How To Build a Niche Directory with Unicorn Platform (NO CODE!) Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

in this video, I'm going to show you how to build a directory with unicorn platform. And the thing I love about this is it's no code, and this is ideal for niche directories. If you think of something not that necessarily has a large user base where, people would maybe register, if you have a directory of. restaurants and you want people to claim the site and that sort of thing.

This is more an information directory where you could do something locally, but something very niche would be great for something like this. And the implementation time is very quick. So this is going to be using Unicorn Platform. and this is an idea that, I personally got from John Rush, the creator of this, and he's, put together some stuff on creating directories, and he's also created some directories using Unicorn Platform that have been very successful.

So this is a really easy, AI powered, 100 percent no code script. WebBuilder. and it's pricing is, let me just give you, just an idea. What I love about this is you can actually publish a website for free on the free plan. so you can create pages on the free plan and you can even do form integrations and all that stuff. Eventually, you want to have this on your own domain, so you move up to a paid plan.

But this gives you a great option to try it out and just see if it works for you. Now I want to show you the showcase here because this is really important. These are all built with Unicorn Platform. There are over 104, 000 websites that have been built with Unicorn Platform. And there's lots of different looks, but the one I want to point out to you is the directories, right?

So this is, John Rush's directory, all GPTs, and it's been very successful. and so some of these are, here's another, directory site. So these have some great directory templates. This one's got, little cards with images. here's another directory site. so these are just some options that you can use with it. It's got some great testimonials, but let's show you how to actually do it.

So I actually wanted to show you, this project, right? So this project is soccer training hub, and this was just an idea. to create a directory based on some more kind of Bluetooth high tech, stuff that's coming into the soccer training world for coaches and for individual players. And it's really easy. It's very modular based. You see this blue text around here.

Let me actually show you it. How that works because I've actually built another site on this and so let's switch over there so you can just see it. This is more of a sales page based site So again, you know this can handle it and you got the navigation here and you have all these different components right that you can just drag stuff in including html what I like about this Is that?

it focus, it makes you focus on, the content and that minimalist idea of here's the template now put your words in something that already works rather than staring at a blank screen and what do I do next? So let's switch over to this platform here and this website here and I'll show you. What, how everything works. Now, one thing is, these links, here are going to open up in new windows.

once this is published, this site isn't published yet, because I have the other one published, the one that I just showed you. But what's really cool is you can just jump in here and edit the navigation. You can easily change the, logo, enter some text about it, right? So this is great for, SEO and that text would appear right here, and customize all the buttons where you want to get to.

You want to add a new button? Sure. No problem. You can just, pop in here. You don't want a button. Okay. Just remove it, leave a blank, right? And it will get rid of it. So it's, let me just show you here. So hello, And then you could, change the button style. And let's say I just didn't want that anymore. I can just remove it and then instantly it shows you what you've got.

so these are all component based and let me just show you these components is what I really love about Unicorn platform. Here you can add a component and you can search for the components and, they're all, ordered here. I'll just show you a few of them, so you can see. So this is the hero header. These are all different hero headers that you may have seen, that look very similar to what on different sites.

These are all hero headers. They keep adding more. all these components that keep adding more. So there's so many more headers than when I first built my other site, which is really cool. Then they have buttons here. So you scroll down and you'll notice that now we're in the button section. So these are the buttons. These are the forms. they have these feature areas, which are great and you can customize these.

you can just pop in this and then edit the features as you wish, right? why use this site, and then. It will just change automatically, right? So you just edit the component and change all this, change the, the percentages, whatever you want to, to change it to. And, boom, like that's how easy it is, right? And what's also cool is when you have a component here, they have the style here.

So you, these are all the other different styles of this same, type of feature bar. And so I can just, go boom and select that and then it takes my same content that I've already customized But makes it look a little bit different, right? So this one here, obviously there's more that you can have it We only have three pieces of default content I can go and add more here right under the content tab, right?

So here I could add another feature, Feature 4, And then it will just, add it here. Everything is responsive and it's pretty awesome. Let me show you here as well. just they have these steps. These are really good for SAS or for selling. You can show things. They've got pricing tables that you can drop in, and you can link right to your Stripe account.

They have posts and resources. everything just looks really beautiful and testimonials. I've got a Senja based testimonial widget, that they've pioneered with the, With that, code, you can put in code here, text, and they got these nice call outs you can use. And then just customize it to how you want. You can change the fonts, all that stuff. the components just make it really easy to implement your ideas and integrate whatever you need to integrate, right?

it just makes a ton of sense. Alright, now, in this I'm just going to delete this component here. Okay. And this is the component that I want to talk about right here. Okay, because this is the whole directory site right here in a nutshell. And I have the other page, the other website published. So this one, I'm not publishing at the moment, but what's cool about it is, if you go here, it will open, and this is because it's not published, open in a complete page that talks about that.

That's optimized for this particular product. That's going to have this text. this description, it can have a YouTube video, it can have a whole bunch of stuff on it. And now let me show you how that works. So this is a very special component. This is like the directory component. So all you do is you connect your Google sheets. And there's a guide on how to do that, but you connect your Google sheets and then you style the content.

How that you want, you can add different filters, So on this page, I only want, ones in a certain category. or maybe I want, 16, records on the, on the page. It doesn't make sense. So that 15, and you can decide how you want it sorted right now. it's by random. And so it checks that these URLs are valid. So all of these actual URLs. Will be separate pages.

So now I've created a website here. That's a few pages, but really it's You know could be 20 30 or 40 in the span of a couple of hours Okay, and that's what's so cool about this So there's more stuff here under the style you can style your your directory there's a lot of different things that you can do to just make the style look like a little different.

Okay. for example, now it looks like a little bit different directory, see this says undefined here and that's because that's looking for a logo and I'm not using that in a lot of these, a lot of these options. All right, and so it's pulling in some of these images, let's go back to this one here. So you see, it has some images coming in. Now I'm going to explain what's going on with that.

Because it's pulling into, this particular Google sheet. Okay. So they give you a template here on the Google Sheet and actually they show you how to configure the directory component. support is great. They're going to get back to you really quick. They're very informative. This will show you how to do that. You can also get a, a template that you download a Google Sheet and then you just customize it, right?

so these are some of the different directory pages you can, you can do. Which is, which is great. in this component here, under the, data source, this is where they show you how to, configure it. Alright, so this is about how to make dynamic data from the Google Spreadsheet. So they have a video on it, how to make dynamic pages, and basically you're going to host them all under one URL.

So in this case, it's going to be apps. So these are applications. And then this column here, the header says page URL. And so what this is every, record that you have in your spreadsheet is going to be a dynamic page, so it's going to be slash apps, slash unicorn platform, slash apps, slash dev hunt. and so you can just take this. So what I did was I just kept the headers, the same, keep the headers the same, and then, just change the content.

of what you want, And be very specific about that, so this is the page URL, so that's why there's no space between the two words, right? and then the description is there, so it'll show you how to do this file share publish to web it'll walk you through that. And then they'll validate the, the data. Okay. So this is really important as well. This is setting up the dynamic page.

And as I said, I'm not going to show you the dynamic page because this project hasn't been published, but it's going to take the heading. So it's going to take whatever's in here, in this column, and put it right here in, in the heading using that placeholder text. It's going to take the information, and Right there and put it there. You can actually pull a YouTube video and if you have YouTube links in there, you can pull a component and have it show dynamically right there as well.

this is how it's going to look right. and then you can have the link right to this. So you can use an affiliate link, however you want to, to set that up. on my page, what I've got is, again, I've got a little description about this directory, allowing people to submit their own, information to this directory that I can then, use. go through and validate and everything with unicorn platform is really easy.

you'll see here the ones with the red are required if I click it, then it will be optional, and you can connect any of these with different things. So right now it's connected with MailChimp, but you can connect this with Google sheets. whatever you want, set up actions after submissions, all kinds of things. another really cool thing is this component here, the FAQ, just give some context of what makes your directory unique.

And as I showed before, like you can change the style, right? so this is, got the content already written, but if I wanted to just, Hey, what would this look like with a different style? I can just choose. a different style and then now, it's going to look different, right? Still the same content, but just showing it in a different way. Here's a blog post.

The, the footer I've customized here. I put some links to different affiliate products or, different pages on the website that I think are interesting and because, of This is geared toward people that either play soccer at a high level, maybe they're coaches, maybe they're players, maybe they're parents of players that are looking at taking soccer seriously.

I can put links to things like Inverting the Pyramid or SoccerIQ that I think would be good value added options for that. So here's all the items here and I'll show you the actual directory, So you can actually customize what you want to show on the directory. this is what I did and you can see I've, I got 21 records in here. These are the URLs. So some of these are affiliate links.

This is the page slug. this is the description and then I can put it in a category. So if I want to allow people to filter by category, I can let them do that. The rank is just, my own internal thing where I can rank it. So if I want them to, have my most important products that I think at the top, I could do that. I haven't gone through and done that.

I had an assistant add some of the prices for this. And some of these are, are, this is just from the template. So false means, don't hide it from the directory. This product is discontinued. So I put it to true. So it won't actually show in the directory, I don't need to take it out of the, the record. And also, these image URLs, right? So I haven't done image URLs because I think if you don't have images, In your site, if you have images, they got to be good.

They all got to, Be the same and that takes a little bit of time having gone through and done that so I just haven't been showing that in the directory, but when i'm ready to I can upload the images to s3 or unicorn platform And then put those images in there And that would be the reason why where are we here? That'd be the reason why you see some of these, coming in, right?

These are for the, these images are from the template. So that's why they're, showing up correctly. They're not, correctly. That's a unicorn platform logo. but the real ball, message, right? So it hasn't been customized. And this directory example that I showed, shows the ranking, right? that's where you see that 77. there's some different things that you can, customize and show or not show in this.

But, all in all, you could get a directory going in about four hours. You could have done the research. Put together the content and, publish this to the web. And that's what I really like about the unicorn platform. It allows you to take that idea in your head and put it into action very quickly. So I'm going to put a link to unicorn platform, and some other resources, if you're looking for directories in the description of this video, and.

As I said, Unicorn Platform, they got great support, they get back to you right away and they know how to help you with some of this stuff. If you need a little bit of help, you can also hire someone on Upwork, to help you with the technical stuff. but there's really not a lot of technical stuff to, to do. Once you get that, that, that Google Sheets connected.

To the unicorn platform. That's really the only technical thing that you need to do In order to get your whole project online and they got a video that I showed you that walks you through that So I hope you find this video helpful And if you've got an idea for a directory, or something else You know, definitely look at Unicorn Platform. It's a really great no code web builder that, is solid and you're not going to have to worry about plugins breaking like WordPress and things like that.

if you have any questions, leave them in the comments of this video and I'll do what I can to get back to you and help you get on the right track. All right, that's all for now. We'll see you in the next video.