Can We Make Money Online With Holidays?

By Simonne on Nov 3, 2008 under Affiliate programs, Make money online

How can I make more money online? This is the question I start almost every day with, especially since the moment I’ve decided to take less internet marketing clients and develop my own portfolio of websites. For the month of October, our main project was How to make money online with Halloween. We are going to show you how we did it, from setup to promotion, to the follow up, and the conclusions. The main conclusion is that yes, almost everybody can make good money online with holidays, because of the buying fever and because of the traditions so many people choose to respect year after year, so they buy anything from costumes to artificial Christmas trees, even if they are on a tight budget.

Make money online with Halloween: The Setup

In the last 3-4 days of September, we have developed the following websites:

• One Halloween online store based on Affilistore (free software) and on datafeeds from ShareASale (affiliate network which offers free datafeeds for a large number of merchants). Cost: 0 (we set the shop as a subdomain on one of our general domains). The shop had maybe thousands of pages, but at the end of October we had only 254 pages indexed by Google
• One main blog: Cost: 0 (we used a free hosted service). We wrote and backdated about 20 posts for the beginning. We submitted abut 4-5 posts to about 10 social networking places, using socialposter.com (free service). Then, after we got at least one page of the blog indexed, we timestamped 20 more posts to be published on daily basis. We didn’t submit any more posts to social media, because we already managed to get almost instant indexing for new posts with Google, so we focused our efforts elsewhere
• 14 support blogs: Cost: 0 (we used free hosted services, different from the one of the main blog, so we can give it links from various IPs). These blogs had between 1 and 30 posts on them, and in their sidebar we had links to 3-6 posts from our main blog.
• One post and an affiliate banner on my tips & tricks blog (the aff banner had 30,000 impressions during October). The post was submitted to about 10 social networking places, using socialposter.com

Make money online with Halloween: The Working Process

After we started to see some traffic for our main blog, we started to add more posts based on the keywords we noticed people find us for. This is the traffic evolution for the first two weeks after getting indexed:

Unfortunately, I cannot tell you how many days passed from setting the blog until getting it indexed, because I backdated the first posts. As far as I remember, the blog was set up on September 24th, so it means the indexing took less than one week.

You can see from the above chart that the traffic really took of from the 9th day since getting indexed. We kept on watching the keywords and adding more and more content, and as you’ll see from the following graph, it was for the better:

On October 25th we though that was the end, as we saw a decline of the traffic. The 24th and the 25th of October were also awful in terms of sales (we barely got 2 or 3 sales during these two days), so we imagined that was it. However, on the 26th we saw the traffic and the sales increasing again. Until October 28th, the sales maintained high, but not as much as in mid-October. You’ll see below the traffic chart for the last part of the project:

As you can see, after the 25th we recorded the biggest traffic volumes. Despite that, the sales were low, and their trend was towards zero as we approached October 31st. On October 30, realizing that we are not going to sell any more costumes, as it was already too late for the delivery in time, we added AdSense to the blog. We made almost two dollars out of that, so it isn’t worth talking about it.

This is an overall chart by week, so you can better see the evolution:

As you can see, we managed to attract almost 10,000 unique visitors to our blog in about one month’s time. You are probably curious to find out how much money did all this work bring us.

How much money we made and how much time we traded for it

First, the time:

• setup of the affiliate shop: 20 minutes
• setup of the 15 blogs: 10 minutes each x 15 = 150 minutes
• setup of aff banners on AllTipsAndTricks, plus writing the post: 20 minutes
• writing 72 posts for the main blog: 10 min x 72 = 720 minutes
• writing posts on the support blogs: 5 min x 75 posts = 375 minutes
• keyword research plus checking the stats 180 minutes
• getting links: 40 minutes per day x 20 days = 800 minutes

Total: 2265 minutes = almost 40 hours.

Now, the money:

• Sales from the main blog: 71
• Sales from the support blogs: 18, coming from only 4 of the 14 blogs. One of the blogs is still not indexed
• Sales from the Affilistore shop: 28
• Sales from AllTipsAndTricks banners and post: 2

Total number of sales: 119
Average commission per sale: $7.04

Total money made online: $838 in affiliate commissions + $2 in AdSense = $840

As you can see, it is not a huge amount. It comes at about $21 per hour, which is less than what I charge my clients. Nevertheless, taking into consideration a few facts, we can consider it a success:

• The support blogs will serve us in our next projects in the niche of party and celebrations, because we can easily change the sidebar links to point to anything we want.
• None of the sites involved had any PR, as they were all new, except my AllTipsAndTricks which has PR0 despite the fact that it is more than two years old and it has a lot of links (one more reason for you to stay away from selling links and writing paid posts – I’ve stopped all these several months ago and still I see this penalty on that blog). At the next PR update, thanks to the links we gathered, some of these blogs will have some PR, meaning time and money saved for the future.
• Guess who’s going to make a lot of money next Halloween? I’ll make sure to keep all these blogs alive, with one post per month, until October 2009, when I’ll have the pleasure to get top rankings for lots of costume ideas keywords.

Final notes on making money online at holidays

In the beginning, I didn’t know which one of the 15 blogs will become the main blog, so I set them up with a few posts each and waited to see what happens. Nine of the blogs were targeted for Halloween, the others being general holidays and party supplies blogs. The Halloween blog which got indexed the first became the main blog. Now, when the project ended, I can tell you that out of the 72 posts published on that blog, only 49 got indexed in Google. The affiliate store had 254 pages indexed, but there was almost no link building done for the shop, and this was reflected in the sales.
So I can say that one of the major differences is in the inbound links. Unfortunately, I don’t have the traffic data for the affiliate shop, because I forgot to set up a separate Statcounter project for that subdomain. But I’m sure that if we hadn’t neglected link building for that site, the results would have been much better. Nevertheless, it is noticeable that it still brought in 28 sales, times $7 affiliate commission, meaning almost $200 for less than one hour of work.
Finding links for your niche blogs can be a challenge, but you have to be creative and keep in mind how important this is in internet marketing. Only look at the time stats we published here: the biggest amount of time in the project was spent getting links. This was the most time consuming activity of all, but it also was the most rewarding one.

I must admit I write very fast. However, you may excel in other skills than writing. If you have troubles in writing fast, then you can check out this content generation program which can help you a lot. We are not using any software to generate content, because I’m just too lazy to learn how to use them, but this Blog Content Wizard I’ve pointed you to is maybe the best one you could find. It generates readable articles and its author supports his customers very well. I know a lot of people who use it and are happy. This was not an affiliate link, we get nothing if you buy it, but I really think it is a must have if you cannot write easily about various stuff.

Each year is full of holidays: now we have Christmas, then in February it will be the Valentine’s day, then the Easter, then Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and so on. After your first year of setting up a small business for each of these holidays, you’ll also benefit from your work in the years to come. 2009 update: new Halloween costumes for 2009 have been added and new sites established. Sales are already starting to show up nicely. This year’s trend seems to be Michael Jackson kids costumes.

One more word about affiliate networks: ShareASale is not the only option. I’ve chosen them because of the datafeeds and because they have a great facility which helped me produce content for all those blogs very quickly: the “Make a Page” feature allows you to select a merchant and some keywords, then it generates the html code for the post, which you need only to copy and paste into your blog post. Add a few words in the beginning and in the end, so you make it unique (think of how many affiliates use the same texts), publish the post and you’re done. You can have a decent blog post in less than 10 minutes. Besides, if you have a make money online blog, you can promote ShareaSale and make $1 from each person you refer (like we do here ).

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