All Posts Tagged With: "BANS"

A couple of emails and comments recently have come to me inquiring about why I don’t provide specific examples of my affiliate sites, BANS sites, etc.   While I certainly understand that it would be ideal if I provided specific sites you could click over and examine closely, there is actually a reason that I don’t.  Well, there are actually two reasons that I don’t, and I figured I would share them in this post.

1. Niche Theft - Maybe even more so than the Make Money Online niche, Affiliate Marketers (especially upstart ones) often take each others ideas.   That is why I stressed in my previous post how important it is to find people that you trust.   If I shared on this site which niche sites are making me the most money, I guarantee I would magically see several clone sites within a few days.  This is especially true for BANS sites, as it is pretty darn easy to mimic someone else’s BANS site because most of the changes will be in the stylesheet, which people ‘View Source’ and copy on to their BANS themes.
2. Experience - Trust me when I say that experience is HUGE in affiliate marketing.  In other words, no matter how much myself or anyone else helps you, you will only learn how to truly succeed through trial and error.   I would say 3 out of every 5 sites I launch fail, but these are the experiences that I covet the most and that motivate me to keep refining my techniques.

Though I encourage everyone just starting out to do plenty of trial and error, one thing I do recommend is once you find a niche that does well, or at least is profitable, attack that niche!   Make a cluster of websites in that niche before moving on.   An example would be if you find success in the Barbie (toy) niche, maybe launch a Barbie poster site, Barbie clothing site, and/or whatever other Barbie stuff is selling.   You could also inter-link these sites (as long as the content is similar) and benefit that way.

On a side note, I have launched a couple actual sites (not niche sites) and plan to blog about some of these sites here and what methods I’m taking to monetize them.  Hopefully some of you will have an interest in that.

A couple of weeks ago eBay announced that in addition to eBay Partner Network, PepperJam Network will now be offering an eBay affiliation (long time BANS users will remember that Commission Junction originally housed the eBay affiliate program before it moved to ePN).

As a big time BANS user, I have obviously followed this pretty closely.   The Build a Niche Store team is one of the best in the business, and already they have released a new version of BANS for people that want to use PepperJam instead of ePN.    If you’ve purchased BANS you should be receiving an email with download instructions.

I’ve been exploring the PepperJam Network the past couple weeks as I prepare to launch new campaigns with them and already I have been enjoying what I’ve seen, but at this point I think I will be sticking with ePN as it is working fairly well for me.   I will be keeping an eye on reports from people using PepperJam to see if the results are any better, but I figure the fewer middle men, the better!

I know many of you are finding success with BANS, will you be switching your existing stores to PepperJam Network?

Last month I wrote a quick post to let you know about some templates that were released for BANS sites. I just got a heads up yesterday that Ian Fernando, the guy who created those original BANS templates, has just released a follow up series of new themes for BANS users.

Of course having the man crush on BANS that I do, I decided to check it out. I have to say that I was immediately impressed with Ian’s work, who has continued to raise the bar, and grabbed a copy of his new package for myself and immediately started playing around with the new templates. I think the theme named “Shoes” is probably my favorite yet, so I went ahead and upgraded a few of my sites, including Diamond Investments, which was a site I made specifically for showing you a sample BANS site. Coincidentally, though that site was only created as a demo, it has already generated over $4.00 since it was launched, plus some additional AdSense income! I’m not even using PPC advertising to send traffic to that site and it is a large and very competitive niche.

One thing I really like about this new batch of themes is that each one comes with 3 different stylesheets, so with the “Shoes” example above, you could also upload the same theme using green or purple. I believe if you buy the full package (which is both the original set and new set), you get a total of 18 themes (3 color alterations for all 6 themes).

If you’d like to see more examples of existing themes, I recommend you check out the new BANS templates!