Step 1 Choose A Country For this store we decided we were going to market eBay.com products and hence would be looking to connect with US internet users.

Step 2 Choose A Niche

For this site we wanted to target a narrow tightly defined niche that as a consequence would have limited competition yet enough demand to made the development process worthwhile.

After a bit of hunting around eBay and some basic keyword research the niche we came up with was “Game Improvement Irons” – a popular type of golf club which has the purpose of helping you improve your iron play.

For illustrative purposes, another type of "narrow" golf related niche would be “Golf Range Finders” while a wide niche would be “Golf Clubs” and the widest niche in this market segment would be “Golf Equipment”. As a general rule, the wider the niche the more development (principally in terms of content) you will need to put into your site to effectively establish it inside its target market.

As "Game Improvement Irons" is a narrow niche there is only so much content that such a site can hold purely because the niche is defined (and hence limited) by the number of different game improvement irons available on the market. In contrast, if you were to target "Golf Equipment" then your site would be capable of holding much more content purely because of the amount of products you would need to write about to effetively compete with the large number of very established and highly developed resource sites that already exist in this segment.

This isn't to say it isn't possible just that your development strategy has to be able to match the demand inside that market and the competition that is already "serving" that demand otherwise you end up with what we describe as a "hollow" site.

Step 3 Build Your Basic Site With our basic research complete we then installed BANS as per the instructions in the Installation Manual and went to the “Setup” area of the BANS admin panel so that we could begin developing our new site.

We would use the "Clubs" eBay.com category inside the "Golf" section which would bring the relevant products off of eBay and into our store database so that we could manipulate and display them to our readers in a format that we wanted.

Step 4 Develop Your Site The site development involved some basic customizations of one of the BANS templates, the addition of a logo and the creation of store and content pages (reviews of each particular club) so that the site covered all of the different game improvement irons available on the market.

Our developed site thus "matched" our target market providing insightful reviews about the different clubs available and the ability to view and compare prices for these clubs currently listed for sale on eBay.com.

You can explore the developed site here: GameImprovementIrons.com

Step 5 Marketing For the purpose of this particular site our marketing strategy was purely focused on achieving natural search engine rankings so that when a US internet user went to a search engine like Google.com and entered – game improvement irons – as a search query, our site would come up in the top 10 of the returned listings.

That internet user then clicks on our search engine listing, reads our reviews and compares the different products, clicks over to eBay, either joins as an eBay member and makes a winning bid or if they were already an eBay member makes a winning bid or uses the BIN (Buy It Now) feature to purchase an item and then our little site generates an eBay affiliate commission for us.

The more golfers who want to improve their iron play that this site connects to eBay listed game improvement irons the more eBay affiliate commissions it will generate and the 40 reviews included in the site are there to help such golfers learn about the different options, compare their features and prices and then once they’re ready head off to eBay to complete their purchase.

So how is the site ranking? At the time of writing our BANS built site is number 5 in Google for its main target keyword – “game improvement irons”.

On top of that it ranks for many other search queries relating to the specific brands and clubs as a consequence of our detailed page structure (ie brand and club specific) which effectively “maps out” this niche and the relevant content contained inside both the reviews and the eBay product listings.