I’ve been using the BANS software (Build a Niche Store) for the past couple of months to quickly and easily create eBay sites that are automatically populated with the categories, sub-categories, and product listings from eBay. I had been wanting to diversify my income stream, which was coming primarily from AdSense. BANS is only $97, and the license is for use on unlimited sites. Best of all, you get the full source code, so it’s possible to modify the script as much as I want.

I figured what the heck, I’ll try it out. I had used Commission Junction for my affiliate marketing attempts, but had never had much success. It seemed that no matter what approach I used, it just didn’t result in a lot of sales. I tried targeted product ads on pages that talked about that specific product. I tried banner ads. I tried product listings from CJ’s datafeed. I tried it with photos of the product, with text links within the copy, with and without listing the price. I only got the occasional commission, and AdSense continued to dominate my passive income streams.

Almost immediately upon launching my first BANS site, I started getting commissions. My commission income is now at about one-third of my AdSense income, but it’s growing, and I expect that it may well exceed my AdSense income within the next few months.

The above graph shows my CJ earnings trend. My first affiliate commission was last May. Earnings stayed pretty moribund throughout 2007. It was in mid-December of 2007 that I bought BANS. It was in January that I started building BANS sites in earnest. You can see the progress I’ve made with affiliate commissions since starting to work with BANS.

I love that the script comes as full php source code — I’ve spent a lot of time customizing and modifying my BANS script so that it looks and behaves more the way I want it to. Some of the modifications I’ve done include:

Code Output/CSS/HTML

I edited the core files to remove the stupid non-breaking spaces, hard-coded table widths and table cell widths, and various other presentational code that was hard-coded into the script files.

The navigation is automatically populated with eBay’s categories and subcategories, and the navigation elements are indented by one, two, three or more non-breaking spaces. I removed those and added specific classes to each level of indent, along with specific ids for each level when the link is the current page. This allows me to target each category level with my css — I generally make the top-level categories bold-face and in fairly large type, then the sub-categories indented by a few pixels, and non-bold face but still in large type, then the sub-sub-categories indented by more pixels, non-bold-face and small type, and so on.

Also, by removing the hard-coded table and table cell widths, and adding specific css classes to each table cell, I can target those easily with my css as well. I’ve done this with the product listings, the search form, the site navigation, the “view more on ebay,” the pagination — pretty much all the code that’s output by the script. This gives me much greater flexibility in targeting these page elements with my css, which is very important to me, as I don’t use any of the boring default templates that come with a BANS purchase.

Call To Action

I edited the core source files to add a line of text below the item name, which reads either “Buy now,” “Bid on this item now,” or “Buy or bid now,” depending on whether the item is BIN only, auction only, or both. That line of text is a clickable link that takes the user to the product on eBay, just like the item name. This is the classic marketer’s “call to action.” You must tell the visitor what you want them to do. I’ve seen my click-through rate to eBay go way up since implementing this little hack.

I also edited the source files to make the Buy It Now button a clickable link. It struck me, whenever I’m looking at one of my own BANS sites, that I expect to be able to click that Buy It Now button, so probably other people do too. Let ‘em click it! Get that cookie planted!

Search Form

I edited the source files to automatically populate the search box with the user’s search query after they conduct a search. If someone searches for, say, “Masonic rings” they might want to refine their query to search for “Masonic gold rings.” I say, make it easy for them. Along with their search results, I give them a search box that contains their already-searched-for term so that they can easily refine that search.

View More Items on eBay

There’s a line automatically displayed at the bottom of each listing page that says “View more items on eBay.” This line is a link that takes you to the appropriate category on eBay, with your custom query already applied. This is a nice touch. I edited that line so that instead of the default “view more items on eBay” text, it reads “Visit eBay to see more [product name].” For example, on my Knife site, on the page for Santoku knives, below the listing of Santoku knives it reads “Visit eBay to see more Santoku Knives.”

Fixing Stupid Listing Formatting

I noticed that a lot of eBay sellers write item titles like this:

Product—feature—feature—feature—feature—feature

or this:

Product~feature~feature~feature~feature~feature~feature

This approach forces the product name to not wrap, which forces the listing to take up way too much space horizontally. I design my templates so that this doesn’t kill my page layout, but it does force a page width that’s way too wide for users on smaller monitors.

I used php’s simple string replacement function to replace instanced of — or ~ with space – space or space ~ space. This allows the product name to wrap appropriately.

Fixing BANS Quirks

I also added php’s mysql_real_escape_string in appropriate spots in the source code to fix a few bugs that shouldn’t exist. It’s impossible, for example, with the default BANS script, to use apostrophes in the page content, or to use quotation marks around a custom search query, or to use apostrophes in the link name for a category page.

The BANS programmers did such a bang-up job with this script, I’m astonished that they didn’t use the escape string everywhere that apostrophes and quotation marks might need to be inserted into the database. But they didn’t. Fortunately, with source code in hand, I’m able to fix that myself.

Custom Templates

I use my own template designs — none of that default stuff for me. I generally rotate among 4 or 5 different standard templates, which I’ve designed specifically to make it easy for me to place a product-related photo in the header. My templates use different color schemes, and I generally just choose whatever color scheme seems most appropriate for the particular niche I’m targeting.

I use a detailed stylesheet to style the navigation links, item listings, and other items just as I want them to appear. I generally remove the PayPal logo from the product listings, place the search box at the bottom of the page instead of the top, and repeat the navigation in the footer. Since I applied special css classes to my navigation links, I can target the main categories, sub-categories, and sub-sub-categories differently in my footer than in my header. I’ve been experimenting with showing only the main categories in the footer, by using display:none for the sub-categories in my css for the footer nav links.

Easy Privacy Policy

With the requirement of a privacy policy for all sites that use CJ and AdSense, I made that easy, too. I wrote a generic privacy policy, which lives on one of my websites, and I have a very basic, very easy page on each site that simply pulls in that page as a php include. It’s linked to from my footer. It exists as an actual page, so it automatically gets included in each site when I upload my files — I don’t have to mess around in the BANS admin area creating a new content page every time. It’s just automatically there. And by including the actual policy, if I ever need to rewrite the policy, I can re-write it once and have it updated on every single site. I love timesaving techniques.

In my continuing efforts to expand the diversity of my income from various sources, I have just set up a couple of Cafe Press stores: St. Patrick’s Day t-shirts for Masons and St. Patrick’s Day t-shirts for Shriners. I’m promoting these on the Masonic Memorabilia site, which is getting a surprising amount of organic search traffic.

Setting up the stores in Cafe Press was a little confusing until I figured out the system. If you sign up for the basic (free) shop, it seems that you’re better off promoting just a single design, which you can place on multiple products. With the premium shop — which costs a monthly or annual fee — you can sell the same product but with multiple designs. Since I’m just starting out with Cafe Press, I didn’t want to spring for the premium shop, so I created two shops so that I could promote 2 different designs. You can create as many basic free shops as you want, and I’m considering adding a couple more shops using the same basic concept for the design.

So far I have to say I’m impressed with Cafe Press. They made it easy to set up my shop, select my products, upload my design, add appropriate titles and descriptions, etc. I left my shops opted in to the affiliate program, and tagged my images so they would appear in the Cafe Press Marketplace for relevant searches on the Cafe Press site.

I’ll report again after my shops have had a chance to get some traffic — I don’t know if I’ll make any sales or not, and the product designs I used give me a limited time for this concept to work.

Last month I started adding eBay listings to some of my web sites, and since then I’ve seen an increase in the number and frequency of my commissions from Commission Junction. I’m not earning very much from CJ; I still make a lot more from AdSense. But it’s nice seeing those commissions come in on a regular basis.

Suddenly, this month, the “Program Performance” report on my account home page in CJ is showing 3 green bars (out of 5) for “Network Earnings.” According to CJ’s help pages, this means that my earnings are in the 60th-79th percentile of the entire CJ network. I’m not a math whiz, but I’m pretty sure that means that I’m earning more (in CJ) than at least 60 percent of the other CJ affiliates.

I’ll repeat what I said in the first paragraph: I’m not earning very much from CJ. Not enough to pay my mortgage payment. Not even enough to cover my grocery bill. Based on this month’s commissions so far, it looks like I’ll make enough this month to pay my electric bill. That’s not impressive — and yet, it’s more than what 60% of CJ’s affiliates are making. Commission Junction doesn’t include affiliates with zero earnings in this computation, either. Clearly, there are a whole lot of affiliate marketers in CJ’s program who aren’t even earning enough to pay their electric bill.

I understand the really successful affiliates (Super Affiliates, they’re sometimes called) make a lot of money, and I hope to join them eventually.

I imagine moving up into the “4 green bars” Program Performance slot will require a lot more earnings, and hitting on all 5 bars may well be an impossible goal. Affiliate marketing is certainly making a few people rich — but most of us poor slobs are doing well if we can cover our electric bills.

Doing affiliate marketing through Commission Junction’s affiliate network has made me a little bit of money. Nothing to write home about, but enough that I can see the potential.

Commission Junction is one of the biggest and best-known (if not the biggest and best-known) of the affiliate networks out there.

So I just don’t understand why they can’t run a web site that works consistently. Over and over, every few days, the CJ website times out when trying to log in or run reports. Some days I can’t log in at all. I’ve contacted CJ’s support desk — all they tell me is to clear my cookies or restart my browser. Dammit, it’s not my cookies or my browser. I’m a reasonably savvy Internet user who has tried every possible thing I can do on my end, including visiting the site on a new browser that has never even been to the CJ site before.

It’s not confidence inspiring. It makes me wonder how much affiliate tracking isn’t being tracked, and how many affiliate commissions aren’t being committed.

Google’s AdSense program isn’t known for open communication with publishers, but at least Google puts a notice on their AdSense pages when they’re down for maintenance. When CJ had its reporting go out for about 2 weeks (over the holidays, no less!), they didn’t even put a notice on the site until at least 10 days into it.)

I’ve been running affiliate links on a few of my websites for the past few months. I’ve been promoting well-targeted products from reputable, well-known merchants who should have a high level of name recognition and trust from my target demographics. I’ve had lots of click-throughs to the merchant sites, but not that much in the way of commissions.

Then last month I started using eBay listings. First, I launched a few sites using the BANS (Build a Niche Store) script, which allows for fast and easy creation of an eBay store based around a particular niche within eBay. My first BANS site was Bit and Rein Tack Supply — which is probably too broad of a niche, but what the heck, I had the domain lying around not being used, and it served me well for experimenting with my first BANS site. I’ve added a few more since then, the most recent being Masonic Memorabilia, which is a much narrower and better targeted niche. I also happen to know a lot about Freemasonry, and I’ll be adding some informational articles to that site, which will help it get better traction in the search engines.

After starting my first couple of BANS sites, I started messing about with eBay’s API, and figured out how to place eBay listings on existing sites, ones that I built using standard static html and that weren’t developed around the BANS script — for example, my Tropical Boating site, which I manage and my husband writes content for.

And in the first month of this great eBay experiment, I’ve had more, and and more regular, commissions coming in from eBay than from all the other affiliate merchants that I’ve tried over the past few months.

People really do buy stuff from eBay. All kinds of stuff. Sometimes they come to my tack shop site and buy a saddle, or they go to my Masonic Memorabilia site and buy a Masonic ring. But sometimes they go to my Discount Marine Electronics site, click through to eBay, and end up buying a pair of “lightly used tennis shoes”.

Yep, that really happened. Someone was looking for color marine gps/chartplotters, found the marine electronics site through Google, clicked through to the site, then clicked through to eBay — and then bought a pair of used tennis shoes.

With eBay, as with most affiliate marketing, the affiliate marketer gets a commission when a user follows their affiliate link and buys something from the merchant, even if it wasn’t what the marketer was promoting. This can make for some rather amusing commissions!

Heck, I’m not proud. I’ll take my commissions wherever they come from. Even used tennis shoes.