Sticktoitiveness: An Interview With Suzanne Franco

I remember back to earlier this year when a new poster joined the BANS forum by the screen name wahmsuzanne. Well that person ended up being Suzanne Franco. Suzanne always has asked great questions and ends every post with *SmiLes*! How could you not help her? I have seen her go through a few ups and downs, but one thing is for sure, Suzanne has Sticktoitiveness. Some people have it, some do not. She should serve as an example and inspiration to every newbie out there. Suzanne is now starting to see some good money on a regular basis and also has started blogging about her experiences on her blog Money Making Ideas. I thought it would be fun to interview her for my blog as I have always enjoyed helping her and conversing with her. Jump over and read her blog daily. So here we go. 10 questions with Suzanne. Thanks a bunch for taking time to answer these.

1. Who is Suzanne Franco?

I am a single mom to three amazing kids. They are the reason I work so hard to make money from home … I don’t want to miss a single thing in their lives. I was born and raised in Southern California and we relocated to the Texas Hill Country about 7 years ago. I enjoy playing tennis (I’ve played since I could walk LOL) and anything in or on the water … boating, wakeboarding, swimming, floating (it’s a Texas thing), the river and the beach.

2. What web background or knowledge did you have prior to finding BANS?

I’d say prior to finding BANS (in February) I had some decent experience with SEO and web promoting but I was (and still am) lacking some technical skills. I had a hard time understanding ftp, permissions, troubleshooting any type of error, with adding or changing themes, etc. Not only did I not understand any of this … it would stress me out completely I would become somewhat paralyzed. I would sometimes be afraid to do anything program related to my sites because I feared that something would go wrong.

I think (hope) I’m over the anxiety of dealing with some of the technical things that are involved with setting up and customizing my BANS stores. I’ve finally realized that I haven’t completely destroyed any of my sites so far and if something does go wrong … I can always ask for help. In fact, thanks again for all of the help you’ve personally given me with my BANS business and with the templates I purchased.

3. What led you to the BANS software?

I read about it on the Wealthy Affiliate forum.

4. What was the hardest part you found getting a BANS store going?

This hasn’t really been a huge problem for me because I enjoy the type of work involved: SEO, writing, building backlinks, involvement on forums, classified ads, Squidoo lenses, etc.

I have one store that is huge (over 450 pages – too big for my taste BTW) and I’ve had the most trouble getting that one going. It indexed right away and then went down to zero pages … and then to one page. Slowly the pages showed back up in Google but I’ve never been able to get the search traffic that I seem to get from my other stores. I feel I’ve done a good job with the SEO but I don’t focus on the promotion work like I should.


5. When did you know that BANS really works?

Truthfully ~ Not until about July or August (about 5-6 months after I started). I started getting steady traffic and went from a couple hundred dollars in profit to over $500. Then in September I exceeded my goal of $800 … bringing in $822.

6. What was your lowest point in your early stages with BANS?

Well, within a 1-2 month period of my getting started eBay (and BANS) went through a lot of changes. The CJ program was dissolved and eBay moved operations in-house, we had a BANS version upgrade, several eBay category changes, PepperJam arrived on the scene, and the BANS site and forum went through a complete overhaul.

This might not have been a problem for someone with a lot of programming experience but for someone like me who is not very techie it was completely overwhelming. I had all kinds of problems completing the upgrades on my stores and I guess I felt silly showing up to the forums all flustered and upset so I tried to fix the errors myself. This was not very smart. There are a lot of very nice and helpful people on the BANS forums and I eventually swallowed my pride and got some help.

What I didn’t know at the time was that most all of the problems I’d had were due to crummy web hosting. When I would ftp the files over … not everything would transfer resulting in missing files. I actually just about quit (you probably remember that “post” LOL) and I’m so glad I stuck with it (and got new hosting!).

7. Have you done any Wordpress BANS integrations and if so how are they doing?

Yes. I’ve done two new stores using your WP on root theme and I just love it! These stores both indexed immediately and are doing very well in the search engines.

I feel so much better about having the blog on the front end and then having the store integrated. We all know that Google loves WordPress blogs and for me this just reconfirms that. The blog format also encourages me to update the content on a more regular basis. There was also a recent decision by eZine Articles to reject articles that link to a page with auction links. I’ve seen several BANS folks reporting success submitting the blog pages attached to their BANS stores.

The other thing that’s great is that I can do a blog post on something related to my niche that I wouldn’t have necessarily created a whole store page for. An example of this would be I did a blog post on some Halloween jewelry on my niche jewelry site. I wouldn’t have added a store page for those items but instead I was able to use eBay tools/widgets to add some auction links in my blog post.

8. Do you remember the moment when the light came on for you about niche site building?

I think the light came on for me the very minute I saw the traffic in analytics and the clicks and bids in my eBay stats. LOL

9. What single thing would you tell every newbie or person who is struggling in the early stage of niche store building?

Well, this is not a get-rich-quick business and the longer you stick with it the more successful you will be. I personally believe in doing a very thorough job on each and every store … as opposed to busting out dozens of stores that don’t produce.

Learn all you can about keyword research and about SEO and put a lot of thought into each and every page of your store. For me … I prefer quality over quantity for sure.

10. Where do you see yourself one year from today?

I hope to continue building up my portfolio of BANS stores. I think I’m comfortable putting up a new store every couple of months. I have 5 stores now so I’d like to have about a dozen or so successful stores by then.

I am also starting to realize the importance of diversifying my online income streams. I would like my BANS business to be one of several ways that I make money online. I’m going to continue with my other existing businesses, I will continue to add quality content to my blog, I will learn as much as I can about affiliate marketing, I will continue with (and grow) my GPT (get paid to) income, and I’d also like to learn about building some PopShop sites. I think it’s important that we don’t put all of our eggs in one basket.

One year from now I’d like to be making a full-time income online (at least $60,000) … and I hope to still enjoy what I do for a living.

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