If you don't want to buy a site to start and need low risk, why not just build your own to learn the basics?

Total cost?
$6 a year for the domain name
and about $5 a month for hosting
= $66 and your time

Well, I don't have the skills to build a site from scratch (read: design and layout), I havn't touched web design since the days when notepad and HTML by hand was how things got done.

So either I buy BANS and build off that, or I buy an already functional site.

does anyone know the law around reusing certain content from another site? like if i wrote a script to get the movie times off fandango or whatever and reformatted them and redisplayed them on my own site - is that illegal?

You might want to find out if the site offers a service to grab XML files with the information instead like weather sites do. Our internal Intranet page at work goes out and gets information from wunderground every 30 minutes for the little weather thing on our site.

If you're literally culling the information by loading the actual page in code and then scouring the code for the information, then yes, that would be a violation, it would also be exceptionally easy for them to break your ability to do it.

Whether you have web design skillz or not BANS is a useful tool. However, don't expect that since you have BANS on your site you're going to make money. You have to have a game plan. You have to determine what niche(s) you're going to go into, and what course of action you're going to take to generate traffic(SEO, PPC, or a combo of both).

There are plenty of ways to "screen-scrape" data, but you should try to do it under their T&C if possible.

It's pretty easy to scrape anything you want if you just use cURL and are decent with regular expressions

If you have used BANS can you give me a quick rundown of why I would be better off using it rather than becoming an ebay affiliate and building my own site?

Fantastic thread. Thanks to Max and z28 for dropping all this knowledge, for free!

The main reason why I use BANS is that I have over 20 ebay sites, and I don't have time to micro manage each one...the majority of them generate traffic organically, but I run a couple PPC campaigns that are generating good ROI.

But to be honest with you, until you try developing your own sites you're not going to know. Affiliate marketing is all about trial and error. You may find out that marketing ebay on your site doesn't generate as much revenue than marketing products from Commission Junction...Again just get in there and build a site.

thanks homeslice, maxtower and z28 for a really nice thread. Really looking forward to getting started in a couple months.

What can you do to get your site to show up higher in the list of Google searches?

Content plays a big role here. A site with lots of information is gonna rank much higher than others. Remember that you rank for keywords and therefore articles that contain keywords that you want to rank for will get those articles ranked higher. You can then add backlinks to these articles and they will get a higher weight in the SE's.

Other factors that play a role is the keywords that are in your domain name, the age of your domain (the older, the better), backlinks and the anchor text that these have. There is also some discussion as how relevant the site that links to another is (a site about fishing linking to a poker site wont carry much weight i.e).

Why would two sites cost $220/month? Can't you get hosting on a site for like $100 for the entire year?

Is there something special or better about these servers?

I'm not sure about his situation, but from that price he most certainly is using a dedicated server.

People typically need these for one of these reasons:
1. A site that requires lots of processing power / memory
2. A site that needs custom server work that shared hosts won't allow
3. A site that just gets so much bandwidth a shared host couldn't handle it

The main 3 types of hosts are as follows:

Shared host - $5-$10 a month - most basic package, good for 90% of people

Virtual Private Server - $20-$70 a month - here you are on a dedicated host, but sharing with a more limited number of people than a shared host. You will also usually get a dedicated amount of RAM or cpu processing. In addition, because your hosting is run in a virtual machine, you get all of the server control that you would from a dedicated host. The quality varies greatly by host.

Dedicated host - $100+ a month, usually around $200 - the entire machine is yours - for the most demanding sites

Yeah, that's what I assumed. But I just didn't know why such seemingly simply sites like the one mentioned in the OP would need a dedicated server.