It’s Time To Get Your Halloween Hustle On

So October is here, and what does October spell for affiliates? It spells the 7 billion dollars that are about to be blown on the annual celebrations of Halloween. I know what you’re thinking. 7 billion dollars…that’s a Titanic assload of berries. But this isn’t about acai berries. This is about getting in on the market early and making some easy bank with the variety of CPA offers that are about to swarm the networks.

The good thing about annual festivals like Halloween is that nearly the entire population is stupid enough to buy in to them. And if you ever needed a case study, I’m a walking fucking testimonial.

I know a lot of guys have success around Valentines Day (…Especially if they remember it, right?). As a society, we generally feel pressured in to doing shit when everybody else is doing shit. Such a culture makes it easy to find some good money in appealing to the seasonal market demands. Whether that means pushing soppy “I love you” e-cards on February 14th or simply re-skinning your flog with some token fucking mistletoe on Christmas Eve – it’s probably going to have an effect.

So what can you be selling over this Halloween?

Well, I’ve done my research and rounded up a couple of cost-per-sale affiliate programs.

Costume City – One of the most popular fancy dress stores on the Net. You’ll need to be registered on CJ to promote it though. I’d drop an affiliate link here to get a second tier commission but who am I kidding? CJ? I’ve had to re-register like 4 times after each of my old accounts self-deleted out of pity. 10% to 15% payout with Costume City.

HalloweenCostumes4U – Also has a nice range of costumes. It’s a strictly Halloween themed site which is pretty important considering most of these programs that still haven’t mastered the art of allowing affiliates to link to a single product page. Payout looks to be around 12%.

Yes, 10% to 15% is a pretty weak payout – but you have to remember that the urge to buy is high. You get decent upsells with accessories so it’s not out of the question to be making some good bank on each sale. Of particular interest are the premium costumes – these are basically costumes that don’t look shit and cost a bit more. I’ve seen a few on there going for around $150-$200. If you can target the right crowd (pretentious limelight hogging whores), it’s easy to spin a healthy campaign.

The best way to convince the crowd to get in on your promotion is to sell it to them that you’re offering the hottest trend of the season – and if they don’t buy it now, it’ll be too late come October 30th. I don’t know if you’ve had your ear to the ground but there’s a pretty big murmur going around that the trend of the season is going to look a little something like this (CLICK).

Going by last year’s turnout, it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of money ended up being spent on costumes and accessories related to The Joker. I’ve seen some brilliant looking costumes and make-up works that went down a storm in 2008.

If you want to get some traffic to these offers, you should find plenty of success targeting the right demographics on Facebook. Use some shock tactic imagery to catch eyeballs. If you can’t find decent shock tactic imagery in a Michael Jackson Google image search, you really need to give up this game.

I’m thinking the 22-27 crowd is going to be quite profitable. You don’t want to target too young or you’ll end up busting a nut on university students. And we all know that university students are the definition of breezy pockets. I have to buy them pints to stop them from starving.

You can probably raise your clickthrough rate with some simple targeting of related keyword terms. Lets say if you’re using The Joker as your banner bait, ideal keywords would be Batman, The Dark Knight…etc. Honestly, I would think twice before keyword targeting Michael Jackson. His fans are so ape shit that they’ll click anything with his face on – doesn’t mean they’re gonna come away from it all dressed in a replica Beat It get-up.

Of course, cost-per-sale is too much work for most of you. Zip submits will also be popping up left right and center in the coming weeks. On Neverblue, I can already see seven of them.

What you need to accept about these zip submits is that they’re eventually going to screw you over. It might take a day, it might take a week – it might happen before you’ve refreshed stats – but eventually you’re going to get scrubbed so hard your gooch is left stinging in to Thanksgiving.

Thankfully, a Halloween campaign isn’t designed to be long term so you can potentially stay profitable by promoting a bunch of submits and switching them over as each one begins to scrub and shave. With the volume that comes naturally out of a seasonal offer, you should have more than enough leverage to make some money.

Honestly, there’s a thousand other programs out there that you could be looking at running now that Halloween is on the horizon. It’s just a question of getting creative and thinking a little outside the box. One way or the other, people WILL be spending money. It’s just whether you’re smart enough to get your slice of the pumpkin pie.