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Lazer Targeting With BANS

Posted by Paul B | December 4, 2007 .

Some of you might have noticed that I’ve added a new money maker to the list, it’s not there only because I want affiliate commissions :) but because it works, really!

BANS (Build A Niche Store) is one of those products you see advertised from time to time that claims it’s going to make you loads of money with very little work. The trouble is that many of these PHP scripts are very buggy and you spend more time trying to actually get them to work than making any money with them. BANS is very different, it works with very little setup and it DOES make money. It claims to be search engine friendly and from my experience it certainly is.

BANS allows you to very quickly build a niche store based on one or more e-bay categories. You enter the category number(s) and it retrieves the products, sub-categories and automatically builds a great store front for you based on our choice of template. There are a number of templates built in and they are very easy to customise to anybody knowing even the smallest bit of CSS. The whole process from installation can be done in a little under 10 minutes (I’m not going to do a step-by-step, ShoeMoney has already done that if you need proof of just how easy this is). In order to profit from your BANS store you’ll need a Commission Junction e-bay affiliate account for the e-bay locale you wish to target (several are available with more to follow soon). At this time of year when the shopping frenzy is at it’s highest it’s possible to make good money with this, in fact I paid for my $97 copy in a little under a month on a site that only gets 40 visitors a day.

So that’s enough about BANS, what’s all this lazer targeting? Well as I said earlier your store is going to be based on e-bay categories, the trouble is that some e-bay categories are not as targeted as you and I would like. For example I wanted to build a dancing costumes store but the lowest level e-bay category I could select was Children’s Dancewear. This category includes all sorts of stuff ranging from break dancing mats all the ways to Irish dancing shoes! I only wanted to target one type of dance clothing so on went the programmer hat and this is what I came up with.

There are 2 files that you will need to alter in order for this to work, index.php and cont/FrontControl.php, in each you are looking for the line that retireves the products via the e-bay RSS feed for your country. The easiest way is to search in a text editor for the string “rss.api.ebay.com”, there will only be a few entries and you are looking for the one below the e-bay country you are using. For example the UK feed is below “elseif($siteType == “UK”)”. Now in that very long line that retrives the products look for
&satitle=”.urlencode($front->q).” and append + whateverkeywordyouwanttotarget, so if I was looking to target the boys toys category for only transformers I would change it from

&satitle=”.urlencode($front->q).”&ftrv=1

to

&satitle=”.urlencode($front->q).”+transformers&ftrv=1

If you do this in both the index.php and cont/FrontControl.php files then every time products are retrieved they will be filtered to those that include your keyword. It works for sub-categories and any searches within your store making sure that your whole shop is lazer targeting to your chosen keywords. As far as hacks go this is a fairly minor one but in terms of getting more affiliate sales it’s gold.

If you’re convinced and want to give BANS a go then you can get a nice $40 discount by signing yourself up as a ClickBank affiliate and buying through your own link. The problem with this is that you need to generate enough sales including three different sets of credit card details (and one being mastercard) before ClickBank will actually pay you. That’s fine if you’re experienced with ClickBank but a huge number of people never make that payment bracket and ClickBank even start taking money of you if your account stays inactive for too long. On the other hand if you want a much quicker $20 discount sign up using my affiliate link and I’ll split my commission so that you get $20 back via Paypal as soon as ClickBank pay me. If you want to do this buy using my link and use my contact form on this blog to drop me a line (including your paypal e-mail address). As soon as ClickBank pay me, (which they do every month) I’ll send you your $20.

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1 Comment so far
  1. ArahMan7 MALAYSIA Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.11  December 5, 2007 1:22 am

    Hi Paul. Thanks for the head-up about BANS. Too bad, ClickBank don’t accept Malaysian, but CJ looks promising. I’m going there now to look around and then who knows… ?

    Btw, came here via Entrecard.

    Greetings and lotta loves from Malaysia.