[Case Study] How To Make Money Online Promoting Hardware

The opportunity

There's a ton of search volume, little competition, and high buyer intention. Running my own general product & service review site, I've reviewed every type of plier you can imagine.

There are some larger tool review sites that cover pliers, but none that offer dedicated, quality coverage.

What you'll often find are Amazon and Home Depot eCommerce product pages ranking for 5-figure search volume terms.

Check out the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) below- a 12,100 monthly search volume with Amazon and Home Depot product pages ranking at the top. This indicates low competition:

Your task will be to build an authority site that reviews different types of pliers from different brands and assesses their quality.

There are tons of different pliers out there:​

​​How to get traffic

SEO

This will primarily be an SEO play- you'll want to produce longform review content on your website structured around different plier types. I'd recommend actually buying the pliers from Amazon, shooting short video reviews, and including an in depth writeup.

For example, for "snap ring plier", I'd create something epic- perhaps the "10 best snap ring pliers", making it 10,000 words at least, with all of the on-page SEO strategies to ensure you DOMINATE this keyword vertical.

There is a bit of a keyword volume discrepancy between LongTailPro and Keywords Everywhere regarding "snap ring plier", whether it's 9,900/month or 12,100/month- but it doesn't really matter.

There's evidently tons of volume as you can see in the downloadable table below. I only included keywords with search volumes greater than 590- there's thousands and thousands of more keywords available in this niche. I'd recommend subscribing to LongTailPro and investigating it yourself. 

Check out some of the top plier keywords and their LongTailPro Keyword Competitiveness ​rating (Avg. KC) below.

You'll find it pretty easy to rank on the first page of the SERPs for 'secondary' keyword terms like "best Irwin Tools plier" or "water pump plier reviews" a few months in. And over time, as your site gets more authority, you'll begin edging up the rankings for primary keywords like "water pump plier".

One quick pro tip: include the plier model numbers in your review- people search by model number, as well.

My instinct is to create content across all channels- your primary resource might be written review content, but you can easily shoot a short unboxing video for YouTube, take some photos and create some cool images for Pinterest and Twitter (using recommended image dimensions), and generate referral traffic that way, as well.

Here's a cool infographic I created using a Canva template:

Not just affiliate content...

Besides just affiliate content, you'll want to create some informational content, as well. This will get you search traffic, help earn you backlinks from quality sites, that are oftentimes leery of linking to affiliate content, which will increase your search rankings. As well, you can use this content to deep-link into your site.

An example, mega-informational post could be "How To Use Every Type Of Plier Ever". This post would describe how to use every type of plier imaginable- you can deep link to your own review content, use other people's videos- it would be an ongoing project that would attract backlinks naturally and eventually rank for a ton of long-tail keywords.

Guest Posting

You might be able to discover some guest posting opportunities- especially if you are producing original and high-quality content. People will want you to write for them- this will expose you to a wider audience and get you referral traffic and backlinks.

Email Marketing

Creating rich, original content (ie actually buying and demonstrating the pliers) will help convince your readers to sign up. I'd encourage you to solicit feedback from your readers about what to review next. Plus, it's a good recurring traffic source if you set up an autoresponder alerting your readers to new content.

Referral traffic

Producing images and videos will get you traffic from Google Image Search, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter- wherever you choose to publish the images.

How to make money

Affiliate Marketing

This will be a strong Amazon affiliate play. I'd recommend applying to the Home Depot affiliate program, as well- though it might be best to approach them when you have some rankings you can show them.

I'm currently planning on re-applying (I was initially rejected) to the Home Depot affiliate program, citing my strong rankings across range of different products.

For diversification purposes, you can layer in some affiliate links to Ebay, Jet.com and Walmart, but Amazon will convert the best.

Drop-Shipping

Eventually you can experiment with drop-shipping- you can recoup higher margins than affiliate marketing.

Sponsored Posts

Once you get some acclaim, product creators will find you and request reviews of their products. It's left to your discretion how you handle that aspect of your online business.

Product Creation

Once you've been doing your site for awhile, you might discover an opportunity to create your own plier​. Or perhaps you bundle a bunch of existing pliers into a set that you can sell on Amazon.