The Side Hustle Show - Full Episodes - How to Build a Profitable Online Directory

What I really wanted was a business with five things and it was something that was scalable. Something cheap to start, something remote where I didn't have to go to a warehouse and pack shoes and ship it to customers, something with high margin and something that could be sold as an asset. And I scoured the internet for these businesses. Very difficult to find.

So I landed on websites and I saw exactly what you mentioned, which is niche informational blogs. We're getting absolutely destroyed, especially starting September 2023. So I was like, okay, I guess I'll just look on HREFs and see what wasn't affected. And I started noticing these directories.

I found this website that was getting over 100,000 monthly visitors and it was rank one, page one for my target thrifting keyword. And I was like, I could do better than this. Okay, I am medium obsessed with this side hustle and as you listen in, I think you'll understand why. So traditional SEO for article-based content, niche sites, authority sites, blogs, whatever you want to call them, that's been a bit of a bloodbath in the last couple of years and maybe that's being gentle.

Harder and harder to make money in that space. But there's one type of content that's been resistant to those changes. It's still thriving. It's still earning creators that elusive call it semi-passive income online.

And that's directory content. Today you're going to learn how to come up with profitable directory ideas, niches, and how to quickly build out that content and some tried and true marketing and monetization tactics to get the ball rolling there. Now to help school me on this is a guy who walks the talk. He's built several of these directory style websites from scratch and now earns a few thousand bucks a month from those relatively hands-off from shipyourdirectory.com.

Frey-2. Welcome to the side hustle show. What an intro. Appreciate you having me on.

Thanks, Nick. I'm pumped for this. Like I said, I'm kind of digging this idea as a way to make money online, relatively hands-off once they're up and running, time leveraged, all that jazz. So my understanding is one of the first ones that you built within the thrifting space.

And we don't want to reveal domains because unfortunately copycats are very much still a thing. But it's in the thrifting space. And is there a moment where you're like, this might actually work. I think I'm onto something here.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that was my first directory. And I would say the major turning moment for that directory was six months in. I randomly just pulled up the Google Analytics and noticed there were a thousand people coming to that website that day.

And I just remember staring at it for five minutes and being like, what is going on? Like, where is this traffic coming from? At that time, I was like kind of a new bet SEO too. I was relearned or just learning all the basics.

So I was thinking, oh, maybe I did something correct. And I started putting ads that following month and the traffic kind of steadily came in. And I made $1,200 that month without really doing anything. It was just putting up ads.

And so that's just an absence. Yeah, I actually end up using Zoic. That was the media partner that I used. And now I'm using Mediavine Grow, which is kind of my go to ad now.

Yeah. Okay, so six months. So you built the thing and then kind of sat on it. Like, I guess, let it age potentially in the search results and establish some domain.

I don't know, do anything proactively market it during those six months or just like log in one day. Hey, it actually is getting traffic. I did I did post on Reddit. And I talk about that a lot every every time I finish an entire directory build, I always find a niche subreddit.

And I'll make a post. It'll basically sound like, hey, I made a website to make XYZ easier or to find XYZ locations easier. And yeah, that's kind of the only thing that I did. It was responsible for maybe like a few hundred people come into the website because that Reddit post performed really well.

And people still commented to it on this day. A couple of years later. But yeah, really nothing much. Nothing too fancy was done.

All right, let's dig into, well, maybe we can pull it back and say, well, why what attracted you to this business model? I think every entrepreneur kind of goes through this moment where they either struggle to start something or start something and realize that's not the thing that they want. So in my case, I was running a full-wear business. I was closing it down super depressed, very low point of my entrepreneurial life.

And I realized what I really wanted was a business with five things. And it was something that was scalable. A something cheap to start, something remote where I didn't have to go to a warehouse and pack shoes and ship it to customers, something with high margin and something that could be sold as an asset. And I scoured the internet for these businesses.

Very difficult to find. I found it's a little bit of a unicorn. It was something that checks all those boxes. Totally.

So I found, I think I landed on SaaS or websites. And I'm not a coder. So this was kind of pre- like this early AI AI. Yeah, if I'm coding stuff.

Exactly. Yeah. The vibe coding was not a thing yet. So I landed on websites and I saw exactly what you mentioned, which is niche informational blogs.

We're getting absolutely destroyed, especially starting September 2023. Yeah. The helpful content updates. I was like, okay, well, I guess I'll just look on HREFs and see what wasn't affected.

And I started noticing these directories. I didn't really like go into it thinking I'm going to go build a portfolio of directories. I was just like, okay, well, this, I found this website that was getting over 100,000 monthly visitors. And it was rank one page one for my target thrifting keyword.

And I was like, I could do better than this. This is like pretty ugly. And I feel like not that helpful. There could be better information.

It's also out of date. They're missing a lot of locations. And I was like, okay, I'm going to go and build it. And yeah, once I started ramping up and that kind of aha moment happened, I was like, okay, yeah, this meets all those five criteria.

And I can just keep building these out. That's what launched the directory side hustle for me. Did that keyword research start from a standpoint of personal interests like were you a thrift store flipper thrift store shopper type of person? I actually was.

Yeah. Like my most recent like at the time when I realized it was getting a thousand visitors a month. I just got in a job because before that I spent the year flipping items going to flea markets and garage sales. And I paid my rent that way for like a year and a half.

But yeah, yeah, that's a super. We got lots of episodes on that on that. The problem is that it failed two of the most important factors in my opinion. It's like scalability and being remote because I like I was stuck in my garage in my apartment just like all day shipping listing items and then like shipping anywhere outside of the US was just way too pricey.

Like it just didn't make sense. Yeah. Physical inventory business, capital intensive, you know, maybe you sit on inventory for months at a time. And if you ever stop sourcing, then you're kind of out of luck.

100%. By the way, most fun side hustle I ever had though 100%. Like there's no greater to the trend component of it. Oh man, it's the best.

But I had to sacrifice that to look more long term and be like, okay, what else can I do that, you know, wouldn't require me to be in a garage all day? No, you're good. So if I'm a student of yours, you're coaching me through this initial research process, like, okay, I can start with things that I'm interested in. Okay, maybe this is a personal pain one.

I'm having a hard time finding thrish shops near me. I'm having a hard time finding new hiking trails, new pickleball courts, new, you know, whatever it is. Is that kind of where you would recommend people begin their, begin their research? When I choose a good niche for a directory, I typically try my best to have that be 70% database.

So the keyword research is good. There's high search volume, low competition. There's, you know, a clear bounty, like a website directory that's already successful that probably isn't the most optimized or kind of old and clunky. And then 30% of it will be more passion-based, interest-based, kind of like what you mentioned.

I've tried directories where it's 100% kind of interest-based hobby or passion-based and for me personally, it didn't work out. So I think the way I landed on the thrifting idea was I just kind of audited my life and where I like to go and where people like to go. And I combine that with the framework where I'm like, okay, what saves people time, earns people money or saves people money. And those were kind of like the three umbrella frameworks that I tried to combine when I was socially observing where people were going in the world.

And that's when I landed on this very specific thrift store that I built my entire directory around. And people love it because it's so cheap. It's like a warehouse style thrifting experience where everything's by the pound. So you don't get markups from regular thrift stores.

Anyways, that's interesting. Okay, I've never heard of that. Okay, so I like this. So 70% we're going to let the data kind of steer where we want to go.

And bonus points, 30% of this decision is going to be based on, well, if I'm going to work on this, I at least got to care something about it. Otherwise, you know, what's going to separate me from everybody else trying to do the same thing. You mentioned having a clear bounty. This is somebody else who has paved the way for you.

This is a site that is maybe a little outdated, maybe a little clunky looking. Maybe the data isn't as clean as cleanly presented as it could be. But they're doing okay. You can tell that they're ranking.

They're getting traffic and say, I can do better than that. And that's how we're going to try and stare step above that site. They've already proven out the concept. And now instead of reinventing the wheel, we're going to go after what they did just do a better.

100% I think it tells you so much, especially with a lot of concern around Serbs changing, right? There's so many more forums and social media websites and it just really depends. If you, whatever you type into Google, you can get a completely different looking search engine results page. So like if you see a bounty, someone that's successful and yeah, I mean, it's basically proof that you can take the structure of their website and just improve it.

I clearly Google has chosen that and has left that there on page one rank one for some time because it finds it trustworthy and matches user intent and search intent to some extent. And yeah, it's like one of the most important factors that I actually look for when I'm building a new directory is a successful one that's come before me. And what's interesting is you seem to prefer location-based queries or location-based directories if not to put words in your mouth, but we did an episode with John Rush late last year. And it was almost like online service providers, it was best like all GPTs or I think was the one that he mentioned was like, you know, a directory of software tools.

It was like kind of the opposite approach. Yeah, 100%. I just personally think that local queries, local SEO is way more protected. Kind of going, you know, just talking about certain keywords and informational blogs that were destroyed.

Local SEO is a totally different beast. And if you go on chat GBT or any LLM and you look up a local query or local keyword like Barbers near me, it's arguably worse than Google Maps right now. So and the SERPs looks the same, which is great. So that's really all in SEO can ask for anyone building one of these directories relying on SEO as distribution is I don't want any surprises.

I think this challenge is still not entirely solved even if LLMs can catch up because there are certain niches like daycare or anything legal or finance where the consequence of choosing the wrong vendor or local business service is too high. Like with the daycare, you're handing your child to some random people. I'm not just going to one prompt chat GBT and ask he were the nearest daycares and be like, okay, cool. That's awesome.

There's also price sensitivity. There's so many reasons why someone would go beyond just a simple one shot chat GBT prompt and look elsewhere on the internet for more information around things that they need, things that where trust is inherent. So yeah. Yeah, a fun example from from the show a few years ago was Rob Patin-Galow built a database of I think it was shadedseats.com and it was like where in major league stadiums at a certain time of day, you know, whatever this game starts like where are you going to be sitting in the shade?

If it's 100 degrees in Arlington, I don't want to be bacon out there in the sun. Where are the shaded seats that he built a whole site around that? Super smart. That's fascinating.

Let's let's look into some of the research here. We talked about high volume low competition. I want to get some maybe high and low metrics for what that looks like or maybe a seed query. What do you where do you start?

So one of the most popular ways that I think you can go and find these niche directories is if you do use a trefsid is a premium tool. It's expensive, but if you do, it's pretty worth it if you plan to use it and build directories. I just type in near me and this is really just what everyone types into Google. If they're looking for something near them, there's several ways that you can kind of filter this information.

The first place I pay attention you is just keyword difficulty and search volume. Makes makes sense to find a keyword that has high search volume and low keyword difficulty. Kind of indicates that it would be easier to rank for. But yeah, look at that pizza near me.

Two million searches and almost no competition. If you were a pizza lover, I feel like there's an opportunity to build something about that. Yeah. And a trefsid is just a third party data tool.

I will say that as you train your eyes and you, like at this point, I've vetted probably over 5,000 different directory niches. I at least seen keywords through the lens of directories and there are trap niches. Pizza near me, I would argue, is harder to rank for than it might look that it might originally appear. Exactly.

What I like to do is I would actually personally, if I were restarting this all over again, I personally like to find keywords right around that maybe 10,000 to 40,000 keyword monthly search volume. This isn't a hard rule. It's ultimately, it's really depending on you and your SEO expertise, but I feel that some of these keywords offer the best kind of bang for your buck if you will. There's not too many directories.

It's still showing a lot of interest. Funny enough, I do have a plasma donation directory. That was the second or third directory that I built. Yeah, look at that.

Keep we're difficulty 77 out of 100 though. That's a little bit challenging. Yeah. And I guess the reason I built it is because if you look up plasma like San Antonio, for example, then you will notice that the actual local keyword plasma donation San Antonio is much less competitive.

So I went into this project not thinking I was going to rank for plasma donation near me. That would be insane. I got it, but you could do it for hundreds of different cities. Exactly.

So a lot of people tunnel vision into the main keyword, which is why I don't think the near me method is necessarily the best. It kind of gives you a foot in, but you kind of want to peel back the curtain and look a little bit deeper because maybe there's lower competition queries that are basically the same search intent that you could target. And that's exactly what I did. I just kind of targeted these type of kind of broader city keywords.

And that was got to go. Building out those individual pages. And yeah, so like this is one method. Sometimes you'll even run into niches.

I think daycares is actually a great example where rather than kind of a more broad location based keyword, you might have phrase daycare. And for whatever reason, it's based in Los Angeles. It gets a thousand monthly searches. So people are clearly trying to look for information around phrase daycare.

And you can use the existing search volume that these individual businesses are getting. And if you look at any other big city, you'll see the same trend and get traffic that way. Because it's super easy to rank for these keywords sometimes with a fresh domain, no backlinks, just creating a useful directory. You'll be surprised at how far you can rank for individual local business queries.

If you will. Yeah, this is kind of interesting. In my head, this is like, this is Google Maps's job. But they're not doing a great job of it.

And maybe there's a better way to organize and present that data. I found a splash pad near me, 32,000 and a keyword difficulty of zero. Laser tag basketball courts, teeth whitening, tattoo removal. What's up, what's up, on one?

Tanding beds, bike trails. Like there's tons of these. And actually, if you're listening in, I could say, Trev's is at least 30 bucks a month and their premium ones are even higher than that. You can only mail you this file.

You can find, we'll link it up in the show notes, sign us on nation.com slash fray or just follow the link in the description. We get you over there. Listen out, 100 that I thought were interesting to me. That in cages near me, stuff like this, and these local based queries where if you had an in or an interest in that area, you could build that something pretty cool.

Really. I will say it's really important because you mentioned something interesting, which is that, you know, this is essentially Google Maps. And going back to the day care example, people want to know more than just name address phone number. That's kind of the information you need to know.

But what about the information you want to know? Maybe if the day cares licensed, if there's activities that are in itinerary for your kids, you know, what's the, how do people treat, you know, their clients at the, at the place that you're, you know, taking your your kids to? There's so many questions and like, I would argue, yeah, some more important things that I want to know, data that I want to know, rather than I need to know that I should include in my directory. And that's really how you differentiate yourself from Google Maps.

Anything else on that research phase? Well, this is going to be a starting point. This is going to be, you know, I'm going to go here. This is going to be kind of broad.

And then maybe there's even subcategories within, you know, obviously within each of these, you know, the batting cage. Does it have baseball? Does it have softball? Is it indoors?

Is it outdoor? You know, does it have a snack shack? Like all these different things people might ask questions about. And I'm, hopefully we get into how to actually collect that data on a nationwide level.

But anything else we should think about kind of in this initial research phase? I mean, there are so many, there are so many small nuances come when it comes to choosing a niche. Yeah, I mean, I would say the most important is finding a bounty, a successful directory, making sure that directories as a format, as a structured page works on Google. Definitely using keyword research.

I tend to also look at a lot of my competitors' back links. So I won't just stop at finding the bounty. I'll look into them. Okay, what kind of back links are they getting?

Why am I doing that? Well, this is kind of looking further in the future. But I want a plan to go and get back links because SEO, as I'm sure a lot of your audience knows, is not just content. It's trust signals.

It's niche relevant back links that are, you know, giving you a shout out basically. Is there anywhere there's a red flag? We're like, even though it says it's a keyword difficulty of 10 or under, but looking at that bounty example website, you know, who you're going for, it's like, there's no way I'm going to be able to touch like they've got thousands of back links. Is there something where you're like, hmm, hard stop onto the next one?

Yes, I would say, looking at the root domain is always a good idea. If they're like a DR90, they're extremely trustworthy. A lot of these exist in the food niche, you know, you mentioned pizza near me. There's like a food truck directory that's doing seven figures plus.

There's a lot of food directory competition. So that's generally a red flag for me. But yeah, you can also check the back links. If they're getting back links from these massive websites that wouldn't even respond to you if you emailed them, probably not the move there.

I'll let the data be your guide, but then put on kind of your common sense hat and detective and be like, what, how am I realistically going to stand out here? Exactly. So 10 to 40,000 was kind of the sweet spot in terms of monthly search volume. Anything, well, I mean, even you mentioned like I go as high as a keyword difficulty in the 70s, if you know, for those local searches, it doesn't seem to be that competitive.

So don't let, don't let that necessarily be a hard stop. I mean, that's just the way that I do it. And I recently spoke to Tim Staudart, who his first directory was doing 250k and net profits. And he chose a niche where there wasn't necessarily a lot of search volume.

And his only framework for finding niches is do rich people do it? Check, then I'm going to go and build it. It's really a way to do rich people do it. That was his whole framework for finding and vetting niche ideas.

And he's gone off and created really successful directories. He's still building directories. Mine's more like probably data driven. And I do ask myself a lot of questions.

I poke around in HREFs. But there's a thousand paths to victory here. And it's, yeah, it's, yeah, it kind of depends. Yeah, the one I always wanted to build, I even had, I don't know if I registered this domain, but I wanted it to be called Happy Hour Hero.

And it was like just the director of the best happy hours around. But I don't know, somebody maybe built that because I was a long time ago since I had that idea. Yeah, totally. Okay, so what's next?

Let's talk about, I don't know, pick an example. We just threw out half a dozen different ideas. What, you know, what do you, where do you get the data from this? Like to do it at scale?

Like I'll give you the example. So I built a virtual assistant directory and review site for like outsourcing companies years and years ago. And it was one on one. I'm going to write the profile of this company.

There was no, there was no data scraping involved. It was just like create the 500 word post about this company and plug it into this category and boom, boom, boom, lather rinse repeat, you know, starting out with a couple of dozen companies and then probably getting over to 150 or something by the time we sold it. Yeah, I would say the, there's a few ways to do it. Kind of going, taking a quick step back before data scraping is you want to decide how this directory is going to monetize.

Like for me, it was all about kind of more passive projects, spend 100 hours upfront once it's up and monetized. I basically don't work on it. That was my style. If you want to go more lead generation, that's not going to be as passive, but has a much higher ceiling for earning potential.

And the reason I say that and why that has to do with data scraping is because if you are doing a lead generation, you don't need to build something that attracts 100,000 monthly visitors to make money. You can focus on the state in which case, you could just scrape for that state and then go deep into that. But definitely want to figure that out first. Afterwards, after you've vetted your niche, I personally use a tool called out scraper.

Not affiliated, it's been a big fan. Let's pause on lead generation for a second. This would be if you're building a directory of service providers, for example, like teeth whitening near me and you partnered with a bunch of dental offices that offer that. Is that okay?

We'll send you a new customer. We expect you to give us a $200 funders fee or something. You have to go out and cut those individual deals. 100%.

That's essentially it. I mentioned that I'm building a luxury port-a-party directory right now. So that's going to be a lead generation play for rental services. Exactly.

So luxury port-a-potties can rent for $2,000 a day. Think weddings, outdoor festivals, that kind of stuff. There's another side hustle. Yeah.

So feel free to build it. I'm sure there's plenty of room for multiple winners. But the reason I, I, I, I, I, like, yeah, for generally speaking for lead generation, that's the whole concept. You are creating a directory that helps people find and make a decision around renting a luxury restroom trailer.

You might be asking, well, phrase, isn't it just as easy as just looking up restroom trailers near me and then just, you know, calling? Yeah, but it's like there's no price transparency. And this exists in so many niches where you can call 10 luxury port-a-party restroom trailer companies. One, it'll be a little time-consuming, but two, you'll probably get quotes that vary in the several hundreds of dollars.

Same thing exists with any like, you know, landscaping or home renovation project. For redoing your kitchen, you're going to get a ton of different quotes. So your directory can be the place that provides that information. And it's easier to just go on a directory where all the information is one place.

And you can kind of quickly compare one or the other. And that's kind of like a simple problem that you can solve that adds a tremendous amount of value. So yeah, but yeah, in general, that's the lead gen model. You are the website that SEOs your website.

You get the leads. You sell the leads to business owners. And that's how it works. Fair enough.

Okay, so thinking about, well, how am I eventually going to monetize this? And maybe the niche kind of dictates which direction that you go. If you're doing a directory for dog parks or hiking trails, like they're probably not going to pay you to some people off to the hiking trail. But there's, that's where display ads come in or maybe, you know, hiking equipment affiliate.

I'm sure there's other creative ways you could do it, but like some more more passive and more kind of just traffic based models. Mm-hmm. Yep. I sell digital products on my thriftined directory as well.

And that makes around $500 a month, passively. So there's a bunch of ways you can monetize. This is like a guide to like make money thrifting or something like what's the digital product? I did something really sweaty, really unscalable.

I called all the thrift store owners and basically posed as some authority figure within the company and said, hey, you need to tell me exactly when new product comes into the thrift store. I need to know the days, the times, how many rotations you have every single day. And I packaged that into a guide and I did that 130 times and I just put it in an excel sheet through it in Canva made 130 variations that are store specific schedules. Oh, yeah.

It's a serious about it. You got to be there, you know, if it comes in Tuesday and noon, you got to be there. Totally. Yeah, there's a ton of resellers who want that information and just one flip is going to pay off.

It's a $19 digital product. It's going to help that expense. So hobbyists, flippers, resellers, they all want to know when the best stuff comes and how early they should plan their trip. Okay.

Interesting. Okay, let's go back to the data collection. You mentioned, I think out scraper was the was the tool out scraper. Yeah.

So it's a scraping tool that allows you to scrape Google Maps and among other websites, if you'd like. That's the most non-coder friendly, in my opinion. It's super easy to set up. You can specify the locations.

You want to scrape Google categories. That's something that I kind of always do before I use out scraper. Just go on Google Maps, type in your keyword, look for the Google categories that you want to scrape for and then move forward with the scraping tool and that will basically give you all the information that you want. You can get the name, address phone number, the website, the working hours, anything that you want is there.

As far as the information that you need to know, as far as the extra the data you want to know, that's where you have to do extra steps there. Yeah, for that kind of stuff, where it's like, well, does it have a vending machine? Does it have shade? Does it have our dogs allowed?

Do you have to start combing through the reviews? How do you pull all that stuff? Especially if you're trying to do it for hundreds and hundreds of locations? Yep, so exactly.

Google reviews is definitely like the main place to look. If people are talking about it, there will be a review tag. If you've used Google Maps, we've all seen it. It's basically what people are talking about the most.

I'll combine that with some Reddit social listening, just looking up your keyword on Reddit. See what people are talking about. If those questions just keep recurring, then okay, then dive in. Look at the comments.

What are people talking about? What's being upvoted? That's where you can get a lot of ideas for data enrichment as well. This is the output of this is going to be a ginormous Excel file or something I imagine, potentially thousands of rows.

Yep. Yeah, so you get a big CSV file or Excel file. I'll clean the data. Sometimes I like to scrape certain parameters like the business status.

It'll spit out whether or not the business is temporarily closed or permanently closed. I would remove those because I don't want those to be on my directory. So they're small, like kind of common sense logical approach, just to cleaning your data. And then once you've kind of ended up with a list that you're happy with, you can go and enrich the data.

And that's that's the whole process. But there are ways to automate it. I actually co-founded a tool that helps automate this because it was such a pain in the butt having to go through, as you mentioned, potentially thousands of listings manually. So we kind of automated that whole process.

This was one of the very tedious chores where we had to build some automation. So one of my first side-usual projects was this shoe shopping site. And so it pulled in the catalogs through data fees or through like Amazon's API. And we'd get some time, you know, probably over a million products.

And I don't want your handbags. I don't want your rings or stuff. I just want shoes. And so it's like build the rules to filter out everything but shoes.

And then sometimes they would have very similar names. And we're like, okay, that product is actually the same as this product. Even those called something slightly different. And this data cleanup was something that could be automated on a recurring basis, but was pretty time consuming upfront to try and build out all those rules.

The tedious, I mean, yeah, I did manually the first time. Not even exaggerating hundreds of hours, just doing like quite possibly the most boring task ever. But this is kind of where your value add is. If you're like, if all this data already exists on Google Maps, that's where we got it from.

It's that question. Well, what am I going to be doing that's different and or better to make somebody come here instead? I think that that is the question I asked myself a lot. And I realized I have like two takes on this one, which is I think I probably learned this from Pat Flynn way back in the day, but people will pay for consolidation.

Whether it's through their time as a website visitor or like actually pay in the case of my digital product, there's all the information online, but it's time consuming. Everyone has their lives that are being, you know, that are busy and we're all doing stuff. So if you can be the person that just consolidates it, then there's a massive value add there. The second take is specialized data.

And this is kind of my hedge against, you know, impending AI threats in my opinion, but essentially, there's data that is available, but in really low quality ways. And then there's like, I guess a really common example is any kind of lack of price transparency with the daycares, right? You would have to call every daycare just to get the pricing. Again, very time consuming.

What if you can consolidate that information? That information is probably not even out there. Like I doubt anyone has called 5,000 of the daycares in America just to get the information. But if you did, that would be a insane value add.

You would have specialized data in the sense that you're the only person on the internet with that level of helpful data. So that's kind of like another way you can create and generate new data that can't be used. Yeah. And of course, if there's 100 of these listings in your directory, that's feasible.

If there's 5,000, maybe a little less so without hiring your own outsource call center team to go and collect it. What would you want to plug your clean up tool? It's called Enrich.Directory. That's the website.

It's essentially somewhat agentic. You can let's just say like the daycare example you can plug in like a license or schedule. You can put in a keyword that you want to look for in the reviews rather than manually sifting through it. And it will identify the most recent ones.

And you can prompt it as well. You can say, hey, does this daycare have a schedule or some itinerary or some kids program? And then it will basically just give you all of those reviews that mentioned it and have a Boolean output that says, yep, they do have a program. Here's the proof.

Some reviewer has mentioned it already and they mentioned it recently. So you can kind of see all that data there. Yeah, say, yeah, this is something we totally did. Like we built this for our own local area when our young when we moved and our youngest was looking for preschool.

It's like, well, what are their hours? What if you do three days a week? How much do they charge? Because so many of them are like nine to noon or nine thirty to twelve.

It's like, I was hoping for a little more coverage than that. It's tedious to go find that data. So definitely value out if somebody puts that together. And that's just one example of hundreds.

Exactly. Yeah. Okay. So now it's in Excel or it's in some CSV file.

Like how do we make that look pretty on the website? How do we start? How do you start to present that data? Yeah.

So after you've scraped, cleaned, and enriched your data, that is the time when I format it on a WordPress website. That's kind of historically been my pick. There are again, multiple ways to do it. At the end of the day, it's just building a website that points people to the right place with with the right information.

Right. So you can use everything from your simple themes or you can use like directory specific plugins. Geo directory is one. I've also used, I've also built out static pages where I just literally click create page and I just start dragging widgets over and just hand make the whole directory.

Yeah. Yeah. It's if there are a small number of listings feasible. Otherwise, there's probably a WordPress like importer tool where you can do something like that.

Yeah. There's WPL import. That's kind of the famous one works really well. Geo directory has kind of a built in importer.

So you can programmatically deploy like 4,000 pages in the same day if you want. So it's out there. I've more recently been playing with AI coding tools like V0 and cursor and plot code and that's fascinating as well. But I always recommend people just use what you already know.

That's usually where I think you should start. And it'll probably be the faster way anyways, rather than learning some new tech stack that you're not familiar with. Yeah. So the structure is each listing is its own page or is it like you kind of start to do that editorial content of like the best plasma donation centers in Houston type of like, you know, mystical content.

It depends. I look at two places. You can look at the atrefs data. If all the, actually the first place that I look is just look up the first top three ranking websites in your Serps or look at the most successful directory.

How's the structure? Do they have individual listing pages? If so, just follow suit. Pretty easy.

If it's more mystical based, you should do what I do. What I did with my first directory, the thrifting one, which is a pillar page directory. It's literally 50 pages for all the different states in America. And when you land on that page, it's a massively long page.

It's ridiculous. But that seemed to work out the best. And I kind of determined that by just looking at what was already working. I didn't need individual listing pages.

People didn't care about that. The main thing people were typing in was the name of the thrift store San Antonio or Austin or Los Angeles, not the specific name of the store. If it's like the daycare example going back to that, you're probably likely to have people want to research the name of the exact daycare spot in which case it would make sense to create its own listing page. And you have a more traditional directory rather than a pillar page directory.

So it depends on what's working out there. You can also look at the keyword research to see what the most popular queries are. And that should really inform what your directory looked like. Yeah, thinking about that site structure.

I mean, simply like site oscillation could be an example like best side hustles for real estate agents for doctors for dentists. We have that type of content. That's kind of the listicle. That's like the pillar page type of stuff at a category level.

And then each of those items on that list probably has its own deep dive where it's an interview about how to build directories or how to invest in real estate or how to start a freelance business like anything like that. And so that kind of structure is going to be dictated by the niche that you that you select 100% that is correct. Okay, so let's say it feels a little bit like fast forwarding through the build out phase here, once it's built and maybe this is a longer process depending on the niche you select, you mentioned posting to Reddit, hey guys, I made this, I made a tool, I made a site to help make finding fill in the blank easier. Check it out.

That's one potential marketing angle or tactic. What else? So like just, you know, it's not, you know, build it and they'll come, it's build it and like try and spread the word at least a little bit to get Google to notice you. So that my next step is building backlinks and kind of starting to build those trust signals.

But that Reddit step is so important because people on Reddit are not afraid to tell you to your face what if your project sucks. And you spend all this time researching, scraping the data, you probably spend a little bit of money too if you're using premium themes on WordPress. You kind of want to take a moment and take in any real-time feedback. If it sucks, then why does it suck?

If people don't find it valuable and they're like telling you it's just another version of Google Maps but uglier, then you should probably listen to them. Every single Reddit post I've made luckily, I've made four because I have four directories that I've really put in like a four A through Z effort on. Luckily they've been really well received multiple hundreds of upvotes, comments. And the second reason you want to do that is because I've gotten my best monetization ideas from these Reddit forums.

People are like, hey, I think it'd be really cool if you added this data. And that's how I got the idea for that first directory for the digital products. People were asking for that data and I was like, oh, okay, that's really hard to get. That's going to take me hours.

But I guess there's like dozens of people asking for it. So if I do it, I could charge for it. Yeah, do the work up front and sell it over and over again. Exactly.

So that Reddit post offers so much value in multiple different areas. Once you have that kind of peace of mind to, you're so much more willing to move on to the next step, which is back links. Not a fun part. Probably like a lot of people's main struggle with SEO.

But yeah, it's how do you build back links? There's so many different ways, especially with directories. We've probably all seen them before, but badges is a great way to build a back links. By that, I mean, if I had a directory for comics, comic shops, which I do, I recently launched that and the full buildup video is out there.

I could go and approach comics store owners and say, hey, like I created this badge for the top 10 best comics in San Antonio. Do you want to put on your website? They embed onto the website. It clicks and then redirects to my website.

Boom, I just got a badge back link. That's actually something that I did like three weeks ago. Yeah, we did this for the VA site too. It was a little like, had a kind of a logo and like, had a little like tested stamp on it for all the ones that we like tested and personally reviewed.

And people put that at the bottom, like kind of in their footer virtual assisted assistant tested. Yeah, it was a little bit of a back link boost. Yeah, totally. That one's like a good one.

I mean, the best back links are ones where I just basically take them from my competitors. Sounds bad, but basically I use hrefs and I look at my competitors' back links. Again, that bounty that I found. And I'll look for a kind of a mom and pop publisher.

One where I reach, if I reach out to them, they'll actually respond. And I'll be like, do you want to swap your link for mine for 50 bucks? Or I'll use some form of leverage. Hey, I'm getting 5,000 monthly visitors.

We're also the most accurate up-to-date directory around comic books. I noticed that you link to this website. You want to swap it out for mine. It's going to be way better like over experience.

We actually keep up to date with this stuff. Ultimately, the idea with the back links is you're just convincing some stranger in some part of the world to put your link on their website. There's a million ways to do that. You don't have to just pay 50 bucks because that can get costly.

That's all it is at the end of the day. The more niche relevant it is, the better, especially in these days. That's how I do it. I got it.

If somebody's site talks about this particular thrifting store, you can reach out to them and say, hey, would you mind adding a link? Or if they're already linking to your older, worse competitor, you can say, I built a better resource. Check it out. If you genuinely think it's going to be a value ad for your readers, hey, we'd love for you to swap out the link because I think it's going to be a better experience.

When I get those pitches all the time, and sometimes I ignore them, and sometimes I act on them. So it's like kind of a volume game. Yep. 100%.

You don't need many, too. I recall the first directory in the thrifting space, I think one backlink alone was enough to push me to rank one page one for my target keyword that gets 60, 70,000 monthly visitors. That's just this hyper relevant. There was real traffic coming to the page.

The article itself was super dialed into my specific thrifting niche. I paid him 50 bucks. I just reached out and I'm like, hey, I'm just going to be frank. I'm just trying to get a link swap.

He was like, it's paid how many 50 bucks. That was it. One link has been worth how many thousands of dollars. It's been worth three years of two or three thousand dollars a month.

That's really interesting. Sometimes it doesn't take a lot. Don't sweat it. I'm going to need hundreds of these things.

It may just take a few. If you've selected a low enough competition area. Yep. Is it primarily, so you mentioned the digital product?

Is it primarily display ads for you in your sites? Yeah. Mediavine grow handles the display ads. 75% of the revenue for that first directory is display ads.

Hovering around like 1500 to 2000 dollars is pretty average. The digital products are 25% of the revenue. It's funny saying revenue because there's virtually no expenses. I think I pay seven dollars for a Google email and 29 dollars for a convert kit subscription.

It's like 98% margin or something like crazy. If you are used to running an agency or any other physical product type of business, you're going to be blown away by the margins in a fully digital business like this. I got to pay for hosting, a couple of software tools, and it's all great after I cover those. Not really really cool.

Display ads, digital products, we mentioned kind of lead gen as maybe slightly more advanced. You got to go strike up relationships and cut those deals. One way that the VA site was monetized, we sold a featured listing like you would see on Yale PetriPadvisor or some of these other sites. Any other creative ways to teach seeing people monetize?

The most successful, which is definitely the hardest to pull off, is using directories as a top of the funnel for SAS. That's where you end up with your 7, 8, 9 figure directories, which are out there. They're not that rare either, which is cool. Any examples from top of mind?

Yeah, so there's one called car parts and car-parts.com. That's one that comes to mind. There's quite a few. I believe Retreat.Guru is one of the biggest directories for people who want Iowasco retreats around the world.

They sell a SAS where they help if you're a retreat owner, if your business is putting on these retreats on, they sell you the SAS to manage that retreat business. Car parts is the biggest, it's also incredibly ugly, which is hilarious. It makes so many millions of years. But they have so many products for all B2B SAS for people who are selling used car parts and other niches within used car related businesses.

Both of those do multiple millions. I think Retreat.Guru does like three or four million revenue a year. Yeah, once you've got the eyeballs, your monetization options really open up. You figured out, do you email Martin?

You mentioned, oh, I got my kit subscription. You do an email marketing for this stuff too? Yeah, I do sometimes put around with newsletters on my directories. The, I think that's actually a really incredible combo.

For the Plasma donation one, I created a lead magnet where I was like, oh, if you want the highest paying plasma donation centers, we email that once a month every month. Just sign up for this thing. I was getting something like 500 organic lead form submissions, which is crazier to think about because the actual ticket in isn't just a normal newsletter opt in where you put in your email, I make them go through like a minute to two minute long survey where they tell me as much as they know about their local plasma centers. So the way that one worked was I just think it's hilarious because I didn't have any newsletter content.

I simply took the information people submitted to join the newsletter because I would ask them, hey, how much did your local plasma donation pay? Oh, I don't have the name for that. I'm not going to crowdsourcing the data for you. Yeah, I don't have to call all these places up.

Exactly. So I crowdsource the data. I didn't even have any newsletter content until people started finding that. And to this day, I don't really work on that website too much.

It's kind of just passively earning with Mediavine grow, but that is kind of one example of newsletter execution. And the first thrifting store had a lot of sign-ups, still gets a lot of sign-ups, but I don't really know what to do with them to be honest. Yeah, sell them the paid thing. And then afterwards, I don't know, there's other thrifting content.

I'm sure they'd be interested in what's what's like a day in the life here in terms of upkeep and maintenance like on the daycares. If you have 5,000 daycares and you want to know the pricing, it's like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. Like, once you get done, you're going to have to start back over at the beginning of the list because the pricing probably changed. It depends on the niche, for sure, with the thrifting one.

I don't think I've logged into the back end of WordPress for that one, like five or six months. I just check every day and I'll be like, okay, cool. There's nothing wrong with the traffic. With something like a lead gen 1, of course, you want to be a little bit more on top of that, especially if you're starting to sell leads and kind of maintain that trust.

I think an easy way is just every six months, every quarter, the lazy approach, which I'm a fan of, just re-script the data, sort by business status. If they're permanently closed, you can cross-reference it that way and just remove those listings that have closed. For store hours, that change, which kind of, yeah, that's like a thing. I don't really change it that much.

I just added a disclaimer saying, hey, these were the store hours when I first added these to the website, like make sure to check it yourself if you plan to visit. Other than that, there's not that much meaning in, so I would say. Yeah, looking for stuff that doesn't change all the time. I found a lot of search volume around, like specific classes, dance class near me, or CPR training, where it's like once it's gone and expired, like then it's out of date and there's a lot of upkeep.

Same thing with the shoe business. The inventory turned over, like seasonally for sure, but everyday stuff would go out of stock, and it would be a pain to stay on top of. So maybe that's a consideration too, or you're like, thinking, oh, yeah, how much upkeep is this going to be? 100%.

There is someone in my community that built a trivia night directory. First directory, it was a hit. I think something like eight or nine thousand monthly visitors. Yeah, but he was telling me it was a pain.

I'd never want to work on this website. Trivia nights are so random and they could change locations or times on a whim. We used to do it on Tuesdays, but now we do it on Wednesdays. Nobody's going to tell you.

Exactly. So, and then once someone has a bad experience, guess what? You lost their trust. They're probably not going to come back to your directory.

So it's just one of those things where data upkeep is is definitely something you want to consider going into this. Yeah, and that's the drawback with the happy hour idea too. It's like the menu prices obviously are going to change. The menu items are obviously going to change.

It would be a cool service, but hard to execute. Anything you would do differently starting over? Not to sound like at all centered in a way, but I think I had the right expectations going in. If I had to give someone one kind of main thing that led to me owning successful directory websites is that my first directory was a playground to learn SEO.

There was no expectation to earn. I didn't go into it thinking, oh, great. This is going to be like making me thousands of dollars a month passively. I didn't even cross my mind.

I think maybe one once I was like, oh, if this makes like $300 a month, that'd be insane. But I'm really just building this to see if the SEO knowledge out there, which is scattered everywhere, it is actually going to work. I was just using as a sandbox and that's kind of my main advice, which is, and it's hard because we all want to make sure that the time we spend into a project is rewarded and hopefully buy money. But that's I think the fastest route to success.

It's just learn the skills because you're learning like five or 10 different skills when you're building directories. It's not like, oh, I'm just going to whip this up tomorrow. I'm cash flowing. It's like, no, you're learning web design in SEO and keyword research.

And there's people who have entire jobs with just keyword research. So it's a long process. Yeah, there's a lot of moving parts here, but set up correctly. You could be, hey, just check those daily earnings and keep it rolling.

I love that line about like this is my playground to learn. It's my playground to learn SEO. I think that's really cool. Well, what's next?

What's got you excited for the rest of this year? I think AI coding is fascinating. I'm a total non-coder, non-technical person and I've just kind of started diving in. I think like playing with WordPress for probably almost 10 years now, there's certain functionalities with directories that I can never do with WordPress.

So that's really exciting. A lot of people are afraid of LLM SEO, understandably, but that's exciting to me as well. Just like learning how that evolves and how that works. I think a lot of people are going to stop creating these websites because of this fear.

I've already started seeing it in my own communities, but people with high agency are just going to keep creating these. And I don't think Logosio is really going to go anywhere in the next few years is kind of my take. And yeah, I have YouTube stuff going on. I have other fun projects that I'm juggling right now.

Yeah, you're helping people learn the stuff at Frey 2 on YouTube. Check them out over there. ShipyourDirectory.com is kind of a membership community for other people kind of on the same path and looking for some support and guidance and community along the way. We'll link those up in the show notes as well.

Frey, this has been awesome. Like I said, I was excited coming in. I'm excited coming out. I don't know what niche I'm going to tackle, but it's definitely on my short list of future side hustles.

Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side hustle nation. Build with an open mind and build to master the skills. No one is going to reasonably expect themselves to build directories for forever. I assume if you're listening to this, you're going to build other things or probably going to maybe open up an e-commerce store or maybe some kind of boring brick and mortar business or whatever works for you.

So just learning SEO and learning how to distribute things on the internet is the play. Directories is just one very narrow niche area where you can apply your learnings. And if your site has been hit by updates over the last couple of years, maybe this is something that you could use to fight back. This is something you could lay around to some existing content or add a little subsection of your site and build out some new authority.

So lots of different routes to go, lots of different niche ideas thrown out in this episode. Again, 100 plus directory niche ideas are yours free. I'll email that to you. Just hit up side hustle nation.com slash fray f-r-e-y.

You'll be able to download that or hit up the show notes link in the episode description. I'll get you right over there. Big thanks to fray for sharing his insight. Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone.

Side hustle nation.com slash deals is where to go to claim all the latest offers from those sponsors in one place. Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in.

If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share with a friend. So fly off that text message. Hey, I think you get a kick out of this one just like I did. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen.

And I'll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show hustle on.