of my websites is earning nearly $20 per day. I outsourced the content and content for my link building campaigns, which means my total work time has been less than 3 hours.
That’s great Shaun! Build A Niche Store is still producing results.
Just reading over the comments here and I’m surprised this still works.
I’ve recently read that it is difficult to get an eBay account for a BANS store.
Is this true?
Mark – thanks for the heads up on phpBay.
Thanks for the free research information, saves me some testing time and money knowing what results to expect. Honestly can’t believe I am reading negative comments, but then again, that’s the reason why some people (like us) are making money online, because others are too skeptic!
I would like to get BANS but I would rather a WordPress solution if I am honest, Google tends to love WordPress and there’s so much third party plugins/themes available for it, if you have an special link (;)) for any WordPress eBay Store generators hit me with an email.
I feel it’s only fair after reading the information you’ve given.
Thanks again,
Chris
These niche stores are great if you can get targeted traffic to them, I have made roughly around $400 a week with a single website which gets around 1000 visitors to a store.
It can take time though getting a site perfectly set up but once it is then the hard part is over, just let it roll.
Thanks for the money making info. Sound like a good idea for some extra income. Will check it out. Thanks.