Here’s the newsflash of the century, people continue to look for an easy way to make money online. Here’s the cold hard truth, most of the people making money online are making it by selling stuff to those who are looking for an easy way to make money online. Shocking huh.

People are Lazy

I don’t know what it is about people that they always want to shortcut or think that their is a way to easily make money on the internet. Heed this advice, as soon as it gets easy, every Tom, Dick and Larry will jump into the mix as well creating competition. Once you have competition it gets much more difficult than before. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy of sorts, the easier something is - the more competition it generates. The more competition their is, then the more difficult it becomes.

This is something that most of the BANS world seems to have not been able to pick up on just yet. They are convinced they can just throw up 300 stores and start making money online easily. Here’s a newsflash, it isn’t going to happen, at least not for long. Google will make sure that if you produce a host of garbage thin affiliate sites that they will soon either be buried deeply in the SERPS or removed from the index altogether.

Would You Buy?

Most of us that try to make money online, also often shop online and surf the internet regularly so you are aware of what sites look like and how you react when you first click onto one. An easy question to ask yourself is “Would YOU buy from your own site?”

If you are anything like me, when I click onto a site for the first time, I make some assumptions about that site. One glimpse at it is usually enough to either inspire me to look around and see what they have or to hit the back button and try another search. So what would people say about your site? What would YOU say about your site.

Let’s say for instance you were a Star Wars fan and you wanted to buy little Johnny a Stormtrooper helmet for Christmas. Let’s say that you were to do a Google search and come across say this site what does that site say to you? Does it inspire you to look around? Does it make you want to stay? If you are like me, absolutely not. It’s an out of the box garbage BANS site with no content, no modifications of any kind and really no hope of making any money. If it does even show up in the SERPS it is probably ONLY because it is new and Google for some reason, ranks new BANS sites pretty high for a few weeks but they quickly disappear.

Now let’s say you hit the back button and land on another Stormtrooper Helmets site. Does it inspire a different feeling than the other site on first glance? Are you not a bit more inclined to check it out and look deeper for that helmet for little Johnny? I would hope so, considering the second site is mine. It is far from done as I still want to jazz up the front page and add a lot of content to the blog portion.

My strategy is usually to get a decent looking site up and see how it produces over the first few months, if it does reasonably well then I will invest a LOT more time into it producing content and try to build it into a content rich site that will stand the test of both time and a Google human review if it ever were to come.

Wordpress + BANS

As you can see by the Stormtrooper site it is a Wordpress blog with a BANS store integrated into it. This is a hot trend as of late and I am experimenting with it as well. I will say this, it is getting a lot of credit from a lot of BANS sites lately but to be honest, I don’t see it as all that necessary. It is just as easy to build a quality content laden site using a BANS template as it is with WP.

Many members are running around the BANS forums crying about Google hating BANS sites and that the sky is falling and if you don’t change now you are screwed blah blah blah. It’s pretty stupid if you ask me, because Google has NOTHING against BANS sites. What they do not want in their index are thin affiliate sites. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a BANS site or one of the other hundreds of Ebay affiliate store scripts out there that exist.

If your site offers nothing for users other than auctions then Google is going to punt it. Plain and simple. I want to repeat, you can build a very high quality BANS site as easily as you can build a high quality WP/BANS site too. It just requires one thing……work.

Conclusion

I know a number of well known bloggers and so called black hat sites promote a number of shortcut ways to make money. Put up 100 sites that make a dollar a day and you’ll become rich overnight. It’s a crock of crap, because what they don’t tell you is those first 100 domains will probably be de-indexed and then you need to put up another 100 sites.

Domains aren’t cheap, especially now that Google is punting anything e-commerce that exists on a .info domain. I used to subscribe that theory of building a bunch of sites that could produce a few bucks a week but it wasn’t for me and fortunately I very quickly modified my strategy. I would rather have 20 sites that produce a few thousand a month than 100 sites that produce a giant pain in the ass.

I am considering starting to develop sites for people who aren’t quite sure how to go about building their own.  I don’t know if that is even something that would be in demand but it’s something I am thinking about.  My BANS store mentoring process is proceeding nicely and Kel has tackled the hardest parts of building a BANS site and is in the home stretch.  I will post an update on that soon.

So in conclusion, do you think people would want to have sites built for them or are they going to continue to look for the easy way out?  Also let me know what you think of my Stormtrooper site….bear in mind that it is far from done and I would expect to have 30 or 40 content rich articles on it within the next 60 days.

Stormtroopers Rule!

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