Ranking & Banking In The Woodworking Niche

This is another fun, visual niche that has both physical and informational affiliate products you can promote to a passionate audience.

The idea is: Woodworking.

You'll be creating a woodworking site that reviews woodworking tools while also publishing informational content like 'how-to' and long, image list posts.

The site can be a resource for hobbyists, professional craftsmen, and a general audience of people who enjoy buying or building gorgeous woodwork. 

Woodworking is a huge market.

According to Wood Industry Almanac:

• Cabinet demand will be $16 Billion in 2018.
• There are over 4,000 household furniture firms in the United States.
• In 2013, Americans spent over $95 Billion on residential furniture and mattresses (Source)

Tons Of Affiliate Products

Indeed, there are lots of physical product terms you can rank for. Whether it be types of hinges or power saws. In addition, there are lots of information products you can promote.

Examining ClickBank, the search term "wood" returns over 100 info-product results. Including one of ClickBank's most popular information products, Ted's Woodworking.

This combination of physical and information products means you can diversify your revenue sources. This niche also lends itself to informational, How To Guides.

What this means is that, besides the physical/info affiliate products you can promote, you can also produce informational content that helps you get backlinks and legitimizes your site.

If all you do is review products, sure you'll make some money, but it will be hard to get people to link to you, which is really crucial if you want to own top rankings.

Visual Niche

The woodworking niche is also heavily visual.

Check out some of these woodworking Pins from Pinterest. A powerful style of content is an image list post. An example could be the 50 coolest birdhouses ever built. You would source 50 images of built birdhouses, add a 50 word blurb, and perhaps link to the woodworking plans, if they're available.

You will have to ask permission for some, unless you can embed them from social media sites like I did above with the Twitter embed.

Imagery can also be a means of traffic acquisition. There's certainly an opportunity to create your own images in Photoshop or Canva and share them on Pinterest, for example.

Community Interest

This is also a passionate community.

• Check out these Pinterest woodworking boards
• The subreddit r/woodworking has about 300,000 subscribers
• Twitter has a host of popular woodworking accounts
• SimilarWeb lists a bunch of high-traffic woodworking sites

Great SEO Opportunity

Running the term "woodworking" through LongTailPro, there are about 645,000 searches for woodworking-related terms. There are some solid options here- "furniture plans", "easy wood projects", "wood chisel" & "cool wood projects", for example.  

*If Google Trends doesn't load- just refresh the page.

The Opportunity

I would list out all of the woodworking products I could promote, along with their corresponding search volume.

I would investigate the sort of informational woodworking content I could create. Popular Woodworking has a list of woodworking projects.

I'd start documenting these opportunities and think about the style of content I could create around those topics.

Perhaps, I do an image list post, like Buzzfeed is famous for, that gathers the 50 coolest Adirondack chairs. I would link to free and affiliate woodworking guides that describe how to build them. I would list out the required tools and materials- these would be affiliate links.

I would use Ahrefs to see what keywords popular woodworking sites like Rockler and Popular Woodworking rank for. This will help gin up more content ideas.

I'd use a site like similarsites.com to discover other woodworking sites- I can use these for even more keyword research and to get a sense of how they structure both their sites and their content. It'll also help me figure out how they monetize- which affiliate programs they use, etc.

I might even decide to run FaceBook ads to these image list posts- they're the sort of fun digestible content that readers like. Another good thing about image list posts is that, since they're so long, you can insert multiple Display Ads and email captures into them- enabling you to earn back some of the ad spend.

I'd keep churning out content and once I've filled out the site with at least 20 posts (split between informational and affiliate) I'd consider doing some outreach following Authority Hacker outreach principles.

I'd keep up this pace, splitting my time between Content Creation and Content Promotion. I'd expect have some solid traffic and earnings after 3 months.

For the informational products, it's best to do your own review. That way, you're not just throwing 'cold' traffic at an offer page like this.

You'll be warming the traffic up a bit, explaining what, in this instance, Ted's Woodworking is all about, why you endorse it, etc. Remember, it's important to cherish the trust of your readership- treat them with respect. They'll sniff out disingenuous cash grabs.