7 Truths You Need to Know Before Building a Directory (For First-Time Directory Builders) Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:00 Today we're going to be closing the laptop because we're going to have a less tactical conversation today around the most important things that you should be thinking about if you're going to build a profitable directory. So, I came up with seven different tips, lessons, questions you should ask yourself before you go and start building. And if you're someone who struggled to find success in your own directory niche, or if you're just someone who struggles to even know where to begin in the first place, then hopefully

00:23 thinking through these things will give you clarity on where to focus your time. Before I even mention the first one, let me just say if there's one thing that I think 99% of first-time directory builders should do is simply go find a directory that's already successful with a lot of traffic and just go build it. And don't just rip it off, but look at what information is there and how the information is structured on a page and how that page looks and just recreate that and then improve upon it, right?

00:48 Add something that makes you slightly different and then just go from there. you probably won't outrank the website that you're copying off of, but it will teach you the entire workflow. And who knows, if you do stick with it and you build enough authority and trust with Google, then maybe one day you do end up outranking them and now you own that hight traffic website.

01:07 But that kind of leads me to my first tip, which is you have to learn SEO. If there's anything that I credit my younger self for is that I spent 100 hours on YouTube learning SEO and then manually applying those ideas to a WordPress website. I don't care if you're vibe coding and just telling AI to SEO optimize your directory or if you're outsourcing it to a team on Upwork to build out your entire directory website without understanding SEO, you won't understand how to get traffic to your website.

01:32 If you don't get traffic to your website, then you will never have a successful directory. And the only exception is if you're willing to go and get traffic somewhere else like social media, building a social media brand or an audience there. But for most of us, SEO is actually going to be the easier and least highmaintenance way to go and build an audience online.

01:50 And so that's why I say directories is a game of SEO. That's what I'd recommend. There's tons of resources online. I talk about SEO a lot in previous videos. You can find trusted SEOs everywhere on Twitter, YouTube, you name it. It's all free. It's all online. And by the way, since I have been AI coding with Cloud Code, even when I tell Cloud Code to SEO optimize my directory, there's definitely still things that are missing.

02:14 And you wouldn't know what's missing if you don't have a basic understanding of fundamental onpage SEO. Look at headers, internal links, URL slugs, thin content. All those are good topics to go down the rabbit hole with. And then of course, you don't want to skip out on backlinks, which is all about gaining authority and trust with Google. I wish I could stress this more without sounding repetitive and just yapping, but there are terrible directories, terrible businesses in general, brickandmortar, online, whatever it

02:41 is, with incredible distribution strategies or marketing strategies, and that's how they get people through the door. And of course, there are companies with bad products where the marketing just exposes the bad product and all that, but I'm talking about like there are literally so many directories that get tens of thousands of monthly visitors, but they're not that helpful.

02:58 They're not that valuable to the audience that it serves. Even if you have a half-ass product, you kind of still have a fighting chance to rank and do pretty well. And I think my portaotty directory is a great example of that. It has Lauram Ipsum on the front page. It's generally not helpful at all for anyone looking for a portaotty. Yet, I get inbound leads like every two weeks or so, and I can go and monetize that if I want to.

03:20 And it's a trash directory. It looks so bad, but I have certain onpage SEO fundamentals down locked in for that website. So the second tip is more of an observation, but you have to have your own conviction for why directories work, why they can be viable businesses. I hear a lot of people on X sometimes comments or people in my community talk about Google AI mode, AI overviews, chatbt.

03:43 And I'm not saying those aren't valid reasons to be a little bit concerned depending on the niche that you're building in. But you got to have conviction for what you're building. Otherwise, you're not going to make it to the end. My conviction for directories come from my own personal experiences and unfortunately I cannot transfer that to you. I have directories that have survived every Google core update since 2022 and they still have tens of thousands of monthly visitors with hardly any major fluctuation in traffic.

04:10 So that's one source of conviction. I also know how much Google's search engine results pages have changed in the last few years. And any location-based keyword is pretty much the same. Like if you look it up on Google, it doesn't look that different than it did just a few years ago. And as I'm building new directories, as I have been in the last two months, I launched two directories in the last two months.

04:30 I'm getting validation through clicks, through the keywords that continue to rank, through Reddit posts that tell me that what I've created is valuable. All of these things come together and add to the reason why I'm still building directories today. So, you have to find yours. And without that, honestly, I think it's going to be very, very difficult to go down this journey without quitting.

04:51 So, yeah. The third tip is also something really simple, but it's a biggie, which is you want to ask yourself what exactly is your goal outcome with your directory? And I mean this specifically when it comes to monetization. And a simple question you can ask yourself is, would you rather have something that is more passive with lower earning potential or would you rather have something that's more active with much higher earning potential?

05:11 I think a lot of people I speak to just gravitate towards that first option, the passive one, but they don't realize that these are completely different games with different disadvantages and advantages. For example, the passive option inherently has less niches to choose from because with a passive display ad revenue directory, you need to have a lot of monthly search traffic to make any substantial money like $1,000 a month or more.

05:35 And what that means is you have to choose niches where it's actually possible for you to attract tens of thousands of people coming to your website if you rank on the first page. It's hard to put a number out there. Maybe 30 to 50,000 monthly visitors to make $1,000 a month. Which means you have to find a niche that actually has 30 to 50,000 people searching up that niche topic every single month, which I guess sounds pretty simplistic, but take it from someone who has vetted and researched thousands of different

06:03 niches for directories. It's much more rare to find an incredible niche for passive display ad revenue that isn't already dominated by massive directories. Or you have to have like a specific eye for them, which I've kind of learned to develop and I can spot them now. If it all looks good from a data perspective, I'm like, okay, that is a very nice pick and that doesn't come across too often.

06:24 So, I'm going to go and boot in it. And it's definitely more rare than the other one, which is a lead generation directory, which takes a lot more work, right? You're basically trying to get the right kind of person to your website, have them fill out a lead form, take that and sell it to a local business. That's way harder, but those are way more common.

06:43 And there's tons of local services where you can go and grind out these directories and make sure your SEO is on point and then start selling leads. I see it all the time. Small directories, big directories, everything in between. One of the reasons I chose the passive route for a lot of my projects is because back when I was working a 9 to-5 I was exhausted after work.

07:00 And for me it mattered more that I had income coming in on the side that didn't require me to be really active than like working on something that was extremely energyintensive that could make me a lot more. My fourth tip is that if you want profit, don't just build a business or a directory purely based on passion alone. When I say passion-based, I also mean niches where there's not enough data or keyword research to make it a viable niche through SEO.

07:27 And I'll give you an example. I've spoken about a directory that I tried to build. It was called honest hustles.com. No longer available, but it was a directory for people with full-time jobs who had a profitable side hustle that they turned into a full-time business. Sounds like a great idea, right? But how were people actually looking for that information online?

07:45 and I also didn't have a good keyword that I could target for my SEO strategy. Personally, when I look for niches, I like to find niches that are 70% databacked, meaning the keyword research, the search volume looks good, and then it's 30% interest or passion based. And that's kind of how I find the right balance for a niche that I'm building in. Number five is a common mistake that I see all the time, which is prioritizing monetization way too early in the beginning.

08:10 And I have a few takes on this, but this usually starts in the niche selection phase. people end up choosing these niches where they either can't compete and they just get seduced by the idea of how much they can make. So, they just enter a really difficult niche. Another version of this is when you try to monetize your website when you have no visitors coming to your website and so that's just not going to work very well.

08:32 This could be with display ads, uh, where you basically don't make any money or you try to sell featured listings, but that inherently has a problem where you try to sell featured listings to local businesses because they want business, right? They want leads, but you don't have any website visitors coming to your websites. More common than you would expect, I would avoid this.

08:50 But most importantly, if you provide value and earn traffic through good SEO practices, you won't really have to worry about monetization. your monetization options are just going to expand once you have a lot of visitors coming to your website or the right type of visitors. And that's why I don't really bother thinking about it too deeply in the very beginning.

09:09 I just stick to a very general game plan and that's it. Number six, stick with one category or niche. Don't try to build in all these different categories or niches. There are certain exceptions, but what I find to be the most successful directory websites are the ones that hyper specialize in a specific niche. And sometimes they just build it around one single keyword.

09:30 Like that's how I do it. I'll find a specific keyword and I'll build my entire directory around it. There are so many reasons not to go broad and enter multiple categories. Imagine you're going to the doctor's office and on one side of the office you just see a full-on laundromat operation. Then you see a doggy daycare in another corner. And then you see like a gym on the other corner.

09:48 And the doctor comes out and he's like, "Oh yeah, like these are my side hustles. I do all this stuff." I don't know about you, but I would probably start to be a little skeptical with his commitment as a doctor. And so, this is kind of the equivalent of what users would see if you are entering all these different niches within one website. Don't even mention backlinks, which are probably going to be necessary for any directory that you are going to build if you truly want page one rank one and to get all the traffic.

10:14 Um, yeah, there's a ton of reasons why you don't want to do this. So, my recommendation, just build in one singular niche. Go layer down if you can. Like I love finding subniches of niches. Four or five layers down is what I personally like. And you'll be surprised at what types of niches exist in that depth of niche selection that still gets tens of thousands of monthly searches.

10:36 Like there are some crazy niches out there. You just have to go and find them. The seventh and last tip on the list is to remember that data enrichment is your advantage. And I think this is a scary idea for a lot of people who are just starting out. But just keep in mind with my first directory, the thrifting directory, the way that I differentiated myself was I simply added whether or not the stores had bathrooms and that kids were allowed inside and maybe if there were handicap spots or something like that.

11:03 It wasn't very complex. It was very simple and straightforward. And I collected that data because I read a lot of reviews that were complaining about their kids not being allowed in the stores. So I figured, hey, this is actually pretty important. And clearly there's not really an easy way to find this information. So that small little data enrichment piece made my directory so much more valuable from a user perspective.

11:28 If you're going to build a big directory, this is even more important. A lot of people will build these 10,000page directories and find that after a month or two, Google de-indexes your pages. Why does that happen? Well, the most common reason that happens is because of lowquality content, which kind of makes sense. I mean, can you really blame them if your directory is no different than Google Maps?

11:50 That is why data enrichment is definitely your advantage and it's your differentiator. Um, it's what offers value to people. So, those are my tips and thought experiments that I think are extremely worth thinking about. It's brought me a lot of clarity. It's helped me get out of analysis paralysis because, you know, for example, for me, once I knew I wanted a passive evergreen display ad revenue directory, I knew that there was only a certain criteria of niches that I was looking for when I was using hrefs.

12:18 I could say no to virtually 95% of all the niches. So, that's one example of how this has helped me bring clarity just throughout my entire directory journey. With that, I appreciate you watching. Grateful for your support, and hopefully I'll catch you in another video. See you.