Working with Mods

One of the great things about working with a BANS website is that a lot of thought has gone into the SEO(Search Engine Optimization) that needs to take place on websites these days if you want to stay up with your competition. Having said that, you still need to have the ability to work with and change the code if you want to make modifications(hence the term Mod) to the design of your website.

BANS allows this and as long as you ALWAYS back up the files that you will be working with, you should be fine. I have added several mods to my website and most have dealt with making the site more search engine friendly. An interesting point about BANS is that you are working with php files as opposed to html. These type of files are server side applications and the necessary html for all of your web pages are actually created at your website hosting location when they are needed and are not available to you in the standard ways. But it certainly does make the amount of files that you have to work with be very small in number indeed.

This leads in to a point I want to make if you are thinking of building a website to make money. You absolutely must be able to make basic changes to your code if and when you ever need to customize your site. It really is not that difficult and you simply can't be waiting around for someone else to make what turn out to be very simple changes. Don't be afraid to make some mistakes. As long as you always remember to back up the files you will be fine.

Creating 20 pages in 20 minutes

Using feeds to populate a store is a phenomenal tool that every affiliate should take advantage of. After taking an entire day to choose and code 10 product selections, it felt like I had died and gone to heaven when thousands of selected products from Ebay appeared instantaneously on my website.

Once I got the hang of it, I was creating a new page for my store every minute. In fact, within a half hour, I had the entire "bare bones" store created. It took me more time to choose my header than it did to create the entire store! Wow!

For good measure, I did the same thing with the Amazon feed and am now able to give my customers an Ebay auction experience and/or a normal purchasing experience when they come to my website. Using store feeds is absolutely the wave of the future when it comes to affiliate marketing. If you haven't as yet, you should really check out BANS to see first hand how this concept works. Next time, working with "mods".

The Teacher

http://www.coach-fashions.com/

Installing BANS

The installation was a bit more complicated than it needed to be due to my using GoDaddy as a hosting service, but all in all it went well. The directions were very easy to follow and it wasn't long before my site was up.

However, at first, no products were showing up! As it turns out it was because of the way GoDaddy configured their Apache servers but once that was taken care of the website worked perfectly. Next, which template is best for my site and how should I set up the navigational links.

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The Teacher

http://www.coach-fashions.com/

Why BANS?

This was a big decision for me and marked a change in my philosophy(something that is very healthy, BTW, when you are first starting out.

It became clear that the sites I was creating simply did not have enough products to entice the visitor into buying on a consistent basis. While I was making money, the amount of work needed was over the top if I wanted to replicate an idea(the rinse and repeat cycle). So I wanted to use a feed from a store or site to populate my website.

I looked at Golden Can and that looked very promising(I will use this in some way down the road). But still, I wanted a store front that could be set up very quickly from a template. Now the design features had to be robust because I had numerous ideas I wanted to implement. I rejected Amazon's astore for just that reason. It really is a primitive product but can be used very successfully if you already have a website that can link to it.

That's when I found BANS(Building A Niche Store). Now this was exactly what I was looking for! Having thousands and thousands of ebay products on my site(even in a rather small niche) was perfect for me and the robustness of the feature set is superb.

So, I purchased BANS for a very reasonable(considering you can theoretically use this on an infinite amount of stores) $97. I chose my first domain name, rolled up my sleeves and got to work. Next, installing BANS.

The Teacher
http://www.coach-fashions.com/