BANS aka “Build A Niche Store” is a product I bought mid 2007 for $97 as I loved the idea of owning a bunch of niche stores that I could make money off.

I got stuck straight into it and built three sites very quickly. I barely did any research for products or keywords or anything else. I just wanted to play with this new toy and see what it was like.

Those three sites have just been sitting there without being touched for all this time and with no promotion except for a few articles I submitted back at the time I set the sites up.

I moved on to other things and forgot about my BANS stores except that I did notice little bits of income coming off them just now and then.

Smart people would have pounced on that and promoted the heck out of the sites but I had my mind elsewhere and let it slip.

BANS had to be updated to cope with the changeover of the affiliate program from Commission Junction to eBay’s own Partner Network - and that quashed any thought of resurrecting my BANS sites because I just didn’t want to go through all that hassle of updating the sites. So I ignored the emails about the updates for a long time.

Then more recently I got news of another update that has come about to do with the eBay categories. Again I let that one go by. All too hard and I had other things to do.

After reading blogs by other people saying how they were making decent money off their BANS sites, I decided to go back and have a look at it. I decided to lay down everything else and just see how much effort the upgrades were and just go ahead and do the updates - no matter how complicated it was going to be, I thought I should at least try.

Well, it was like going to lift up a parcel that looks really heavy and finding it to be light as a feather. I was expecting a major headache but the upgrade process was simple & easy as anything. The instructions were really clear and easy, and the whole process took minutes. Most of that time was uploading some files to the BANS site folders on my server. A piece of cake. Don’t know why I thought it was going to be so hard and time consuming.

So that just shows me that the guys behind BANS really are committed to making this product user-friendly and simple. I am sure anyone with half-a-brain could set up a BANS site and get some traffic happening and start making sales commissions without any problem at all. So taking my own advice - my new goal this week is to set up about 10 new BANS sites, send some traffic and see how they go, and to start really promoting my existing 3 BANS and see what kind of income I can build up to.

Find out more about BANS (Build A Niche Store) HERE.