Linkbait Tuesday: Garden Sheds
Linkbait Tuesdays is a weekly feature where I offer tips for a readers website and then invite the community to offer their advice in the comments. If you want tips for your site sign up to Linkbait School.
Linkbaiting is most fun when you are tackling new industries, maybe that’s why I’m having so much fun with the Linkbait School - most of the people who signed up are in totally new and exciting niches with massive potential for some creative linkbait.
Today we are looking at a niche I wouldn’t have expected to exist - a blog and social network about garden sheds. This is an industry with a hugely passionate following and probably includes older people so targeting the Digg demographic isn’t a very good idea unless we can think outside the box.
First of all I would clean up the social network site. Remove all the paid links and get rid of all the loans and credit card content as this is really affecting the sites trust. I would suggest hiring a good SEO to look at the site as there is a lot of long tail traffic being left on the table not to mention rankings for competitive keywords such as “sheds” which could be improved very easily.
The main www.readersheds.co.uk uses a 302 redirect to www.readersheds.co.uk/readersheds/ which is far from ideal. There are also a bunch of old domains that don’t redirect properly to the new site which will be affecting rankings a lot.
The side has a huge amount of potential for affiliate income from sheds and other garden related products but the conversion rates will be low because of the cluttered design.
In terms of linkbait I would start off merging the blog and the social network and creating a big site with great search engine rankings. The blog is key to attracting links and it doesn’t make sense to split the link equity between 2 sites, especially in a niche where attracting good links is going to be very hard.
The key with linkbait is to decide on your target linkers. For example we could decide to write about gadgets to use in a shed to appeal to gadget bloggers.
Linkbait Ideas
- How to Turn Your Shed into an Office
- Top 10 Gadgets for Your Shed
- How to Store Your Fishing Tackle in a Shed
- How to Build a Mountain Bike Rack for Your Shed
- Why Bloggers Should Move to a Shed for Inspiration
- The 10 Coolest Sheds You Will See Today
(fill this post with pictures from SU
- Start a Celeb Sheds series profiling celebs who own sheds. Celeb Bloggers will love this.
All these ideas appeal to different type of bloggers so you need to contact each of them separately when you publish the linkbait.
Also you could try creating a Facebook application so people can show off their sheds. Think like Hot or Not for garden sheds.
Categories: Linkbait
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Patrick
Many thanks for your comments about my sites, I never thought readersheds as a “social network about garden sheds”! but of course thats just what it is…
I suppose when the idea came to me in late 2000, there was nothing like it out there and I don’t think there is now in that niche anyway
I will take your constructive ideas on board, the site is well overdue a redesign and I hope to have it done in the Spring (a good time for sheds) but as its all bespoke CMS from my good hand I may have to look at other options.
I will make the blog a part of the main site instead of a separate entity..
it’s good to get others to look at your work and point out the issues, as sometimes its close to your heart and you dont see the cracks!
wilco
uncle wilco November 6, 2007 9:38 pm | Reply
That sounds interesting. Thanks!
Aurelius Tjin November 7, 2007 3:51 am | Reply