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
So, there were 11 sites, 8 hours initial time investment, plus about two hours spent on setting sidebar links from all other 10 sites to the new affiliate store and on submitting it to a few social networking places.
How Much Traffic the Sites Got
Out of the six Blogger blogs, only one really took off – the graph above shows its traffic evolution. This blog brought in 9 sales, accounting for $107, while serving as support site for the real money maker in this project.
The Joomla-based store, set up in late September, benefited from the fresh content bonus from Google, so it had first page ranking for a few costumes, translating into 11 sales and almost $90 in affiliate commissions.
Last year’s best site was the star of the show. The traffic started to rise since July, after the death of Michael Jackson, when I thought to add a couple of Michael Jackson costumes to the site. Unfortunately, all merchants ran out of stock so quickly, that I actually didn’t see one single sale before mid-August when they replenished their stocks. Once the costumes were available again, sales started to take off, and by November we’ve got a total of 199 sales from this site, accounting for $1800 in affiliate commissions. According to my estimations, we’ve lost maybe 100 sales because of many popular costumes running out of stock during the second half of October. At an average commission of $9 per sale, you see that it could have been much better. Actually that’s why I prefer AdSense – they never get out of their ads stock 
Earnings Split By Website
- Last year’s main site: $1800
- Joomla-based store: $90
- Best Blogger blog: $107
- A site that was scraping our best Blogger blog content: $25 (thank you scraper, whoever you are)
- All other 8 sites: $47
Money earned: $2069
Additional merchant bonus: $250
Grand Total Costumes 2009: $2319
This is a good method to make some additional money on holidays, without needing to work too much. We could call it the relaxed marketer’s approach. It shows once more that the bigger the pie, the easier it is to get some of it without too much effort. Of course, the more you want, the more you have to work, but this is the beauty of internet marketing: you can balance work and earnings until you find your happiness.
For 2010, I have a new question and a new challenge: how much money can one make with Halloween by developing an authority site and by working on it as much as needed to make it really big? We’ll live and see.
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Great post Simonne and thanks for sharing the valuable information learned from your hard work on this project.
Fascinating how much people spend on Halloween…
Lachlan,
Thank you for stopping by. Indeed, Halloween seems to be a huge opportunity for celebration and fun. That’s a chance for us to give them what they want and make some money for our own entertainment in the same time.
Wow Simonne, this is awesome. I guess I will have to get my big butt in gear and work my de-indexed Halloween site (Thank-You Bans!). Lets see if I can get it indexed first!
Hey Denise, thanks! If your site was de-indexed because of BANS, maybe you could just let go of it and make some new ones. I also got a lot of last year’s Halloween sites de-indexed, thanks to WP-MU.
Whenever you decide to get into Halloween, drop me a message, we can help each other
Thanks Simone! I just renewed this domain again. Let me give it a shot to get indexed and I will definitely get back with you.
I learn so much from you. It would be awesome to be able to be working with you.
That’s great, Denise! I can’t wait to be working together
What It Takes To Make Money In a $4.75 Billion Market…
This article illustrates a case study of making money with internet marketing by selling Halloween costumes. All details regarding the setup, the progress and the results are presented in the article, with charts and explanations on the performance of …
Nice Simonne, your Halloween sites really took off. The thing that took me time was adding descriptions to the costumes that I was posting. In your case, it doesn’t seem like your wrote for each and every costume you posted. Which makes it copied content, I’m still impressed how you got over that. Would love to hear more about it.
@Abdulrehman When you are using an affiliate feed you are allowed to use the content provided by the merchant.
Thank you, Abdul. As Lachlan said, content in feeds may be used as it is and it will save you a lot of time. It doesn’t matter it’s not unique, because out of 1000 pages with similar to identical content, the one which gathers the most anchored links ranks better than the others. Maybe if we used original content we would have been doing much better, but in terms of the time invested, I think we got a good return for the hours spent in setting this up.
Thanks for the input guys, nice to hear that it doesn’t matter about the copied content. But I also noticed that for most costumes there were some authority websites ranking with thousands of backlinks. I concentrated more on linking from within my network, what was your strategy? One will be bookmarking, any others?
The linking strategy was a combination of bookmarking and own network use. However, you need to keep in mind that we didn’t go after competitive keywords, we just focused on long tails which were easy to rank for.
Oh I see. Thanks for letting me know. I’ll be looking forward to halloween, next year, again.
That earning is quite awesome. Holloween is really a time that most people spends a lot of money. Your post was really very informative. I enkoyed reading it.
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I think it is great post.Great post written very inspiring and great to read about making more and more money online. Have a great readers hip.
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Great post, i never knew that there are much money in Halloween market, thanks for the tip
Earnings Split By Website
?
Last year’s main site: $1800
Joomla-based store: $90
Best Blogger blog: $107
A site that was scraping our best Blogger blog content: $25 (thank you scraper, whoever you are)
All other 8 sites: $47
Your earnings is distinguished! I work in internet already more than 2 years , but such amounts has not yet earned! You have probably else hidden secrets
Actually there is a “secret”: we’ve started probably more than 50 projects over the past three years, only a few being successful. The others can serve as examples on how not to make money online
Thanks for sending me this link.
Buying costumes online is a great idea because local shops jack up the prices. My wife was shopping with her sister at one store, they were already out of costumes, then we drove to another store where people seemed desperate to find something.
There is definitely a sense of urgency because like you said, the costumes sell out even if you’re not a procrastinator! So my wife spends $60 on a costume. Waiting in line to try it on, waiting in another line to pay for it. The next day we find the same costume is at another store for half the price
Feel free to use my comment as free content for your Halloween blog
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Interesting Article
Thanks
Aha it seems to be clear
Great Job and hard Work i think. Thx and greets from Bavaria
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