Goodbye BANS – Hello PhpBay

Many of you know that I’ve used Build a Niche Store (or BANS) to build quick eBay affiliate sites. BANS allowed me to take my first step into affiliate marketing and enabled me to make money quickly online. I still recommend BANS for anyone just starting out. Its fast and easy to understand. However there are several problems with BANS that eventually become more problematic as you try to grow your sites.

BANS is great for quickly creating thin eBay affiliate sites, the problem is that Google hates thin affiliate sites. BANS also is not very good at content management. Yes you can add content and extra pages, new store pages, etc., but really WordPress is by far superior. One solution many people have done and that I do is to integrate both WordPress and BANS together in the same web site. Both BANS and WordPress are written in php, so with a little tweaking you can get BANS and just about any WordPress theme to play nice together in one seamless web site. But this raises another problem. It can take a lot of time to cram these two applications together to make it look and behave right. Another problem is that it takes a good bit of html and php experience to make it all happen. This is definitely not something for everyone.

Building websites should be easy. You need to have a way to get them up and running fast so you can concentrate on link building and content. So to solve these problems and create a feature rich website quickly with lots of great content with WordPress (by the way Google loves blogs and WordPress) I’ve been spending a lot of time to moving my sites to a straight WordPress install with the phpBay plugin.

phpBay is a great WordPRess plugin, very similar to BANS in that it allows you to setup ebay affiliate pages on your blog. Its very simple and easy to use and it works great with WordPress. The biggest difference with phpBay versus BANS is that you have to setup each page individually. BANS on the other hand would create an entire site full of product pages in a matter of minutes. When I first started my niche business I was super excited to have an entire site built so quickly. But now that I’ve grown, I really prefer to build my pages by hand. I can set all of my keywords and phrases exactly the way I want them, put some good relevant content on each page for indexing, and ensure my link text is optimum for deep linking.

It may seem like a lot more work to build your site this way. I don’t think anyone like to do things the manual way, but from my experience, I really am saving a lot a time building my sites this way. I no longer have to recode WordPress themes to work with BANS. I don’t have to go back through each and every page to rewrite and change default keyword structures and link text. I can build out product pages and product catagories in a way that best suits my readers. And the best of all, I have WordPress to management all of my content.

By Joseph L Wilson

Follow along with me on my journey as I build my Internet Marketing Business. Read more about my successes and failures as well as a few personal insights to building great affiliate websites.