How to Build a Niche Directory Website in 2026 (Step-by-Step) Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:00 Spotcrime.com is a site that gets over 1.3 million visitors with a simple search page. With 3.4 pages per visit and an average CPM of around $6 in the crime niche, we know this site is making around 79 grand per month. Today, I'm going to show you three other directory websites making amazing money, and we'll teach you how to launch your very own in this short video.

00:22 For those of you who don't know me, I'm Alex, co-founder of this channel and digital marketing expert. I've been making profitable websites since 2015 and I'm going to show you a few sites today you've probably never heard of. But first, what are directory websites? They are simply websites that organize data. I would think of them like a more specific Google maps or the digital version of the yellow pages.

00:44 So why are they working now for individuals to make income online? The reason directories are working now is because the quantity of content on the internet has never been greater. As it grows, it becomes harder to find more specific answers to an individual problem. People are more trusting of a well-curated answer for a specific problem than a broad one.

01:03 The same way you probably don't follow fitness magazines anymore, rather fitness influencers. Let me give you another example. Say you're looking for unique things to do in your city. You could look up unique things to do on Google Maps, but how unique are those things really if they're on Google Maps? Wouldn't you want a site that specializes in actual unique activities?

01:26 Well, here's example number two of directory websites making real money. Atlas Obscura. This is a site dedicated to finding unique experiences near you. You just type in your location and it lists obscure things to do near you. This site gets around 3.5 million monthly visitors even after Google launched its latest AI updates. It has tier one traffic, so we know that this site is worth millions.

01:50 We also can see a lot of directory sites built around hobbies. My third example is pickleheads.com, a directory site dedicated to helping pickle ball players find courts and games in their area. This site recently seed raised $2.5 million and has over 600,000 monthly visitors in the pickle ball niche. Hobbies are a great way to connect people and are great for making directory sites.

02:15 So, what kind of directory sites should you make? Well, as much as it might be enticing to go recreate some of these million-dollar websites, I'd actually recommend starting with something small. We want to start with something local. That way, our competition and the SEO won't be so daunting. It's also the best way to test a specific niche before going broader.

02:35 My final example, and the perfect kind of website for you to start with, is a site called soakorggon.com. This site simply shows you all the hot springs in Oregon. This is a much smaller site and is an example of a site you can start with today. Even with just 25,000 monthly visitors, it likely makes around $1,000 per month in passive income from ads.

02:58 This is a perfect place for someone starting out to begin. And I'm going to show you how. The best way to start a directory website is with what we call an MVP model. MVP meaning minimum viable product. You want to start fast and test different ideas, not getting bogged down by making the perfect site. And we can get you a directory site up and running in less than 10 minutes.

03:21 This is going to be a simple five-step process that we'll follow. We're going to step number one, choose our niche. Step number two, get a hosting and domain for our website. Step number three, install WordPress and the best tools for our directory site. Step number four, edit the homepage and make our first listing. And step number five, automate the directory listings.

03:41 Let's get started. Step number one, choose your niche. While many teachers will tell you to go on a deep dive into hrefs and search for your perfect niche, I believe it's best not to overthink this, especially if you're a beginner. Take Soak Oregon as an example. We see it's just two words, an activity and a location. I'm going to use myself as an example.

04:06 I've lived in Texas pretty much my whole life, so that's the location I'll choose. Some activities I like are playing guitar, pickle ball, hiking, surfing, and grilling. Well, there's not much surfing in Texas. And as much as I love to play the guitar, I'm not very good just yet. I think out of the options, pickle ball makes the most sense. So, I'm going to make a site around finding the best places to play pickle ball in Texas.

04:33 Simple enough. Remember, don't overthink this. Just choose something based on your location and an activity that you like. Step number two, let's get our hosting and a domain for our website. A domain name is just what people type in to find your website. And web hosting is a place for your website to live on the internet. Without web hosting, your website would never be able to go live, so nobody could find you.

04:54 So, it's absolutely essential. But don't worry, I have a discount code that's going to make it super affordable. like the best discount you're going to find anywhere on the internet. Let's go to the computer and build our first directory site. Okay, let's get to building that website. So, there are a lot of best website builders that you can choose, but without a doubt, the best place to start with a directory website is WordPress.

05:18 WordPress because it can handle the complexity of the directory site while also making it simple to install using plugins. So, another reason why we use WordPress so often is because it powers over 43% of all websites on the internet. Almost 475 million websites are using WordPress, which is pretty astounding. And when using WordPress, as we said before, we need a host.

05:42 A host is where your website lives. And when we're looking at hosts trusted by WordPress, we can see that these are some of the best options. And without a doubt, we've tried all these, we've used all these, we've recommended all these at Creator Pro website, but Hostinger seems to be their best option. So, we're going to start there. So, on YouTube right now, you can see that there's a link in the description, and you can just go and click that link.

06:07 Where that link is going to take you is to our specific page with Hostinger. You're going to see day on here, and it's going to be a limited time deal, a special discount that is the best discount you can get on the internet for hosting. You'll also see coupon code create a pro website has been applied successfully. Okay. When selecting the plans here, we can see hosting isn't actually that expensive.

06:30 We can go down and check out our most popular plan uh which is the business plan. The reason why we like starting with the business plan is because it also comes with a free CDN. And a free CDN will speed up your website by about 40% on your loading times. So, it's worth it. So, start here with the business plan. Okay. Now we're at the cart. We're at the checkout.

06:51 Now you can choose which monthly cycle that you want to pay in. So you can choose up to 48 months. 48 months is great if you want to save money for a while. You have the website for four years, which is pretty amazing before you have to reup. Um, but we also recommend using the 12-month cycle. Um, the 12-month cycle is a full year for your website, but you also get some of the best discount savings.

07:15 You can also see here, and again, make sure it says create a pro website uh to get your extra coupon uh for getting started. And now we're going to hit continue. Oh, well, also just to mention, this comes with, you know, 12-month plan. It has daily backups. You get a free domain name, which is amazing. Uh helping help setting up your website, and you get privacy protection.

07:36 You definitely want privacy protection. Trust me, if you don't have this, you'll get a bunch of spam calls. It's not what you want. So, let's hit continue. Okay. Now, this is where you register. Use your email address and password. All right. Now, you're going to Now, here you're on the billing address. Now, you're going to fill out all your billing information here.

07:54 And again, you can see we've saved saved a bunch of money. This is going to be our total. We're going to hit continue. And now, we're just going to go to payment. Fill out all your info. And congratulation, your payment is done. Let's go uh get started working on your website. Step number three, install WordPress. and the best tools for a directory site.

08:16 So now you're going to hit this landing page where you can either create a website or migrate a website. We're going to create our own website. Hit next. Now we talked about you can either use WordPress or Hostinger has a custom website builder. We're going to use WordPress to build this site. Now you can create login details for your WordPress website.

08:35 This is really important because you're going to want to be able to log in to the back end of your WordPress website. So, type in an email address here and then make sure it's a password that you can easily remember. Okay. Now, it says choose how you'd like to build your website. Because we already have the template and the plugins that we're going to use for these directory websites, we're just going to go ahead with and create a blank site down here.

08:57 All right. Now, it's time to get our domain name. Now, we talked about how to choose your niche in this space, and we're just going to pick an activity and a location. Remember, I chose pickle ball in Texas. So, we're going to do let's do pickle ball Texas. Okay. Well, it looks like pickleball Texas.com. Someone is already using it. So, let's do something like love pickle ball Texas.

09:26 Love pickleball Texas.com is available. So, let's select it. Remember, when choosing a domain name, it really doesn't matter that much how good the domain is to the success of your website. But I really do like in this space having the two words that we talked about, having the activity that you're interested and the location. So let's do love pickle ball, Texas.

09:49 Okay, we're going to hit finish registration. And now we're going to fast forward through time as it's verifying your personal details. Okay, let's look for our target audience is going to be in the United States. So now we're just going to click install WordPress. Okay, as it's installing, we're going to fast forward through this part. Okay, and welcome to your WordPress website.

10:09 Let's get started. Okay, great work. Step number four, let's edit our homepage and make our first listing. Okay, welcome to your WordPress dashboard. Okay, so the basics of understanding WordPress is that this is where you edit everything and this is where the edits show up. Now, right now we are in the back of our domain. This isn't how our domain actually looks.

10:29 If we want to see it at any time, we can just go here and visit site. So this is how our website looks right now. Okay. Now let's go back here and then we need to install a few things to perfectly build our directory website. The first thing is we need to install the hello elementor theme. So let's click on appearance and click themes. Now what we want to do is we want to go up here and hit add theme.

10:53 And right here on the number two block is the hello elementor theme. If it's not here then you can just go search themes for hello elementor and just click install. And now that's installed. We're going to click activate. And congratulations, you've installed your theme. Okay. Now, what we want to do is we're going to add in a couple very important plugins for this directory site.

11:14 So, go to plugins and hit add plugin. Let's go to the search bar here and type in Elementor. This is the plugin that you want. It's Elementor website builder. Click install now and activate. Now, this is going to take you to Elementor where you can connect your account, but you don't have to do this. You can hit skip. And now it's loading Elementor.

11:41 This will show off some of the AI features that you can use. Feel free to look through this and see all the cool new things Elementor has added with their AI. But for now, let's just hit X. And now we've been taken to this page. We actually need to go back to WordPress. So, getting back there, we click here and we go exit to WordPress. Hit X and back to our WordPress dashboard.

12:01 Okay, now we need to install one more plugin. Now, this is actually the best directory plugin that I've found so far. Okay, so we're going to go to add plugin. Now, this plugin, for some reason, is really hard to find on this plug-in search dashboard. Think of these search bars as kind of a dumb Google. So, I would just type in geo. Scroll down here, and this is the plugin you're looking for.

12:26 Geo Directory, WP Business Directory plugin, and classified listings. Now, we're gonna hit install now and activate. Okay. Once you've installed and activated, you're going to be taken to the geo directory setup page. The first thing that we're going to do is we're just going to use the open street maps um selection here and hit continue. Now, because I know my location, I'm just going to go ahead and scroll out here to click on Austin, Texas.

12:58 We're all the way down here and Austin. I'll just zoom in. We can see the marker here. Okay, that's perfect. This is the default city that I'll be using. Hit continue. Now, there's some interesting extra features in here, including the AO code connect, Ninja, Ninja Forms, and users WP. Now, I don't really need the users WP, but I recommend having these two on your site, so let's hit install.

13:27 These are additional plugins that'll be installed on your website, and we're going to click continue. So, we don't have a full demo site, so we're just going to click skip this step. And now that we're ready, we're going to scroll down here and click return to the WordPress dashboard. Okay, great. Our next step is we want to edit the theme and how this website looks.

13:47 So, we're going to choose a pre-built theme. I want you to scroll over here to AO Code and import demo data. Now, it's going to ask you to connect your site. So, we're going to click here and connect the site. We're going to log in and create an account and log in. And once we're all logged in and registered, we're going to hit connect. Once that's done, it'll redirect us back to this page and we're now connected as a user.

14:17 So, let's go back to AO a code again and hit import demo data. Cool. Now that we've done this correctly, we're going to see a bunch of great themes here that we can choose from. Now, I would recommend clicking Elementor and using this great theme right here called restaurants. Now, these are all great directory themes that you can use. And the reason why we've installed a code and gone through this whole process is because this is going to be very helpful when building out these directory sites.

14:49 Um, but for the theme that we're going to start with is this one right here. Hit view and then we're going to hit import. Okay, now it's importing the demo. And right now you can see it's installing dummy post so it can show you an example of what your website looks like. These will be really important a little bit later. Okay, everything's been installed.

15:10 Let's hit view the site. All right, so congratulations. You have your theme installed here. Now, we're going to go and customize it. So, in order to customize sitewide changes, we go to this customize tab up here a little bit real quickly. Actually, let's go back and talk about this just for a second. So, when we are logged into our website, when we are on our website and we are also logged into WordPress, we can see that we can edit things right here.

15:36 Um, this is just sort of a short menu so that we can easily get to changing pages. If we want to go back to the WordPress dashboard, we can always just click here and go back. Now, let's hit customize to change some of these things. Okay, the first thing we're going to do is change the site identity. So, we are going to click here and then we're going to change this logo.

15:55 Hit change logo. Now, now back here is where you upload your media files. So what you can do is you can click here and select files and upload you know any photos that you have saved to your desktop or saved to your computer and upload them. Now I already uploaded a few to save us some time. So in the media library I have some things saved back here.

16:18 Now I am not a logo designer but I made this crude and kind of funny logo that made me laugh. And so we're going to use this as our logo. I made this logo to kind of show you guys. You really don't want to overthink this thing. Um, I made this really simply in Canva, but if you want to make some great logos, what you can do is go to YouTube and type in create a pro website logo.

16:44 And we can see here that we have two amazing videos on create a pro website. How to make a free logo in 5 minutes and how to make free logos. So, feel free to use those if you want to make a more beautiful logo. Now, what we're going to do is change the site title. We're going to call it pickle ball Texas. And now we're going to go back and we're gonna edit the menu.

17:00 Now see, we don't want restaurants on here because we're not a restaurant site. So we're gonna call this courts since instead of restaurants, we're going to have courts. Okay. And now hit publish. Cool. So now that's those changes have been saved sitewide to the the website. All right. Now we're going to hit X. And now we can see these things have been changed.

17:24 Okay. Now it's time to change this page. And we are going to do this. We're going to edit with Elementor. Elementor back here is an amazing editor. And what it allows you to do is just drag and drop things to change them. So if we want to add a text editor here, we can just drag that in. And if we want to get rid of it, we can just hover over and hit delete.

17:45 So it makes things really easy to change and really easy to customize. So our site is all about the best pickle ball courts in Texas. So, we're going to say find the pickle ball courts in Texas. Find the best pickle ball court. How about we do find the best pickle ball courts courts and games in Texas? That seems more fun. Check out our amazing listings.

18:12 Our amazing listings. Cool. Now, you can see if we hit publish here, it'll be saved sitewide. We can also view preview the changes without publishing them by clicking here. Okay, so it looks like we got it saved right here. Okay, now something I want to do is I want to change this image, this background image of these wine glasses. So I'm just going to right here and click edit section.

18:37 Go to style. And now here we have where we can change the image. So I'm going to choose an image that I've already gotten and select. Cool. That feels more like a pickle ball court and game in Texas. All right, awesome. Now, another cool part about Elementor is that you can delete things really easily. So, we probably don't need this tab about browsing popular restaurants and nightlife in our city.

19:07 So, in order to delete a section, all we have to do is just hit X and it's gone. And now, let's say we did that and we regret it immediately. Well, you can just hit command Z and it just repopulates. So, Elementor is an amazing editor. If you want to learn more about editing things with Elementor, I'd encourage you again, go to YouTube, type in Create a Pro website, and we have amazing tutorials that walk you step by step through editing editing everything in Elementor.

19:36 All right, now let's go back. We're going to get rid of this section and we're going to publish, which means we're kind of saving. Okay, now we have our featured listings. Now, this is where we're going to start creating our listings from scratch. Now, one of the things that is interesting is that we have all of these sections in Elementor that we can use, but actually because we installed the plugin, the geo directory plugin, we're actually going to use the featured listings from there.

20:04 So, you don't need to worry about installing the pro elementor because you already have the geo directory settings. So, what we're going to do, so we're going to hit this plus button right here. And by hitting that, we're going to scroll down. And now, these are the Elementor Pro pro editions. Because we don't have Elementor Pro, we can't add these things like these searches or these posts.

20:28 We can add all these things that are unlocked right here. But if you scroll all the way down now, we see Geo Directory. Now, Geo Directory is the plugin we're using to gather all of our listings. So what we want to do is we want to look here. We can add in geod directory directions, post content, output locations. This plugin has a lot of different things that you can use.

20:54 But for this example, we're going to use best of listings. We're going to drag it right here. Cool. Now we can see what's happened is it's populated a bunch of listings into our website. And again, in order to save, we're just going to hit publish. And now refresh. Cool. Now, all of these listings have gotten populated here. Okay. Now, you can kind of see that this is how you would edit your website, right?

21:23 We'd come in here. And what we would do next is we'd scroll down here and we go, well, do we need this how it works section? We can add an image back here. We can change these. We can add in the appropriate text that matches what we want to do. Here's kind of an ad. We could easily get rid of this ad if we didn't like it. You can just come in and edit your website here at any time.

21:42 And again, if you want to get more into the Elementor depths and learn more about that, I'd encourage you to watch our long step-by-step tutorials. They're the best way to learn all about Elementor. But right now, what I want to teach you how to do is how to edit these listings. Okay. So, what we're going to do is we are going to go back to WordPress.

22:06 Click here and we're going to ed exit to WordPress and click here again. And here we are back in our WordPress dashboard. Now let's edit our first listing. Let's click geo directory. Okay. Now you can see back here we have 15 listings. But where are these listings? Well, actually they're located in here under restaurants because this template was essentially for restaurants.

22:25 Now I'll teach you how to change this a little bit later, but let's click on restaurants now. And now what what we can see is we can see all of the current listings that are in here. So, if we go back to our website, we can see, you know, Lowe's Philadelphia Hotel. And if we scroll down here, and voila, the last one on here, Philadelphia Hotel. Now, what we want to do is we're going to edit our first listing.

22:53 So, what I'd encourage you to do is because this is a great dummy post, it shows you exactly what it's going to look like, is to click edit. Now, this is where we edit our individual listings. So we have our overview of the hotel and all its information. We have categories here. We can sort things by categories, by feature, by hotels. Default categories.

23:14 We have the address where it's located, latitude, longitude. We can edit an info. We can add it. We can add or subtract all of this data from this individual listing. Now, this is really important to add in great data here because this is how Google is going to rank our listings and what we create. So, right now, what we're going to do is we're going to just make a basic listing and show you how to create your first listing from scratch.

23:47 So, actually the first listing that I want to create is for a pickle ball court that I know called South Austin Rec Center in Austin. They're often called sarkc. Now, when filling out this data, we have an overview, hotel, seafood, hours, etc. So, I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to copy all this data right here and I'm going to take it over to chat GPT.

24:11 Okay, I said I'm making a directory website and need to fill in this information. The current text is about a restaurant I'm and I'm making a site for pickleball courts in Austin. I need to take this information and turn it into info about the South Austin Rec Center and why it's a great place to play pickle ball. It's located in Austin, Texas. Here's the info I need changed.

24:31 And let's see what it comes up with. Okay, this is the information it came up with. Pretty amazing. Uh, nestled in the heart of South Austin, South Austin Rec Center is a community gym that's become one of the most vibrant spots in the city to play pickle ball. That's pretty good. So, we're just going to use this for now. And we're going to paste this in here.

24:52 Amazing. So, let's just hit update. And now, if we refresh the website, we can see it's the South Austin Rec Center. Okay. Now, let's add some of our own images because these images are of a hotel. Now, here's all the images they use. We're going to delete these. Okay. So, let me select an image that we can add to this desktop right here. We're select that screenshot.

25:24 Okay, we can hit preview changes. Okay, we can hit update. And look at that. We've got our first listing and our first image of our South Austin Rec Center. Now, we're going to go back through and we are going to edit some other aspects about this. Um, we're just going to make this the featured tab. Default category feature. We can add the address in which thankfully Chat GPT already got for us.

25:53 It's 1100 Cumberland Road. US region is in Texas. The city is in Austin. It's in 788 78704. And we're going to set the address on the map. And now we can see exactly where Sarkc is located. Actually, I like that's called Sarkc. We're going to put in parenthesis SARKC because that's what all the pickle ball players refer to it as. Okay, so the latitude and longitude should be correct.

26:33 Now, now we're going to get rid of all this data because this is a hotel. We can add the phone number if we want to. We can even add a video in here as well. And we can even set the business hours if we like. So these business hours are correct because it is it's not closed. They're public rec courts and they actually close at 10 p.m. is actually when the lights go out.

26:58 So I'm just going to change this to 10 all these days. And we're going to hit update. Let's refresh the site and check it out. Okay, great. Now we can see how the website currently looks. Now, very simply, if you wanted to go through and change all of these individually, you could start building out your directory website. And the best part is it populates in here based on these feature listings that you select because everything is linked with that geo directory plugin.

27:24 Now, naturally, this would take a long time to go through find individual thing, find individual listings, and to insert them at each individual place. Well, that would take you forever. So, now we're going to move on to the final step of this process, and it's automating your listings. I would encourage you to play around with WordPress, play around with Elementor.

27:50 Again, some of the best things that you could do is go to our latest, if you go to create a per website and Elementor, these big guides, these hourlong guides will give you a much more fuller and comprehensive overview of both WordPress and Elementor. The reason why I encourage you to do that is that the more you get in here, the more you mess around with things, the more you click around and break some things and learn some things is going to be the better you're going to get at building websites and building the

28:22 website you want. Step number five, automate your directory listings. First off, congratulations. You've got a directory website and your first listing made. You're well on your way. Now, obviously, you can go through and fill out these pages manually, but there's a much better way to do this. When making a directory website, there is an art to scraping data and filling out your website's content quickly and efficiently.

28:46 While I do know how to build great websites, scraping data isn't really my forte. I could teach you how to do this with tools like Octopse, but I want you to have the best chance for success. So, now I'm going to direct you to a great YouTuber named Frey Chu, who will walk you through that process. Frey is the real deal when it comes to making directory websites and even has his own community on the topic.

29:09 I'm linking now to a video where he was able to build a 2,000page directory in less than 24 hours scraping data. It's complex, but you can follow that tutorial to automate your directory listings and make this process go a lot faster. It really is picking up from the tutorial we've already started. So again, I'm going to link that. Now, finally, I'm going to end with a couple more resources for you guys.

29:33 Number one, once you've built your directory site and it's getting traction, you'll want to add Google AdSense. Dale, my best friend and fellow teacher at Create a Pro website, made a great tutorial you can check out in the description. Number two, I'll also link a guide to getting free images for your website and optimize them for faster page speeds.

29:53 This is very important when building sites like these because they have a lot of pages and the load times can be really slow if you're not careful. Okay guys, thanks for watching. Don't overthink this. If this is something you want to get started, go back to step one and get started today. And I'll see you on the next tutorial. [Music]