I started this BANS Experiment with 7 domain names so I could test out this eBay affiliate program that everyone was raving so much about. I set a budget of no more than $150 for everything. I spent $95 on the BANS software and that left me with $55 for 7 domain names, which I got from GoDaddy using a coupon code which knocked them down to $7.15 each.

I used my already existing Hostgator webhost account to host the sites. I used to be a systems administrator for Hostgator back when I lived in Houston, so I know what great service and tech support they have.

Note: If you do not already have a web hosting account elsewhere, I suggest you signup with Hostgator . You won’t find a better webhost out there. If you use the coupon code ‘beach’ you will get 20% off your initial order with them.

The pace was a little slow in the beginning but this was to be expected. It takes time for the search engines to crawl your website and for people to start finding you.

I had a total of 1596 unique visitors to my bans sites and I made a total of $208 in revenue. Deducting the cost of domain names and the software itself, this left me with $58 in profit for the month.

I learned a lot about SEO marketing and niches to invest in and what not to. My biggest hitter was Harley-Davidson-Auction.com with 521 unique visitors and 112 return visitors. It brought in bigger commissions due to the price of the motorcycles. It netted me $128 in commissions off the sale of two bikes and some parts.

My biggest let downs were the ones I was expecting to make the most off of due to the current popularity of the niche, IndianaJonesMarket.com and Transformer-Auctions.com. I expected these sites to do really well due to the recent exposure from the movies. What I learned was even more valuable though. I could not get high enough on the search engines to get enough visitors due to the flooding of the keywords from the movie releases. Combined they earned $8.86 with Transformers site bringing in 139 visitors due to keywording ‘transformer toys’ and Indiana Jones site bringing in a whopping 85 visitors.

What I found is that if there is a current rush or a lot of popularity with that niche, you will never get high enough on the search engines to gain enough visitors. I also learned that specialty items like coin collecting will get you hits but wont earn you commissions worth bragging about due to the nature of coin collecting. No one wants to spend $500 on coin they have never seen before. Coin collectors are skeptics at heart and prefer to see it in person. They are however willing to spend a few bucks at a time on coins from eBay without issue. RareCoinBazaar.com netted me $2.14 but had the highest number of individual sales. Unique visitors for this site was 336.

Lesson learned? Pick a niche that will generate enough sales with larger commissions and that will be easy enough to get higher up on the search engines without having to paying for it.