How are your Halloween sales??

So started a push for Halloween items on the 1st.. getting lots of clicks and paying WAY too much on PPC.. and I'm getting poor commissions in return.

Just curious if Halloween is generally like this.. and ditch it for next year, or if there is tons of money for affiliates.. and I need to re-think my strategy and presentation for 2008.

Currently, this is all eBay related items, but also I'm getting a quite a few clicks to costume merchants, etc on the CJ network.

Thanks!
hanji

 

Very good this year, almost double what they were last year between merchants on CJ and Shareasale.

 

hmm... that's what I was afraid of. I must be doing something wrong.. attracting the wrong traffic, etc. Back to the drawing board.

hanji

 

my halloween sales have not changed from any other month

 

If you aren't promoting halloween merchants (such as costumes) then I can imagine it wouldn't change from month to month!

 

this is the first year for me selling costumes, the experience until now is good.

 

I'm not. but you know...you asked.

 

"Until now"? Did you get a drop in sales?

Also, are you promoting 'categories' of costumes (ie: boys, girls, accessories) or are you promoting 'themes' (ie: spiderman, harry potter) or both?

Right now, I've been promoting categories.

Thanks!
hanji

 

Halloween has become lots more competitive.

My best Halloween sales were in 2004. I made more than twice as much money then as I have so far during this Halloween Season.
I don't practice PPC, I only am interested in organic SEO.
I especially noticed all the Adwords ads in the right margin of Google using my main keywords for a page (or group of pages within a theme, i.e. "Pirates" -- group the items so a page or two would appeal to a certain audience and another group of pages would appeal to a related but different audience).
It's been difficult trying to compete with Pay Per Click advertisers.

My advice would be to be as specific in terms as possible on each web page within a section. Thus if you have a sub domain [that would define a "section"] entitled "Halloween" or "Costumes" or something of that sort, focus on specific themes allocating 4 web pages on the theme.
If you can write something original (it doesn't have to be long, just a phrase or a sentence or two) a search engine will pick up your original words and highlight/mix the words in the search results. Just a little bit of originality will prompt the user to visit your site.

This year I've done well in Yahoo! ranking. My traffic seems to come from the Yahoo! search engine and through Google Images (and others but those two seem to be a main source of traffic).
My largest sales for Halloween items took place between October 15th and the 19th -- those were major "sales days," anything before or after was a "trickle" in comparison. Although keep in mind, there are some items that can be sold year round.

If you engage in PPC, you might want to follow the advice of someone I know who favors "all year round items" rather than seasonal.