Geasy
Jr. Executive VIP
I’m back with another niche, and this time it isn’t so boring (in my opinion at least).
I’ve been a fan of Shark Tank since its first season twelve years ago. Since then, more than 250 episodes have been filmed and more than 1,000 businesses profiled.
While not everyone got deals – and of those that did, not all have successful products – the businesses featured on Shark Tank have produced MANY successful products, and these products generally have a surprisingly high search volume and surprisingly low competition.
I will be exploring the opportunities here, and explaining how I would move forward with a brand new site that could leverage this niche to start making money consistently and quickly.
The factors that lead me to believe this niche is viable include:
As you can see, the volume here is great, with many keywords capable of driving significant high-intent traffic for the ranking domains.
The niche’s traffic is relatively evenly distributed over the hundreds of Shark Tank products that have become (mostly) successful. Winning even a handful of these could provide significant affiliate returns.
In most of the past editions, there have been four or five subtopics that dominate the keywords. In this case, there are really only two:
The great thing about this niche is that the searches are very likely to be high-intent. These are people who saw the product on the show and are looking to either buy it directly or learn more about it. Either way, they aren’t “top of the funnel” visitors, and I would expect to see higher-than-average conversion rates here.
The more general “Shark Tank” searches might not convert but will be a great indicator of how well your site is understood to be about “Shark Tank” as rankings increase for these branded keywords.
Getting to a point where you are ranking for these general keywords should also mean that you will begin capturing a portion of the “Shark Tank + Product” set of keywords.
This is EXCELLENT. We see YouTube and Amazon taking the top spots, and then we see a massive longtail of ranking sites.
This is a fantastic sign that we will be able to move into this niche and begin ranking for plenty of keywords that actually drive traffic without having to become an absolute powerhouse domain.
This longtail seems to be loosely grouped into types:
The problem is that not all of these products are available – and of those that are, many aren’t monetizable.
So, it will be important to refocus the keyword list around products that are low competition, high volume, high purchase intent, available for sale, and monetizable via affiliate programs.
Vetting these keywords should really be done on an individual basis, but for time’s sake, I would first sort the list by CPC, as that’s a proxy for assuming decent purchase intent and volume.
These are the top CPC keywords from my shortlist:
Somewhat surprisingly, many of these keywords are “Shark Tank + Product” keywords, giving an indication that those types of keywords are in fact some of the most valuable (likely to convert with decent commissions).
Decent click volume + high intent + product or service-focused + low competition + a decent organic/CPC ratio.
I created a filtered list and did my best to get rid of low-volume and unrelated keywords by hand, and here’s what I ended up with.
Using this data, I built a few Tableau views to help me quickly get an answer to my question about where to focus.
You can find all the stats here - https://imgur.com/a/AB8twKE
I created a scatter plot to give me a good intuitive view of keywords by Difficulty and Click Volume. I colored each keyword by percentage of organic clicks vs. paid clicks (since my play here is an SEO one, I care about keywords where I can capture a decent portion of the total clicks while also meeting my other criteria ).
I’ve selected a grouping of keywords that have low difficulty and (relatively) high volume. This will give some guidance as to which might be the lowest-hanging fruit and good first targets for SEO.
This would need to be further culled for inappropriate keywords, which probably make up around 10% of this list: things like “Shark Tank Season X” keywords, which aren’t high intent, or “Red Dress Boutique”, which is a brand keyword that’s very well known outside Shark Tank.
Aside from that, this provides a great shortlist of primary product targets. I would also try to remove keywords that are searching for service-oriented or location-specific keywords. For example, things like “Wicked Good Cupcakes” would probably not be a target, because monetization might be too difficult (unless you want to be paid in cupcakes because they have a rewards program).
While I’m not certain this would matter, I would likely structure the site as Home page → Product pages rather than Home page → Product Audience or Product Category → Product pages.
My goal would be to have thorough, detailed, and useful content on every single page. I would make each product page better than any other resource I could find on that product by including:
I’d also create a handful of conversion tools, putting a special focus on creating one or two evergreen, tool-based link magnets. A few ideas for these include:
Shark Tank deal maker
A quiz/game type of evergreen tool where people are asked in a Tinder-esque web app to choose if a product or service got a deal or did not get a deal on Shark Tank. There’d be time limits on each selection, and apples-to-apples data on each (ask, revenue, etc.).
How many people come to the same conclusion as the sharks? Which shark are you most like?
Shark Tank product idea generator
This would be a simple but powerful web app powered by GPT3 (a text generating AI). Using this tech, we would give GPT-3 a generic prompt – something like “The following product won the shark’s best pick this year. It is:”. The great thing is GPT-3 will give us a bunch of realistic sounding ideas, some of which could actually be viable! And it can do this infinitely.
Here’s a list I generated instantly with GPT-3 (the bolded text was my prompt):
The following is a list of products that will be featured on the 2025 season of Shark Tank:
We’d leverage the Shark Tank fandom itself to create newsworthy, data-driven content that would be picked up by this fandom – as well as be broadly interesting and relevant enough to a larger niche (entrepreneurs) that it could also get picked up in mainstream publications.
These campaign ideas should be related to the niche, but also broadly interesting. They should be data-driven, either by creating a dataset (survey or data scrape) or by using an existing dataset.
The idea should also reflect the SUCCESs principles (Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotion, Story).
Bonus points if the idea is evergreen, has regional angles, or utilizes user-generated content loops (user interacts with content in a way that they create additional content that draws in users to the original content).
Some ideas include:
Anatomy of a successful Shark Tank product
Stats for Sharks is a treasure trove of Shark Tank data. Using this site (which already did the data legwork), there is a ton of analysis that could be done to better understand why some Shark Tank pitches succeed and others don’t. This project would dive into the nitty gritty, and look at best and worst success rates correlated with different variables (initial ask, sharks present, how well the pitch went, uniqueness of idea, etc.)
Gender/race/age discrimination on Shark Tank?
Using the same data as the previous idea, the goal here would be to quantify the differences in deal-making based on the demographic data of the pitching person(s).
Is there any statistically significant bias? If so, where, and with which sharks? And how strong is the statistical evidence?
This could be risky/highly controversial, so tread lightly. And whether you publish this or not would depend on the strength of the data/results.
Quantifying the “Shark Tank Effect”
The goal here would be to try and understand the impact being featured on the show has on a product’s success. We could use both news mentions and Google trends data to build the case for the “average visibility bump” that comes from being on Shark Tank. What should most people expect? Are certain categories bigger winners than others in terms of the buzz they create? Any differences between consumer products and services? Digital and real products?
As with previous editions, I think two or three of the above link building ideas and a few dozen onsite pages dedicated to the Shark Tank products would be enough to get a steady stream of sales coming through.
I would probably begin monetizing immediately with affiliate links to products. Amazon or Target would be the fastest way to start earning some affiliate income. A handful of Shark Tank products probably have their own affiliate or referral programs, so I would explore this later on as well – at least for keywords I began ranking for.
That said, it’s highly popular, and seems like an evergreen show. I would imagine it will continue for a number of years at least.
Given this, I’d be looking to expand beyond Shark Tank products in the future, encompassing more of “As seen on TV” products that exist outside the Shark Tank universe.
If the show did end, I would hopefully have been able to leverage its popularity early on, build the needed authority, and transition into a specialty product-focused blog.
I’ve been a fan of Shark Tank since its first season twelve years ago. Since then, more than 250 episodes have been filmed and more than 1,000 businesses profiled.
While not everyone got deals – and of those that did, not all have successful products – the businesses featured on Shark Tank have produced MANY successful products, and these products generally have a surprisingly high search volume and surprisingly low competition.
I will be exploring the opportunities here, and explaining how I would move forward with a brand new site that could leverage this niche to start making money consistently and quickly.
The factors that lead me to believe this niche is viable include:
- Emotional connection (people already have an affinity for the show, and this affinity can be leveraged)
- Great aggregate search volume (1.2M+ monthly search volume)
- Very low competition generally (0-20 keyword difficulty for all the keywords I’ve profiled in this lesson)
- The distribution of sites that rank for my target keywords is quite varied. There are no big box retailers taking huge shares (Amazon being the highest at 8% of the traffic share). The rest is shared between dozens of smaller sites.
- Good for content marketing. Shark Tank has a huge fan base, and projects revolving around the data of Shark Tank will allow for many compelling campaigns that can attract “Shark Tank” related anchor text. This will very quickly improve our ability to rank for a big part of the longtail in this niche (Shark Tank + Product keywords).
The traffic opportunity
As you can see, the volume here is great, with many keywords capable of driving significant high-intent traffic for the ranking domains.
The niche’s traffic is relatively evenly distributed over the hundreds of Shark Tank products that have become (mostly) successful. Winning even a handful of these could provide significant affiliate returns.
In most of the past editions, there have been four or five subtopics that dominate the keywords. In this case, there are really only two:
- Specific products
- Shark Tank informational searches
The great thing about this niche is that the searches are very likely to be high-intent. These are people who saw the product on the show and are looking to either buy it directly or learn more about it. Either way, they aren’t “top of the funnel” visitors, and I would expect to see higher-than-average conversion rates here.
The more general “Shark Tank” searches might not convert but will be a great indicator of how well your site is understood to be about “Shark Tank” as rankings increase for these branded keywords.
Getting to a point where you are ranking for these general keywords should also mean that you will begin capturing a portion of the “Shark Tank + Product” set of keywords.
Players in the space
Taking a look at the competition that ranks for my keywords, we see:
This is EXCELLENT. We see YouTube and Amazon taking the top spots, and then we see a massive longtail of ranking sites.
This is a fantastic sign that we will be able to move into this niche and begin ranking for plenty of keywords that actually drive traffic without having to become an absolute powerhouse domain.
This longtail seems to be loosely grouped into types:
- Big box general and platform (Amazon/Target)
- Shark Tank informational sites
- Shark Tank product informational sites
The revenue opportunity
Focusing on products featured on Shark Tank gives us a huge potential revenue opportunity.The problem is that not all of these products are available – and of those that are, many aren’t monetizable.
So, it will be important to refocus the keyword list around products that are low competition, high volume, high purchase intent, available for sale, and monetizable via affiliate programs.
Vetting these keywords should really be done on an individual basis, but for time’s sake, I would first sort the list by CPC, as that’s a proxy for assuming decent purchase intent and volume.
These are the top CPC keywords from my shortlist:
Somewhat surprisingly, many of these keywords are “Shark Tank + Product” keywords, giving an indication that those types of keywords are in fact some of the most valuable (likely to convert with decent commissions).
Taking your first steps
Given the indications that this niche has potential, I’d like to take the next step and really refine my keyword research, looking to find which keywords reflect product segments that would make good targets. I’m looking to find keywords that have that hard-to-find combination of:Decent click volume + high intent + product or service-focused + low competition + a decent organic/CPC ratio.
I created a filtered list and did my best to get rid of low-volume and unrelated keywords by hand, and here’s what I ended up with.
Using this data, I built a few Tableau views to help me quickly get an answer to my question about where to focus.
You can find all the stats here - https://imgur.com/a/AB8twKE
I created a scatter plot to give me a good intuitive view of keywords by Difficulty and Click Volume. I colored each keyword by percentage of organic clicks vs. paid clicks (since my play here is an SEO one, I care about keywords where I can capture a decent portion of the total clicks while also meeting my other criteria ).
I’ve selected a grouping of keywords that have low difficulty and (relatively) high volume. This will give some guidance as to which might be the lowest-hanging fruit and good first targets for SEO.
This would need to be further culled for inappropriate keywords, which probably make up around 10% of this list: things like “Shark Tank Season X” keywords, which aren’t high intent, or “Red Dress Boutique”, which is a brand keyword that’s very well known outside Shark Tank.
Aside from that, this provides a great shortlist of primary product targets. I would also try to remove keywords that are searching for service-oriented or location-specific keywords. For example, things like “Wicked Good Cupcakes” would probably not be a target, because monetization might be too difficult (unless you want to be paid in cupcakes because they have a rewards program).
The content plan
I’d split my content plan into two parts:- Onsite content (through a hub and spoke structure meant to provide high-value resources applicable to each relevant keyword group).
- Link-building content (data-driven content meant to earn links and/or press).
Onsite content
The organization of the onsite content would be a bit different from most of my niche sites. I’d be looking to create less depth to the site overall and have products as their own hub pages.While I’m not certain this would matter, I would likely structure the site as Home page → Product pages rather than Home page → Product Audience or Product Category → Product pages.
My goal would be to have thorough, detailed, and useful content on every single page. I would make each product page better than any other resource I could find on that product by including:
- Aggregate reviews,
- Data from the show about the product,
- Detailed product info gleaned from reviews,
- Product comparisons,
- Embedded video of the product in action,
- And much more.
I’d also create a handful of conversion tools, putting a special focus on creating one or two evergreen, tool-based link magnets. A few ideas for these include:
Shark Tank deal maker
A quiz/game type of evergreen tool where people are asked in a Tinder-esque web app to choose if a product or service got a deal or did not get a deal on Shark Tank. There’d be time limits on each selection, and apples-to-apples data on each (ask, revenue, etc.).
How many people come to the same conclusion as the sharks? Which shark are you most like?
Shark Tank product idea generator
This would be a simple but powerful web app powered by GPT3 (a text generating AI). Using this tech, we would give GPT-3 a generic prompt – something like “The following product won the shark’s best pick this year. It is:”. The great thing is GPT-3 will give us a bunch of realistic sounding ideas, some of which could actually be viable! And it can do this infinitely.
Here’s a list I generated instantly with GPT-3 (the bolded text was my prompt):
The following is a list of products that will be featured on the 2025 season of Shark Tank:
- The Beanie Beanie – a beanie made out of beanie babies.
- Canny Momma – a subscription service which helps new mothers track their baby’s milestones.
- The Catalyst – a new type of footwear.
- Foggz – masks which provide protection from atmospheric pollution.
- Mota Hooka – a portable hookah.
- NBK Apparel – clothes for athletes designed to allow them to personalize how they wear the clothes.
- Pumpkin Spice Soap
- Shooter Tubes – straws which have a cover on them
- Cute Bobs – hair salon for children.
Newsworthy content for link building
The other arm of my content strategy would be to create content that allows me to acquire the highest authority, most relevant links possible. This means trying to create content that is actually newsworthy and can be pitched to publishers successfully.We’d leverage the Shark Tank fandom itself to create newsworthy, data-driven content that would be picked up by this fandom – as well as be broadly interesting and relevant enough to a larger niche (entrepreneurs) that it could also get picked up in mainstream publications.
These campaign ideas should be related to the niche, but also broadly interesting. They should be data-driven, either by creating a dataset (survey or data scrape) or by using an existing dataset.
The idea should also reflect the SUCCESs principles (Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotion, Story).
Bonus points if the idea is evergreen, has regional angles, or utilizes user-generated content loops (user interacts with content in a way that they create additional content that draws in users to the original content).
Some ideas include:
Anatomy of a successful Shark Tank product
Stats for Sharks is a treasure trove of Shark Tank data. Using this site (which already did the data legwork), there is a ton of analysis that could be done to better understand why some Shark Tank pitches succeed and others don’t. This project would dive into the nitty gritty, and look at best and worst success rates correlated with different variables (initial ask, sharks present, how well the pitch went, uniqueness of idea, etc.)
Gender/race/age discrimination on Shark Tank?
Using the same data as the previous idea, the goal here would be to quantify the differences in deal-making based on the demographic data of the pitching person(s).
Is there any statistically significant bias? If so, where, and with which sharks? And how strong is the statistical evidence?
This could be risky/highly controversial, so tread lightly. And whether you publish this or not would depend on the strength of the data/results.
Quantifying the “Shark Tank Effect”
The goal here would be to try and understand the impact being featured on the show has on a product’s success. We could use both news mentions and Google trends data to build the case for the “average visibility bump” that comes from being on Shark Tank. What should most people expect? Are certain categories bigger winners than others in terms of the buzz they create? Any differences between consumer products and services? Digital and real products?
The first six months
Building out the onsite and link-building content during this period should realize quick gains. This niche is not very competitive, and 50-100 unique linking domains of decent authority (news publishers and their syndications), should be enough to rank competitively against the competition.As with previous editions, I think two or three of the above link building ideas and a few dozen onsite pages dedicated to the Shark Tank products would be enough to get a steady stream of sales coming through.
I would probably begin monetizing immediately with affiliate links to products. Amazon or Target would be the fastest way to start earning some affiliate income. A handful of Shark Tank products probably have their own affiliate or referral programs, so I would explore this later on as well – at least for keywords I began ranking for.
Beyond six months
The trouble with this niche is that it may have an expiration date to an extent. We don’t know how long Shark Tank will continue, as some substantial portion of organic search is probably driven by the show itself, where potential customers are Googling the product as they watch or shortly after. If the show goes off the air and there isn’t a big syndication market for it, organic traffic could drop substantially.That said, it’s highly popular, and seems like an evergreen show. I would imagine it will continue for a number of years at least.
Given this, I’d be looking to expand beyond Shark Tank products in the future, encompassing more of “As seen on TV” products that exist outside the Shark Tank universe.
If the show did end, I would hopefully have been able to leverage its popularity early on, build the needed authority, and transition into a specialty product-focused blog.
