Can You Really Make $200K+ With A Website Directory? My Thoughts + Answering Questions Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:00 so recently I watched this video by Greg Eisenberg right over here and I couldn't help but to notice after watching the video there were a lot of questions and I thought to myself well hey I own a directory that's successful uh it earns around $1,500 $2,000 a month and I'm also building for different directories as we speak so I'm really Allin on this directory game um I spent the last 9 months kind of fully invested like quit my job to fully go into this directory game to see how legit it is I figured I would spend

00:34 some time answering some of the questions debunking some Skeptics but also just answering some of the really common questions cuz I see them all the time uh so if you watch this video or you are looking to build a website directory hopefully this will give you some good information on how to build a profitable website directory in 2025 so real quick I started my first website directory back in October of 20 2022 I was self teing myself SEO at the time just learning through YouTube and I built a website as just a way to

01:07 practice what I learned let's see October by June 2023 so uh about 8 months about 8 months later this first website directory that I built um started making around like $1,000 to $1,200 a month like recurring gets around 50 to 60,000 monthly visitors and you can see here how much I earned quick note I said 2k a day because I also sell digital products on this directory website which is a whole thing I'm not even going to explain but um it is an extra angle once you get a lot of traffic to to a directory website uh but

01:44 that accounts for about uh $400 to $500 a month on top of this all right so to be clear I'm going to be going through the comment section and just give me my two cents uh if you see any questions that I didn't answer um add them hello here's the first question that we saw what is the use of a business directory if chat gbt search will stop any traffic towards directories AI uses info from directories but the Searcher doesn't need to go to the directories information is given inside GPT search all clicks are basically

02:13 stolen so what's the point basically depending on the kind of directory I would say I would be more nervous than others yeah the directories that I find are have the greatest hedge uh they're all location based my most successful directory if I told you the keyword you might think it's as easy as going to Google Maps and typing it in once you kind of go into the niche itself and the community and you look on Reddit you look on Tik Tok you just kind of start to do some social listening on the niche itself and you you

02:43 start to realize wow it's like kind of hard to find these even when you type in Google Maps the queries that pop up are not accurate it pulls up all this kind of sort of junk that's not exactly what you're looking for so Google Maps is failing that them um they're asking for it on Tik Tok and Reddit and there's no like curated directory that just lists all the locations in a nice simple format uh we're talking Basics like store address hours um hours of operations phone number um and I like to add extra you know

03:18 convenience uh so like reviews um an image of the outside it's a long-winded way to say that it depends on the directory the use of a business directory is sometimes as simple as solving for convenience uh that's the problem that you're solving right when you combine that with an underserved Niche that's getting 50,000 monthly clicks uh searches every single month it's it's it's a good opportunity it seems like directories are following the Yellow Pages book fate dude I know Yellow Pages was much bigger back then but

03:55 Yellow Pages still gets millions and millions of monthly visitors so so people still use it don't underestimate the Boomers I've built a directory before and yes the potential revenue is not high but can be worth it for the most part yeah that's true it depends how you monetize it so I would say there's really two main ways people monetize directories the first one is display ads right you just have a ton of traffic and then you display uh you use eoic or mediavine ad sense these are all these different ways to

04:25 monetize your directory with ads the second way is through selling featured or sponsored listings there is a very very well-known directory owner called Tim STDs um I think on YouTube he goes by stdy he's very transparent that his directory sober nation which is in the rehab Niche um he was selling uh featured listings for $129 a month and he had many many many many many rehabs pay him so at the height of his directory he was pulling in 250k a year you can definitely get there but it's really rare but I would agree the

05:07 potential revenue is not super super high but um they could be pretty robust and they could kind of like stick onto Google for a while I haven't really worked on my website in months and it's continuing to get 50 60k a month in in monthly visitors okay so this guy John this is awesome question what is the best way to find the current directories that are out there to know if one already exists for the niche you're building in this is where I use atrs I mean it's it can be as simple as just Google searching it but what

05:37 ATS allows you to do is look at all the different it first helps you understand all the different types of keywords um that are similar that might be getting way more search volume but effectively you could just go to Google and type in your Niche and just look for directory websites there are so many niches where directories already exist and they get no traffic uh very very little traffic that doesn't mean that you can't go and get traffic I mean I would say out of all five directories I've done a good amount of

06:15 competitive research and most of them have competitors that are directories but when you look at it from an SEO lens and you start to look at their onpage SEO you start to analyze their backlink structure you just that that's what gives you confidence on whether or not you should kind of move forward or not um it's not whether or not current directories exist so it's like oh like I can't make one it's like nope like actually most directories they don't have great onpage SEO optimization um they don't do any backlinks

06:45 which in my opinion aren't even necessary depending on the niche if you can't afford HFS or sem rush just look on Google and just like start clicking down to like the second or third page and look for directories that way um I will point out that if you do use all the tools he shows and throw 10 directories at the wall to Hope one works it's a minimum of $300 a month if you catch a fish grape but might be an expensive fishing pool I think Go's Groove is referring to just all the different softwares that are required to

07:19 start a directory if you do it like John Rush did in the video Perhaps it is quite expensive but you can get started with just WordPress a domain and a theme when I built my first directory the one that has been monetizing for a year and a half um averaging 1,500 to 2,000 a month I quite literally copied and pasted I had Google Maps in one on one side of my screen and I had WordPress on the other side and I quite literally copied and pasted the store hours the phone numbers um the images literally all of that was so

07:54 manually done because I had no idea of how to do it any faster the thing is like if you're committed to like increasing your monthly recurring revenue and having a digital asset that that makes money pretty passively then you don't have to spend that much money you can just get started the tools make it really really nice but when you're just starting you don't need to spend $300 a month uh let's see this guy says I don't want to sound like a hater because I can easily admit I'm wrong if the data shows it but I always

08:23 raise an eye route to Good Samaritans on presenting the easy ways to make money if the powder is fresh tell your friends but not the public he's saying maybe we're too late for this ball game uh for instance would you risk going into Drop Shipping when there are a million influencers trying to sell their courses on it I see what this guy's saying yeah this guy is I kind of disagree with this Drop Shipping is just e-commerce man directories is just directories is really just formatting information in a way that Google

08:56 prefers and that's kind of SEO too right I can see the frustration that this person has through through his words um but I also think that when you see a video like this you obviously don't copy the exact same Niche and kind of copy the same workflow what you should take away from this video um is that people are making money from it and you should give it a try if you want but maybe find your own Niche maybe find your own workflow like I would never make a directory in the AI tool space my directories are all super

09:33 boring it's like porta potty rentals liquidation stores flea markets like stuff that is so boring and so it's just so boring like there's no other word to describe it but I've just found a way to do it I I I know what I'm looking at because I've done it before and I know it has a good chance of monetizing pretty decently so I guess what I'm saying is that directories work just like Drop Shipping still works but it's um it's not a it's not a it's not a get quick it's not a getrich quick scheme right it's um it's a it's

10:06 an SEO focused kind of distribution first business model that takes months for reference my directories on average Take 6 months to start seeing like significant traffic in like the thousands like 5 to 10,000 range and then um you know even longer once you get to like 20,000 plus yeah like I guess if anything I'm proof that it works and I didn't know what the hell I was doing um I didn't listen to anyone's like process I kind of just tried it okay so this guy said okay so I create a directory say it's criminal lawyers

10:46 near me just a dumb example how do I then populate the directory with businesses on this directory topic on day Zero okay so this is a really common question which is where do I get the data personally I use outs scraper but the answer is web scraping tools and I will actually log in so you can see what I'm talking about uh so real quick like this is I'm you know obviously I'm not sponsored but um I use out scraper there's so many other web scraping tools out there but for an example for criminal defense lawyer what

11:16 was it criminal lawyers near me so basically what you want to do is use this scraper tool services by brand um Google and then Google Map scraper um so you can look up criminal lawyers like on Google Maps like I did and do you see how that text underneath the um the 4.7 and the five stars that's like an actual Google Maps um category so you can quite literally just use Criminal Justice attorney Sorry by clicking categories Criminal Justice attorney there it is and then from here you know you can choose which states

11:55 that you want and then you can choose um you know if you want emails and you can even choose like if you want um the postal code the full street address if you want longitude ltitude so these are the ones that I choose which is why it's like defaulted to this but yeah so basically once you hit get data it'll give you an idea of how much it's going to cost so $53 to $353 it's usually less like it's usually on the lower end I should say but yeah you would just confirm that and then it would basically give you this uh the

12:26 CSV file as you can see here I think yeah so this so this uh this CSV file has 61,000 rows so that's how you get the data you clean those 60 61,000 rows it's like a very tedious task just because it scrapes the data it doesn't mean it's super accurate you're you're going to get a lot of junk so you have to clean the data right you have to verify these are actually criminal attorney companies or whatnot and then once that happens then you could manually format it onto your website your WordPress website or do it

13:06 programmatically but we're not going to get into it into that so by the way criminal lawyers probably so competitive I mean I would not go into that uh so a directory is a list of stuff it's just a list is that right what is a directory other than a list it's a list it's a Well curated list um that is optimized for onpage SEO right like your domain name has your keyword um your slug your header one tag your images alt text every single thing is optimized for SEO but it's a really good list for SEO uh that's that's the

13:45 easy way to put it the validation process is that easy here only Google keywords planner I would not leave it up to only Google keywords planner I think it's a great free tool I would always go with HRS that's My Chosen tool for um honestly keyword research competitive research and backlink research the thing is that even with third party data like atrs you'll see a keyword that has 200,000 monthly uh Vis uh searches it'll say it's not very difficult to rank it's called keyword difficulty it will be like under 10 which

14:22 is like very easy but it won't actually be easy to rank for because when you look at who's ranking for them the quality of their backlinks you want to check how many pages they have how much topical Authority they have I'm kind of going into the nerd Rabbit Hole of SEO but basically I would not just rely on Google Keyword Planner I would learn how to use tool called HRS or you can validate the overall interest uh through Reddit forums uh Tik Tok is really really good a culmination of all that should give you a decent

14:52 idea of whether or not you can build this directory and get people to come visit what are some of the best examples of directories today um care.com Craigslist I mean those are two of the behemoths there's so many small directories that I find on a daily basis where they get like 20 to 60,000 monthly searches and they're probably making like $2 to $5,000 monthly passively but like they're in the weirdest niches that's what I'm saying it's like they're all in very very boring boring niches that you would never expect uh

15:25 but those are the best examples I think care is doing like over 150 million in Revenue a year so um how to create an AI tools directory like futurepedia I would be very careful about an AI tool directory it depends on your goals right my goal with creating a directory is to have passive income like I want a I want a web asset that's going to make me passive money with a lot of time upfront and then very very very little time to maintain it I want it to be extremely high net margin I choose every niches I don't want to

15:58 have to continue updating it every single month you know I don't mind spending like a few hours a month but it's just not my goal to like continue maintaining these if that makes sense this guy says he's been working on a directory as a side project um he uh I guess he's talking about John Rush finished one in 50 minutes and this guy feels like he needs to change my process this is a hot take but I actually I would actually rather spend a month or two months building out a directory and doing the proper research and

16:30 like just making sure that I'm aiming at the right target I mean maybe the way he does it it's not that much work to just throw up a directory but I've done programmatic SEO directories and they just they just don't rank as well I'd be very curious to see anyone who who has crushed it with just a programmatic SEO directory the ones that have had the most success are all the static pages so 50 minutes is like stupid dude that's maybe he found a formula that works for him and maybe I'm just slow but personally I spend a

17:02 month I spend two months working on a very nice directory so don't feel like you have to create one in 50 minutes okay yeah a lot of people are kind of like confused and they don't really believe it um maybe I'll make more videos on kind of the many different steps that are required to build a directory cuz based on this comment section A lot of people didn't really grasp the full step toep process um so maybe I'll make some more content around that but I think that's probably enough I mean I think I've been live for

17:37 quite a while now those are all the questions that I'm going to answer for now this video is getting pretty long but if you are interested in building business directories um comment down below let me know I'm genuinely curious and if there are any questions that you have about this video or just business directories in general h at your boy just comment down below um and with that um thanks for watching appreciate it see you