Difference Between December And January? 95% Sales Slump, Thats What

You may remember back on Dec 1st I challenged Blogging Fingers readers to Build A Profitable Niche Blog With Christmas Sales and Sell In January.This is what I proposed:

“The target with this site is to earn $150-$250 during December when everyone is buying Christmas presents and then sell the blog late January when the January sales are slowing down. I will then pick the most profitable 30-day period to display as the monthly earnings. E.g. December 15th - January 15th may have earned more than simply the month of December. If there is a 30-day period where $200 was earned, the site should have no problem selling for over $2000.”   

Its’ ethicalness was questioned, but generally the idea went down well. The site I created was Airsoft Store Online, here are the results: 

December

• $18.96 From Amazon Associates
• $21.50 From Google Adsense
• $13 from an Airsoft Affiliate program

The Important point about December was that I was on holiday for 3 of its 4 weeks and so the $50 earned was quite literally from me doing nothing. While this is short of my goals of hitting over $150, I wasn’t disappointed. 

January

• $15.52 From Google Adsense
• $0.80 from Amazon Associates (how embarrassing!)

You can see in January how there is a 95.8% slump in Amazon sales, and a noticable decrease in AdSense earnings and nothing from the airsoft affiliate program I used. Traffic remained much the same - consistent low levels with the odd Stumbleupon spike. It seems a bit pointless analysing this in too much depth when the figures are so small, but it is clear to see the so called ‘January sales’ are considerably smaller than the December shopping spree, or at least that is the case with Airsoft Guns.

What About Selling The Blog?

I had originally planned to sell, but I decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. This is all small money at the moment so I’ll just add the site to my slowly growing collection of niche blogs that earn a little money each month.

Lessons

Erik Karey took up my challenge and looks to have done very well using eBay, rather than using the low paying Amazon Associates. Congratulations Erik! I’ve since replaced some of my Amazon Associates links with eBay links.I am of the belief that my target of earning $150-$200 in a blogs first month and then selling for $1000+ was attainable, had I used done these things differently:

• Use a higher paying affiliate program like eBay where the lowest tier of earnings start at 50% rather than Amazon’s lowly 4%.
• Work hard to grow the blog for 1 month and not go on holiday for most of it!
• Take the opportunity to sell in very early January

Did anyone else take up my challenge or do something similar? Do you have any more advice to add?

Click here for eBay!