I’ve had a number of email/PM conversations since I started exposing myself my attempts at money making in public looking for my opinions on which route I think is the better to take: the full-fledged Build A Niche Store route or the quick minisite mashup route. My answer, every time, has been both.

THE NICHE STORE ROUTE

A well-executed, SEO’d niche store is a wonderful thing to behold. Steady $2, $3, $10, or even $50 commissions roll in with little or (better yet) no effort on your part. That is, AFTER the initial planning and customizing and SEOing has been done. A converting niche store requires a fair amount of effort up front if it is going to succeed, from keyword research to domain name selection to menu customization to look-and-feel to backlink building to… well, you get the picture. Putting up a straight-out-of-the-box BANS site on a broad, competitive niche and expecting the commissions to roll in is simply wishful thinking. It’s not that BANS development is back-breaking labor by any means, but there definitely is an initial effort investment.

THE MINISITE MASHUP ROUTE

On the other hand, the minisite mashups are great because they are so painless to set up. Do a little basic niche research (consisting primarily in determining if there exists enough products in the market for whatever topic you are looking at), paste a couple handfuls of decent keywords into a text file, upload, and a minisite is born. I do a few more tweaks, such as inserting some stat tracking code and setting up site-specific Adsense channels, because I want to see how much traffic — and from where — each gets. But even with those extra steps, I can still put up a mashup minisite in less time than it takes to steam a batch of rice. Overall, the performance on these mashup minisites is hit or miss. I have a few that paid for themselves – meaning, at least covered the domain registration fee – in less than a week. And I have a few that, if they continue performing the way they are now, I’ll be lucky to have them pay for themselves in a year (which earning just $0.63 a month will do). Most of their earnings come from Adsense, but I’ve also gotten a handful of eBay and Amazon sales as well, and it doesn’t take many of those to get that domain registration fee back!

SO WHY BOTH?

Like I said, I’ve had a surprising level of success with a couple of my mashups, whether from a random sale commission or eBay signup here and there. Nevertheless, the main drawback to the minisite over the fleshed out BANS site remains their earning potential. The award for consistency definitely goes to the BANS sites. I can count on an optimized BANS site converting regularly.

So why not just build niche stores? Because my time is finite. The true benefit of the mashups isn’t necessarily the trickle of money they bring in (though I won’t turn it down!); it’s the information I glean from their traffic. Once they are up and getting noticed by the search engines, noting those that perform gives me a decent indication of which ones will do well as a full blown sites versus those that may not be worth the effort involved. I simply have more ideas than time, so using something like the mashup to help decide where to focus is invaluable.

Amazingly, a few people who don’t know me personally notice this site. Why I don’t know, especially considering I post about once a year…

But a couple of you do, and you emailed me about how I went about building those sites I mentioned in last post. The big honking banner in the upper right of this post is the answer. Build A Niche Store aka BANS is an ultra-simple way to put up a bunch of eBay affiliate sites in no time.

For instance, my latest, the Nikonos Cameras store took me about 4 hours total to throw together, from keyword research to graphics to content creation to ad layout to going live. And honestly, a more than healthy chunk of that was tweaking the header image to look the way I wanted it (what can I say – I’m a little obsessive about things like that).

Yes, the BANS software does cost $97, a not unsubstantial amount if you’re living on the edge like many. But for those 97 bucks, I can build an essentially unlimited number of sites (Have you ever looked through eBay? You can buy just about anything there. Ideas is one things I am not in short supply of!) The only additional cost to me is whatever another domain name is going for at the time, from a couple bucks for an .info to maybe $8 for a .com per year.

So far the last two weeks I’ve cleared over $150 from just one of those sites. And see no real reason why I won’t see at least similar performance in the future (and likely better as the search engines better index the sites). I haven’t touched the site since I put it up, so you won’t see me complaining about that performance one bit.

The remaining sites? Not doing quite that well yet, but they’ve all made enough to pay for themselves already, so anything going forward is pure gravy. Besides, they’re so new they barely appear in Google yet, so I expect nothing but better performance going forward…

If interested, grab a copy the BANS software, ask as many questions as you want in the very active forums (and feel free to drop me a PM – I’m Sean there), and see what you can come up. But be warned — building niche stores can be addictive!