What It Takes To Make Money In a $4.75 Billion Market
Halloween is one of the most popular celebrations in the US. A poll of 8,526 consumers, conducted between 1 – 9 September 2009 revealed an estimation of $4.57 billion total spending on Halloween 2009, most part of it being represented by Halloween costumes (source: CNBC.com). This is quite a big pie, isn’t it? I don’t know how much of this came from online sales, but I know that it was easy to grab a little slice of the pie without too much trouble, as you’ll see:
Last year, we made $840 + $170 (merchant bonus), so a bit more than $1000, in which we invested about 40 hours of work.
Halloween 2009 Network Setup:
- Sites from last year: 4, on which we spent about 4 hours to adjust the old posts and add new costumes
- New blogger blogs: 6, which took about 3 hours to set up and fill with posts made with the ShareASale’s “make-a-page” feature (which allows filtering the costumes by keywords, so you can easily make sub-niche blogs such as “costumes for kids”, “witch costumes”, “baby costumes”, “couples costumes” etc)
- New Halloween costumes affiliate store: 1, made on a professional Halloween Joomla template offered by JoomlaBear – for those of you who want to use it, you can download it for free by following the previous link. This site took one hour to make, $8 to buy the domain name plus $55 spent on a feed importing plugin for Joomla
Be a ProBlogger: Make Money with Halloween and a Simple Joomla Template
October is here and once more we make money online with Halloween. For newer readers, you can find the case study by reading the post mentioned above. Briefly, we had 15 blogs plus one Affilistore affiliate shop, which earned us $840, plus a very nice $170 additional bonus from the merchant which was not included when I wrote the initial post. We hoped that all 15 blogs will get a nice boost for Halloween 2009, but so many things happened in this past year, that out of the 15 blogs we’ve ended up with only 3 or 4. The others died an ugly death by getting de-indexed by Google. Some of you may know the details, but this is a long story and it’s not what I want to talk about today.
So, last year’s main blog is well and it got great rankings for some of the most searched costumes, so sales were up in the second half of September – it’s already scoring $40 per day on average.
The Affilistore shop ended up with all URLs changed, because my favorite merchant left ShareASale for CJ, where there’s no more room for me unfortunately. No problem, I found another costumes merchant who offers feeds, but you can imagine I couldn’t redirect 7000 URLs just like that. RIP my shop and move on: I’ve set up a series of blogger blogs with costumes targeted on categories of customers: fat women, small children etc. One of them has already got good rankings for some costumes there, so sales are starting to show up. I’ve been sending a few links to all these blogs, but nothing too serious.
My biggest discovery over the past two weeks is Joomla. I like it that there’s a huge pool of free resources available, components, extensions and plugins, lots of Joomla templates free or paid, discussion forums where beginners can ask their questions and get guidance from more experienced guys. I had a hard time to figure it out in the beginning, as it’s quite different from Wordpress, but I ended up in love with its features and capabilities. From this love, not a baby but a new site was born, called Halloween Costumes 2009 (you can imagine that next year it’s going to be called Halloween Costumes 2010). The site still needs some ironing, but it has more than 300 pages indexed in Google and visitors started to show up already.
October 20th update: the new site has already paid off and it’s now making profits. If one site is that good, why not make some more? Check out the new Halloween costumes Joomla-based site made by a friend of mine and tell me that you don’t like how it looks. Soon you’ll be able to have your own good-looking Halloween site, but you’ll have to switch to Joomla – I’ll keep you posted on that.
I’m tracking the progress and I’ll be posting a follow up in November. Speaking of progress: one of our readers has joined ShareASale via my affiliate link last year. I’m happy now each time I see second tier commissions from him (or her) – I’m happy that there’s at least one person who used our ideas to make money online. He/she’s probably not the type that would hang around on Problogger.com, but who knows? Aren’t we all probloggers at heart?
Nomad’s Guide to Make Money Online: a Book for Beginners
If you’re reading this, you’re either one of our friends or somebody who’s trying to learn how to make money online with as little work as possible. If you’re willing to skip the part with “as little work as possible”, the Nomad’s Guide to Make Money Online is the book for you, a valuable asset that would bring you closer to your goal of making a living online. Before finding out more about the book, I have to warn you that it’s not for people who are already making money online with any of the many systems available. If you fall in this category, just stop reading and go make some more sites that bring you home the bacon. However, if you haven’t managed to discover a working method, please read on, as this may be your missing piece from the puzzle.
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Keyword Elite 2.0 vs. Google Adwords Keyword Estimation Tool
Keyword Elite 2.0. If I see these words in my inbox one more time I think I’m going to puke, and I’m positive I’m not pregnant. Over the past days or weeks, all those lousy spammers successful internet marketers I’ve been subscribed to tried to stuff Keyword Elite 2.0 deep on my throat, together with a big bunch of bonuses worth thousands, only to make me buy the new software which is not only a keyword searches number estimation tool, but also a support in finding JV partners and in… I forgot what else, because I’m not going to buy it anyway.
Keyword Elite 2.0 is an expensive piece of software. The 1.0 version was also expensive. I’ve bought that one, not that I didn’t have access to it for free, but because I wanted somebody to get the commission from my purchase. After using it for a while, I discovered that estimation has very little in common with accuracy. In my personal experience, I had the best estimates using the free Wordtracker old version in combination with Overture, which showed me how much I can make per click. Even today I’m successful with some of the keywords I’ve discovered in 2006. I can’t say the same about Keyword Elite.
If you think of buying it, make sure you take a look at a Keyword Elite v2.0 not fake affiliate review. If you still consider the purchase would bring you a good return on your investment, here’s another opinion about Keyword Elite 2.0 from somebody who’s stopped using its previous version although he has paid for it like I did.
If you understood the part with the keyword research accuracy, you’d better open your eyes and stay away from the PPC thing, because that involves real money and sometimes money from your credit card, if you’re foolish enough to do like all those “PPC Gurus” say and throw your credit card into this game. PPC is something you can’t learn from the books. You need to experiment and that means money. Believe me, I’m handling PPC campaigns for my clients, yet I prefer to make money by writing content that ranks well in the search engines.
What about the JV Diamond part that promises to help you find sites where to put your ad on the Thank You page. Ha, ha! You’ll surely make a lot of sales with that. I’ve setup one of my sites to show a one time offer to people before getting a free download. It’s there since last year, and absolutely nobody cared to buy the f…. thing I was selling! Why then waste time and money to produce some more useless things?
Here’s what other people think:
Alana wonders if one really needs it: Keyword Elite V 2.0 Overview – Do you really need it?
Jim feels ignored: Keyword Elite 2.0 Ignores Mac Users
Paul seems to be having enough spam KE v2.0-related: I`m Already Pissed off with Keyword Elite 2.0
My final decision is not to buy Keyword Elite v2.0 because it’s as wrong as Adwords Keyword Estimator tool which is free.
Sqip: Home Business Heaven or Scam?
Would you like to earn money doing nothing? Would you like to own shares in a company that’s going to sell for millions? Well, dreaming is free and also free is joining Sqip, an online portal that gives all members equity shares (which they call Private Equity Points, or PEPs) in the company.
Like Agloco did back in 2006, Sqip claims free PEPs number is limited, so after they come to an end, further members won’t receive them anymore. Ha! This is like they are playing the scarcity game on us, which sounds desperate rather than a professional business proposition.
OK, so far, nothing seems like scam here: you join Sqip for free, then you see the 100 PEPs in your account and their current value. (more…)
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