This week I analyze a 3-year-old entertainment niche website that is currently available for sale on Motion Invest, SharkTankRecap.com.
This site receives an average of 224,000 visitors per month from 1,400 human-written articles and earns over $7k per month from display ads and Amazon.
The owner of this site has done an excellent job of growing traffic by focusing on providing information about each company that was featured on the Shark Tank show.
While many sites in the entertainment niche have a low RPM, this is not the case with this site which earned $22 per 1,000 sessions in January via Raptive display ads. The relatively high RPM for this niche may be due to the show focusing on entrepreneurship and business.
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 excellent growth over the past couple years, growing from little traffic to over 200k monthly visitors.
Ahrefs shows that organic traffic dropped by half in recent months, but has stabilized over the past few weeks.
It has obtained an excellent 1,800 referring domains over the last 3 years including many natural mentions from high-authority publishers.
The website’s domain was started from scratch in 2021 by Andrew Smith, an online entrepreneur who has also grown a video game niche site to a mid five-figure valuation.
Almost all of the 1,400 articles on the site are about specific companies that have pitched their business on the Shark Tank show with a summary of the episode and usually an update of what happened after the show.
One red flag with this site is that it uses a trademarked name in the domain name. The owner of the trademark could take legal action although companies typically don’t go after fan-made websites.
The website design is basic with the site using the popular magazine theme ColorMag Pro.
Highlights
- TikTok account with 26k followers
- Email newsletter with 2k subscribers
- 1,800 referring domains
- 1,400 human-written articles
- RPM of over $20 despite being in the entertainment niche
Why is this site winning?
- A natural and diverse link profile with links from high authority sites like SI.com, PopSci, USA Today, and also from the companies that they feature.
- Unique information that they acquire by contacting the companies directly.
Top 3 Competitors
A few similar sites are targeting Shark Tank related keywords:
- SharkTankBlog.com – A similar site also covering Shark Tank episodes and products with 162k monthly traffic (Ahrefs).
- SharkTankTales.com – Another Shark Tank focused site with 29k monthly traffic (Ahrefs).
- AllSharkTankProducts.com – A Shark Tank site focused on products with 51k traffic (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:
- Improve and Add More Content to Pages
- Diversify Traffic with Pinterest and Facebook
- Create Best SharkTank Products Listicles
- Add Stronger CTAs for Products
- Write Reviews of Specific Shark Tank Products
Let’s get into it!
➡️ Win #1: Improve and Add More Content to Pages
Many of the articles are fairly short at around 500 words on average. Lengthening the content on the company articles by adding more useful information about the company and product could help improve rankings and traffic.
There is also a summary of the key information in bullet format, however the text is small. This could be made into a more visually appealing chart or infographic to improve the experience for the user.
Adding charts with useful data points could also make the content more interesting and engaging. For example, a chart could be added with the valuations of other Shark Tank products in the same category (e.g., “Highest Toy Product Valuations”).
Another thing they could do is embed the YouTube video of the Shark Tank pitch when it is available. This would increase the time on page of visitors and be useful to visitors who are looking for information about the company.
Another thing that could improve the on-page SEO is improving the internal linking. Currently, there is a list of products from the same Shark Tank episode at the end of articles. It would be better if this was a list of similar products (e.g. Other Beverage Products).
➡️ Win #2: Diversify Traffic With Pinterest and Facebook
About 86% of traffic of this site in 2024 came from Google so it makes sense in the current SEO environment to aim to diversify traffic.
Shark Tank related topics could potentially do well on Pinterest and Facebook since the show is so popular.
Currently, their Pinterest account gets about 9k views per month but it could do a lot better.
They are posting frequently but they could create different types of pins to encourage more saves and generate more views.
For example, instead of just posting basic pins about each show guest, they could focus on the types of pins that are more likely to be saved such as memes, funny product ideas, interesting quotes, trivia about the show, statistics, or lists of best products.
The site has a Facebook group with 750 members, but it would be better to build a Facebook page instead so that posts can be promoted and viewed by anyone on Facebook who is interested in Shark Tank content.
One type of Facebook post that gets strong engagement is infographics about company updates which matches with the content on SharkTankRecap.com. The example below from the official Shark Tank Facebook page received 228 likes, 17 comments, and 18 shares.
➡️ Win #3: Create Best SharkTank Products Listicles
The site has a few listicles about all the products from a specific season (e.g. “Season 9 Products”).
There is an opportunity to create more product listicles about certain types of products like healthy foods, pet products, cleaning products, etc. (e.g., 9 Most Successful Food Products on Shark Tank).
There can also be listicles created that have catchy titles like most creative pitches, most heartbreaking fails, and the largest deals. They can also look at what listicles receive organic traffic on other sites and strong engagement on social media for inspiration.
Not only will these pages include keywords with good Google search volume, but they can also be made into social media posts that are shareworthy. Additionally, these pages provide an easy way to build internal links to relevant pages on the site (to the specific companies that are mentioned in the listicle).
➡️ Win #4: Add Stronger CTAs for Products
In articles about a company with a product on Amazon, the Amazon CTA is below the fold near the middle of the page and pretty easy to miss.
The site makes about $300-$600 per month from Amazon and this can be increased with some improvements to the CTAs.
One way that the site can increase clicks to Amazon is to have a specific Call to Action box for the product on the right sidebar. You can use the Block Visibility WordPress plugin (free) to show a CTA block on the sidebar of a specific post.
Additionally, an Amazon CTA can be added at the top of the article instead of in the middle so that is visible above the fold.
If any products have their own affiliate program or use an affiliate network that allows popups, then adding specific CTA popups to pages can increase affiliate sales.
➡️ Win #5: Write Reviews of Specific Shark Tank Products
One revenue opportunity that hasn’t been explored is reviewing products that have been featured on Shark Tank.
There are hundreds of unique products that could be reviewed and this site can leverage its strong link authority to rank well for those products.
If the company update page has received a link from a high authority site like USA Today, then they can pass link equity to a review page with an internal link.
This site can even leverage its high traffic to ask companies for a free sample to review. This will provide a good opportunity to use first-hand experience and unique photos to differentiate the content from low-quality affiliate sites.
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WebOperators.com – hire our team of operators to manage your niche website. This is the same team that has achieved 215+ website flips since 2008.
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👉 Actionable Takeaways
Here are actionable takeaways that you can apply to your niche website today:
- Look for opportunities to improve user experience and user engagement metrics by adding useful information, tables, and graphics to articles.
- When you receive almost 90% of traffic from Google, it is a good idea to experiment with tactics to grow traffic from social media sites to diversify risk.
- Block Visibility is a free WordPress plugin that allows you to add a specific CTA to display on a specific URL.
- In niches where very high authority sites are ranking for buying guides, publishing single product reviews may be far less competitive.
