Can’t Get Rich

Let’s talk about niche stores. The hot topic in the affiliate marketing world lately seems to be BANS (Build A Niche Store), a special script that auto-generates web pages for use with the eBay affiliate marketing program. BANS looks pretty nice, but it costs $97. Depending on who you are, that’s either a steal or a massive ripoff.

A steal

If you want to crank out dozens of niche stores in one day, BANS is the right way to go. It takes care of all the hard work, and your finished product is neat, clean, and ready to go.

A ripoff

Here’s an example of a niche store with Toys in mind. It was created by BANS. Looks pretty nice, right? Now, here’s a niche store with a video game console (edit: removed) theme. Not quite as pretty, but then again, I threw it together in 5 minutes for the sake of this article. I’ll clean it up later.

Tools of the trade

If you want to go the easy (lazy) route, you can buy BANS for $97 and get a nice pretty site which is essentially nothing more than an RSS scraper. On the other hand, if you’re cheap like me, you can use free, publicly available tools, which produce a near-identical end result. The only catch is you need a basic understanding of HTML. Here’s what I did:

1. Find a pretty CSS template and download it.
2. Download RSS2HTML and put it on your web server.
3. Read the short and simple user’s guide.
4. Edit the RSS2HTML example template using beginner-level HTML code (table tags, etc).
5. Get your RSS feed (in my case, an eBay feed of Wii consoles).
6. Run the script from the easy to use web interface.
7. There you go. You have a pretty basic (and free) niche store generator.

See? Not so hard. Of course, my technique does require you to spend some time tinkering with HTML, so it’s not practical for mass producing niche stores. On the other hand, if you just want to play around with niche stores using only a handful of sites, then this method is cheap and easy.

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