In this week’s teardown, I analyze a 14-year-old kids craft website, RedTedArt.com. The site receives 132,000+ organic traffic per month (Ahrefs estimate) and many more visitors via Pinterest, Facebook, and YouTube.
The founder of this site published content consistently for several years on the site and YouTube and built a successful business that earns an impressive $22,000 per month according to a recent interview on Starter Story.
Kids crafts is a good niche for the current SEO environment as the articles are primarily hands-on tutorials that are hard for AI to duplicate. It is also a topic that does well on Pinterest and YouTube, which provides good traffic diversification.
After reviewing their content and monetization strategy, I have identified the top factors that have led to this brand’s success and areas that could be improved to grow traffic and revenue even further.
This is what I cover in this report:
- Website overview
- Major highlights
- Competitor overview
- Easy wins to increase revenue and/or traffic
- Actionable takeaways you can apply
Let’s get into it!
✅ Website Overview & Highlights
The website has had slow and steady growth over the past couple of years and is currently on a small uptrend in traffic with minimal impact from recent Google updates.
The site has earned a huge number of links and referring domains over the past 14 years.
The website’s domain has been active since 2010 and has grown steadily to become one of the top sites in the niche of kids crafts.
Maggy Woodley, started the site when she had her first child and was looking for an alternative to returning to her job. Once the site started earning a little revenue she saw the potential and committed to publishing 2 articles per week and stayed with it for years.
She focused on creating tutorials that are easy and require minimal materials. This helped differentiate the site from other craft sites.
Maggy is also a published author of two print books with many positive reviews.
Currently, the site features over 2,500 craft tutorials and over 3,200 pages according to Ahrefs.
The website design perfectly matches the target audience of people looking for easy and fun crafts.
Highlights
- Pinterest account with 608k followers and 10 million monthly views
- Facebook page with 2.3 million followers
- YouTube channel with 950k subscribers and 1,400 videos
- 22k referring domains
- Lots of links from large media sites like The Guardian, USA Today, PBS, and Wired
Why is this site winning?
- The owner focused on easy and accessible craft projects that are highly sharable on social media like Pinterest and Facebook
- A huge backlink profile that grew organically as the subject naturally attracts links
- The author published consistently for years with a focus on providing value to readers
- The valuable tutorials can not be found on Reddit or Quora or be reproduced with AI
Top 3 Competitors
Here are similar competitors targeting many of the same keywords.
- ArtsyCraftsyMom.com – A similar kids craft site also focusing on easy crafts with 35k organic traffic per month (Ahrefs)
- MessyLittleMonster.com – Another kids craft-focused site with 31k organic traffic per month (Ahrefs)
- HappyToddlerPlaytime.com – A successful kids craft blog created by a former CPA. The site has worked with some of the largest brands like Lego, Walmart, and Nike and receives 35k organic traffic per month (Ahrefs)
Let’s get into the easy wins to grow this specific website.
🔥 5 Easy Wins To Grow This Website
There are opportunities to significantly grow this brand. I break down the following easy wins:
- Add newsletter CTAs to the main content
- Offer a membership subscription
- Offer a video course
- Conduct keyword research to discover popular topics to cover
- Add trust signals to the sidebar to boost credibility
Let’s get into it!
➡️ Win #1: Add Newsletter CTAs to the Main Content
This site has some good email newsletter CTAs such as a popup CTA and a sidebar CTA box.
The site could increase its newsletter signups by adding a CTA box within the main content of each article.
Since this site already uses Slickstream tools, they can implement the Slickstream Highlighter to highlight the email newsletter CTA box while greying out the rest of the site.
The popup CTA has a cute gnome knitting animation but lacks a lead magnet that would encourage email signups. They could offer a free eBook or mini-course to increase the conversion rate.
➡️ Win #2: Offer a Lifetime Membership Subscription
This site can increase revenue by offering a membership subscription at an attractive price that bundles digital products and premium content.
One of their competitors, ArtsyCraftsyMom.com, offers a lifetime membership subscription for $69. The membership provides an ad-free experience and access to premium content like eBooks and digital products.
Offering craft tutorials in a PDF format or an advertisement-free experience would be a valuable feature that can be bundled with premium content.
We recently did a teardown on StarterStory.com which earns over $1 million per year from its membership subscription. Starter Story blocks certain premium articles with a prompt that requires the visitor to become a paid member to access the content.
Membership could also provide access to the Red Ted Art eBooks like “30 Christmas Ornaments” and “Learn With Play”, which normally cost $7.99 and $14.99 respectively.
➡️ Win #3: Offer a Video Course
With a huge amount of free video content on the site and YouTube, the owner can offer a premium course to teach a valuable skill like how to effectively teach crafts to young children.
Owners of sites like this one can tap into their deep subject-matter expertise to curate the essential knowledge to help someone become a better craft teacher to their children.
Another possibility could be teaching parents how to keep kids busy with crafts during the summer or how to help children learn through crafting activities. The author already has a 343 page e-Book on the topic “Learn with Play” that could be converted into a video course.
A valuable addition to the course would be a community where members can connect with like-minded parents and share crafting ideas and experiences with each other.
The courses can be offered separately or bundled with the lifetime membership product. With an already thriving email newsletter, an email sequence that promotes a course can be very lucrative.
➡️ Win #4: Conduct Keyword Research to Discover Popular Topics to Cover
With an incredibly strong domain authority, this site can use keyword research to identify topics with high potential to drive significant traffic.
With about 3,200 pages, the site receives an average of just 41 organic traffic per page. The relatively low traffic per page can be increased by conducting keyword research to uncover high-potential keywords that have not been covered yet.
It would be valuable to analyze similar sites with Ahrefs or SemRush to see what pages and keywords drive the most traffic. The Ahrefs content gap tool is especially helpful in identifying which topics competitors rank for in the top 10 that you have not covered yet.
Keyword research could also uncover adjacent categories that the site could expand into that could open up new opportunities for traffic. An example could be easy and fun food recipes since these activities are similar to crafts.
➡️ Win #5: Add Trust Signals to Sidebar To Boost Credibility
Despite hundreds of thousands of followers on YouTube and Pinterest, there is not a ton of branded searches for Red Ted Art (an estimated 60 searches per month).
As a result, many new visitors may not be familiar with the brand. Adding signals to show credibility can encourage visitors to become email subscribers and stay on the site longer. It will also improve E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) which Google wants to reward.
To increase trust signals, the site owner can display a profile photo and short bio in the sidebar that explains some of the author’s accomplishments and experience like publishing two books about kids crafts.
The sidebar could also display a picture of the latest book. People trust people who are published authors as this is associated with high expertise on a subject. Additionally, adding an affiliate link to the book on Amazon can increase book sales.
This site has been featured by many of the largest media websites like The Guardian, USA Today, PBS, and Wired so adding a “Featured On” box to the sidebar can be a great way to show new visitors that the site is popular and well regarded by other trusted brands.
The owner may also consider adding an author byline to articles to benefit readers. Although author bylines are not an SEO ranking factor, they can help boost trustworthiness by showing readers who is behind the content on the page. The byline can also link to the about page where the reader can learn more about the author and follow them on social media.
👉 Actionable Takeaways
Here are actionable takeaways that you can apply to your niche website today:
- Implementing Slickstream Highlight for Raptive users or Spotlight Widget for Mediavine users can effectively draw attention to email newsletter calls-to-action in the main content.
- Offering a lifetime membership product that bundles valuable premium content can be an excellent way to generate additional revenue.
- Well-established brands that offer tons of valuable free content have an excellent opportunity to offer premium content like video courses that teach a valuable skill or solve a common problem.
- Look for ways to add additional trust signals to pages to boost credibility with new visitors and improve E-E-A-T.
