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?
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Hey Simonne! My name is Sharingan and I like this post about Halloween sites. I am very new to this and I read your profile and I would like to learn some tips and tricks as well. I am a follower of Griz and I just recently set up a Make Money Online blog and I just got indexed but I am in need of backlinks. I was wondering if we can do a backlink trade. I’m going to read your tips and tricks blog to learn some more thanx in advance and cool post
Yo Simonne,
If you remember I asked you a few questions last year after Halloween as well when you made some profits off it. I was waiting for your post this year and here it is. Good job with the daily average (I’m impressed), I also tried my luck on this but so far haven’t really gotten close to doing so good because the big G apparently didn’t like indexing my site that much. BTW, I only bought 1 domain and did all the work on it. I didn’t focus on putting hundreds of items instead I tried focusing on a few halloween costumes that were in good demand and tried to rank for them. The bad part is I haven’t made a single penny. Now that my blog did get indexed, it mainly gets traffic from Google Images and not much from the google SERPS itself. I know I’ve lost chance this year but maybe I could learn some more from you for the next year…Thanks in advance =D
Hi Abdul,
I remember you. I’m sorry you didn’t get any luck with Halloween this year. I also have many blogs that didn’t take off, but three of them were really successful – you’ll see all details in the post I’m going to write after Halloween. My blogs also get some traffic from Google Images – that’s not converting for me either.
Hi there,
I just wanted to say I’m really interested in this subject, but I am a novice, at best.
Unfortunately when I started reading your blog, I couldn’t help but feel lost. It is definitely written for people in the know. I guess I’ll have to look elsewhere if I want to get an idea of how to go about making something like this work.
It’s too bad I don’t already know enough to find your site useful. Maybe after I learn a bit, I can come back.
I have to agree. Halloween is one of the best holidays for online shopping. I have a number of costume websites now and they do pretty well each year. These can be done with Joomla or else WordPress or even just as static HTML with links to your affiliate program. I’ve done them all.