So in late 2011 I stumbled upon an insanely high-volume trend which occurs every year. Mother’s Day, Mothering Sunday, that day we celebrate our Mothers… you know!
It turns out that mother’s day is Googled every year between January and March, roughly, a whopping close-to-a-million (1,000,000) times. Finding out that the trend was also true for ‘mothers day 2011’ made the discovery all the more exciting.
I quickly realised I could make easy money (surely, with those sorts of numbers!) year-on-year over the course of a couple of months. So I got down to work. That first year (2012) I made around £2,000 with little-to-no work between January and March. So, do it again this year? Of course!
The question is… how did I do it the first time? Before we get into that, read about how I discovered the idea here.
After The Discovery
After making this discovery; it was obvious what needed to be done. Buy the domain and figure out how to monetise these close-to-a-million potential visitors later. I logged into my 123-reg.co.uk account and searched to find that mothersday2012.co.uk was available for registration.
Needless to say I bought the domain, along with 2013, 2014 and 2015…
Moving on… How do I Monetise the Domain?
After a small amount of researching using affiliate blogs I decided the best course of action would be to set up an online store – whereby I make a percentage of every sale made. The store simply had to categorically serve mother’s day related gifts from other websites.
Once again I navigated my way toward the Google keywords tool to find out what products I would need to sell; and equally importantly, what had the most demand. It went something like this:
- Chocolates
- Flowers
- Breaks & Spas
- Experiences
- Days Out
- Jewellery
- Beauty & Health Care
- Cards
With this information I created a simple yet easy to navigate website using a set of publicly available online tools. It was VERY easy. The necessary tools are:
- WordPress – Though commonly known as a blogging platform, by now most of us understand that it has been adapted and modified so drastically that it can be used for nearly any type of website necessary.
- ShopperPress – I found a custom WordPress theme used by major retailers called ShopperPress which is essentially a shopping cart for WordPress. It plugs directly into WordPress like a normal theme with many additional advantages such as products upload, easy affiliate stores, easy customisation and more.
- DataFeedr – This was the cement to hold the bricks together. It made the domain, WordPress and ShopperPress collectively a functional online store. It simply allows you to sign up to affiliate merchants (affiliatewindow, webgains, tradedoubler etc…) and combine product feeds into one – then feed that directly into ShopperPress. This was to be my main and cost.
Once I’d created my product feeds, I pulled them into my ShopperPress theme, re-coloured it, fixed it up a little and bob’s your mothers brother, it’s ready.
I must stress here. Without DataFeedr this wouldn’t have been the quick and easy job I tell it to be. Adding hundreds or thousands of products to a website will be overly time consuming. It will take patience.
Launch, Traffic and Numbers
The site was launched in November 2011. By February 2012, traffic had risen from a measly 10 – 100 a day to 2,000+ and growing. Come March 2012, traffic had dramatically risen peaking at a huge 15,931 unique visitors in one single day.
Google Analytics for MothersDay2012.co.uk
All in all, from January – March 2012 I had successfully nabbed myself 340,599 unique visitors!
Maybe Give Google AdSense a Go?
I’d been updating a friend of mine, Luke from Ingenie.com, about the project on a near daily basis. Explaining how exciting it was that traffic was growing and products were selling. In mid-January as traffic began to rise rather steadily, he suggested that I throw up some Ads using Google AdSense. And that if the traffic does reach potential, he predicted I could make around £1,000 just through AdSense.
So I threw up a few Ads expecting nothing too exciting to happen. Well, I wish I’d thrown them up earlier. On the first day we earned 39p. A week later we were earning nearly £4.00 a day. By the time we’d reached the first week of February AdSense was bringing in over £10.00 a day.
On the highest earning day, AdSense reached just under £80.00! The final amount was £1,591.98.
Products and Sales
The products and sales were slightly disappointing. Then again I had no idea what to expect. The AdSense had become so exiting that the products sales were simply frustrating. So many clicks, so, so many clicks – yet such low sales numbers.
In the end I made just under £500.00 worth of sales. I did however take away something much more important… a lesson learned for next time.
I found that though chocolates were the number one sought after mother’s day gift, they weren’t necessarily what converted the visitors.
Instead, only 8 sales made were chocolate related. However, 33 sales went towards flowers, accounting for around £1,000 worth of revenue. Whereas a surprising 17 sales were made with experience days equally accounting for around £1,000 of revenue. The rest was spread between hampers and random gifts sets.
Coming to the End…
Throughout the course of the project, the site was changed several times to maximise the profits of sales. As were the Ads since Google AdSense was relatively new to me. This time round, I know what works well and what doesn’t.
On the whole, I’d say the project was a success. I learned a lot, I tested a lot and I pocketed a lot. Considering the whole project only really took up about 20 hours… that’s a win. £100 an hour is a pretty decent going rate, don’t you think? Needless to say, I’ve been looking forward to mother’s day 2013 all year! Check out the new website here.
Let’s see if last year’s mistakes become this year’s profits.
I’ve set a target for it too: anything over £2,000!
If you have any ideas on what else could be done to improve the idea, comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts!
