Be a ProBlogger: Make Money with Halloween and a Simple Joomla Template

October is here and once more we 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 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 (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.
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 but who knows?