In one of my posts last week I mentioned that I would be writing about affiliate marketing more often on this site, and I figured where better to start than with something that I have come to rely heavily on to generate a significant portion of my online income over the past few months.

First, a little background. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’ve had some success with keyword sniping, which is basically locating a small niche to target and create a blog with about 10-15 posts. Then place some advertising and affiliate links on the site and forget about it. If you’ve done your homework, over time you can then create a large amount of income for no additional work.

One of the things that appealed to me about making money online with keyword sniping is the ability to “finish” the site, removing any real need for ongoing upkeep. The problem with this method is that it can sometimes take 10-15 hours initially to get the site setup and ready to roll. Why is that? Well, in order to successfully snipe a keyword, you’ll first need to do your research and locate the keywords you are going to target. After that, you’ve got to build your website, create a theme, then research and write about 10-15 posts. Add in the time it takes to locate affiliate programs that match up well with your site and you’re putting a lot of time into each individual niche site that you’ve created.

I knew there had to be an easier way, so I decided to go out and find it. One consistent thing I noticed while reading a couple of the affiliate marketing forums that I frequent is a website software that allows you to completely generate a website in under 2 hours. Yes, you read that right. I can do EVERYTHING in under 2 hours from registering a domain to completed website.

After reading at least 15 success stories from forum posters (these were not situations where the poster had anything to gain so I felt their recommendations had considerable value), I decided to give this magic product a try. The first day I set up 3 “niche stores” using domains I had registered in the past but hadn’t found a use for yet. The first store took about the full 2 hours, but after that it was less than an hour per website to set them up. Then I basically left them alone for a week to see what happened.

After a week I hadn’t made any money, but I had sent a lot of traffic over to eBay, which I viewed as a success. If you are an affiliate marketer, conversions are great, but getting clicks in the first place is extremely important. I knew it was only a matter of time. About 4 days later I checked again and I had already made about $10.00 from these 3 sites. Based upon this success, I decided to launch a few more sites, bringing me to a total of about 8 niche stores.

Fast forward a couple months and these sites are pulling in anywhere from $2.00-$5.00 a day (individually), which as you can imagine, adds up very quickly over time. The domains are easily paying for themselves, and the income is both comparable and in many cases better than using Google AdSense. I’m now in the process of researching and locating some optimal niches to target and continue to grow my business.

So what is this magical product? What I’m talking about is Build a Niche Store (although commonly refered to as BANS). When I first signed up, I was cautious about investing the price of $97.00 for this software. Now that I have experience with using BANS, I would gladly pay more for it. It paid for itself in only two months, and I think I could have generated additional income if I had invested some more time into making more stores before today.

So, how does BANS work? In order to use it, you simply need hosting account and a domain name (or multiple names for multiple stores). The creators of BANS recommend HostGator for your web hosting because it makes a few things easier than other web hosts, but their instructions are very specific and walk you through settings up your store no matter who you are hosting with. You upload it and run the install script, then you’re all set.

Everything else you can do from the Admin panel (a walkthrough is provided while you get used to it). You just enter your eBay Affiliate Network ID (they explain how to get an account with them if you don’t have one) and set your own meta tags, titles, and descriptions. You also have full control over how things are displayed on the site. BANS will then create a complete eBay affiliate niche store on the domain for you. That is really all you have to do, but you are also able to create posts in the same manner that you would if you were keyword sniping. The idea is that you can get more pages indexed and bring more traffic to your site, which in turn will hopefully convert to more affiliate commissions.

Because I know sometimes it is easier to see the final product in action, I decided to create sort of a demo. If you’d like to see a BANS niche store in action, I took one of my spare domains and set one up for you to see how the store looks and works. This is not one of my niche stores that I mentioned above, but simply is a niche store that I set up specifically for demonstration.  You can see the niche store over at DiamondInvestment.net.  Now imagine that site with a custom made banner at the top and some stylesheet changes to give it the colors you want!

As far as site functionality goes, obviously if I was going to put some work into generating income with this site, your target audience would be people buying diamonds and jewelry on eBay. You can see from the categories in the sidebar that it covers a wide variety of diamond jewelry areas based upon the specifications I gave it. You also get to choose between a variety of 2-column, 3-column layouts, and advertisement styles so the store can look the way you want it to. You can also add a header if you want to complete the look of a full fledge store.

As you can probably tell from the above, this is not a paid post or anything of that sort. I’m very passionate about this product and would recommend it to anyone that has webhosting that supports addon Domains. With only a little effort it will pay for itself and over time I think you can make a considerable amount of passive income. I feel that for each site I’ve put an hour or two into building, I will get returns of $200.00+ over the course of the year. My hope is after a few more months to have 20+ stores making me passive income and that will hopefully be for years to come!

For my next post, I’m going to work on creating some strategies and tips to maximize your income with BANS including what niches to avoid and what settings are best. In the meantime, go ahead and check out Build a Niche Store. Probably the best investment I’ve made online to date.