Can We Make Money Online With Holidays?


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:

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:

How to make money on Halloween Traffic stats

How to make money with Halloween: Traffic stats for the main blog, first 2 weeks


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:

How to make money with Halloween: second wave of stats

How to make money with Halloween: second wave of stats

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:

Make money with Halloween: stats for the last part

Make money with Halloween: stats for the last part


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:

Make money online with Halloween - Weekly traffic for the main blog

Make money online with Halloween - Weekly traffic for the main blog

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:

Total: 2265 minutes = almost 40 hours.

Now, the money:

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:

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 :wink: ).



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    21 Comments »

    Comment by Terry Didcott
    2008-11-03 16:06:15

    MyAvatars 0.2

    That is a great result for a first year project and as you said, it will be better next year and every year after that. It just shows that you can make decent money online when you put some time and effort into it, rather than just sitting back and reading about it all day!

    Terry Didcott´s last blog post..Freelance Writer’s Big Happy Family

    Comment by Simonne
    2008-11-03 16:43:41

    MyAvatars 0.2

    Yes, things add up nicely. If we think that 40 hours mean one week of working full time, multiply it by 4 and you get a nice income of about $3500. I don’t know how much is that for other countries, but here one can make a more than decent living out of that. Besides, there was a lot of time I’ve invested in projects which didn’t pay off at the end of the day.

     
     
    Comment by nicola Subscribed to comments via email
    2008-11-04 08:51:53

    MyAvatars 0.2

    Thanks for sharing your process with us – step by step guides are always appreciated.

    I bet you’re looking forward to next Halloween!

    nicola´s last blog post..Bagteria Small Leather Bag

    Comment by Simonne
    2008-11-04 09:57:39

    MyAvatars 0.2

    You are welcome, Nicola. I also like such examples, because sharing experience is good for both learning and motivation.

    Of course I’m eager to get to the next Halloween. Even more, I can’t wait to see if this can be repeated with Christmas and Valentine’s Day.

    However, there’s a glitch in the plan: if next year the merchant changes the links, I’ll have to go through all blog posts and replace them. People with better programming skills should think of this from the very beginning – to design a system where replacing affiliate feeds can be done from one single place. I know how this should look like, but I guess it would take me ages to do all that coding.

     
     
    Comment by nicola
    2008-11-05 13:31:09

    MyAvatars 0.2

    That’s a real pain but at least you’ve got the links and everything in place (and plenty more time to build links before next year)

    nicola´s last blog post..Bagteria Small Leather Bag

     
    Comment by nicola
    2008-11-05 19:15:20

    MyAvatars 0.2

    BTW, I signed up for Share a Sale – I hope you get your $1!

    nicola´s last blog post..Bagteria Small Leather Bag

    Comment by Simonne
    2008-11-05 20:36:37

    MyAvatars 0.2

    Thanks! I haven’t got it yet, but it’s probably coming. Anyway, I have good news: we sold two more costumes since I’ve published this post and today I’ve just sold the first Christmas tree :wink:

    Update: I’ll get the dollar after you generate the first click.

     
     
    Comment by Denise Subscribed to comments via email
    2008-11-12 02:19:41

    MyAvatars 0.2

    Simonne,

    This is the first time I have visited your blog. WOW is all I can say.

    I love the way you gave a step by step account of exactly what you had done to make money online with the holidays.

    I will definitely be signing up to your feed, Plus going back over your past articles posted.

    Here I thought you were a newbie! :lol: :lol:

    I will definitely be back often and try to replicate your make money online techniques.

    Denise´s last blog post..How to Make Money Online at Home Has New Look

    Comment by Simonne
    2008-11-12 10:14:00

    MyAvatars 0.2

    Hi Denise,

    Thank you for stopping by. I’m so glad you found this blog useful.
    If you read my old articles, please don’t follow the advice on writing paid posts, because those are not working anymore the way they used to.

    Newbie? I could say I consider myself a newbie. There is something new to learn almost every day. The more you learn, the more you need to know.

     
     
    Comment by Jayden Fellze Subscribed to comments via email
    2008-11-14 11:22:00

    MyAvatars 0.2

    It is a novel idea, isn’t it, to work on a holiday and earn too? You have suggested something which many of us would not have thought about. Yes, I am planning to think of something for the next holiday, something interesting and appealing.

    Jayden Fellze´s last blog post..4 Ways To Promote An Affiliate Product And The Most Effective One Is…

    Comment by Simonne
    2008-11-15 18:31:34

    MyAvatars 0.2

    Indeed, there’s a lot of money to be made online on holidays. Even if it’s only to earn a small additional amount for gifts or for a nice trip, and it’s still worth doing it.

     
     
    Comment by Webtoolkeeper Subscribed to comments via email
    2008-11-19 14:11:08

    MyAvatars 0.2

    I sold masks and toys during Halloween and the profit was reasonable… it’s always good to have some options..

     
    Comment by Money Is Everywhere
    2009-02-13 19:51:55

    MyAvatars 0.2

    I find holidays a great time to make lots of money as long as you prepare ahead of time.

    Money Is Everywhere´s last blog post..Blogging Basics Part 4 – Blog Promotion

     
    Comment by DENBBY
    2009-04-08 18:47:02

    MyAvatars 0.2

    I’ve been in the affiliate marketing business for over a year now and if only I had know about it sooner I wouldn’t have spent the last 10 miserable years working my butt off for an ungrateful company. Now something brand new has come to my attention and its mind boggling; millions of dollars worth of free unlimited internet advertising… GOOGLE ADS FREE also MSN also YAHOO all FREE. I want to share this with everyone because it costs me nothing to tell you about and it can only make affiliate marketing stronger and increase your results and profits hugely. Please just listen to Rachel at… link edited by Simonne

     
    Comment by Abdulrehman Agha Subscribed to comments via email
    2009-04-11 18:29:03

    MyAvatars 0.2

    Sounds great, but are those supporting blogs the only ones you used for links? What other SEO factors did you make use of?

    Abdulrehman Agha´s last blog post..3 Easy Steps to look like a Comment Spammer

    Comment by Simonne
    2009-04-12 21:47:03

    MyAvatars 0.2

    In the beginning yes, the supporting blogs were the only link resources used. Later on, I got help from a few friends, with 4 or 5 well anchored links from contextual posts on their blogs, with PR 1 or 2.

    Everything was based on watching the long tails, then adding more posts targeting the terms we were already found for. Then, when I saw that there were 2-3 costumes selling like crazy, I went and added posts promoting those costumes on all blogs involved.

    I’ve noticed that fresh posts got very good rankings in SERPS immediately after being indexed. Those rankings were stable for several days, then they were going down. That was enough to see if we get any sales for the particular keyword. If yes, I kept on adding new posts targeting those keywords. In this way, I had at least one result on page 1 in Google all the time. For one of the best selling costumes for boys, I managed to have three listings in the first 10 for more than one week.

    For next Halloween, I’m going to use the same network, but I’ll do lots of article submissions in July-August, hopefully I’ll manage to boost the rankings for those keywords that sold well last year.

    The blog posts were simply tables with costumes and their description, generated from ShareASale, to which I added a brief introduction and a final sentence.

    Comment by Abdulrehman Agha Subscribed to comments via email
    2009-04-13 13:14:46

    MyAvatars 0.2

    So those terms really didn’t have much link competition right, else it is way hard for a blog to be ranking good in such a short time. What’s the advantage of submitting your blog posts through socialposter.com, it didn’t get you any traffic right?

    Abdulrehman Agha´s last blog post..3 Easy Steps to look like a Comment Spammer

    Comment by Simonne
    2009-04-13 15:50:30

    MyAvatars 0.2

    As far as I’ve noticed, submitting new posts to several social networks helps with getting them indexed very fast. Besides, a few of those links you get are do-follow, and you can use the desired keywords to anchor them.

    The terms were not very competitive and there was a huge long tail – there are maybe thousands costumes searched for each year, so everybody can have a small share of this pie.

    Then there were those small niches such as costumes for pregnant women – a pretty good part of the traffic came from such searches.

     
     
     
     
    2009-10-03 19:30:21

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    [...] 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 [...]

     
    2009-11-04 17:24:58

    MyAvatars 0.2

    [...] year, we made $840 + $170 (merchant bonus), so a bit more than $1000, in which we invested about 40 hours of [...]

     
    Comment by Kevin Freeman Subscribed to comments via email
    2009-12-14 11:28:46

    MyAvatars 0.2

    Great info. I’ve been involved with affiliate marketing for two and a half months now. After taking in tons of info and building 10-12 wordpress sites, the light is finally coming on. I love your systematic approach and will definitely implement some techniques into future campaigns. For anyone looking to expand their network as I am, check out a couple of my sites (they are all works in progress). Halloweendirect.us , or Christmasdirect.us ,
    P.S. I ranked in the top five for two keywords after only having the site up for 7 day’s. I was vague on how I did it at first but, It’s becoming clearer to me the more knowledge I gain from great resources like this site. http://www.ezmoneyon.net/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_wink.gif

     

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