The Most Overlooked Way to Make Money On the Internet

Discover how to build profitable directory websites with low investment and passive income potential in this insightful Koerner Office Podcast episode.

Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.

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Key Takeaways

Directory websites are a viable and often overlooked method to generate passive income online.
Low-cost tools and strategic keyword research are key to identifying profitable niches.
SEO competitiveness can be managed by targeting smaller, underserved niches and improving on existing sites.
Building a portfolio of directories can scale income from hundreds to thousands of dollars monthly.
Successful directories often arise from observing real user demand and gaps in existing search tools like Google Maps.

What the video covers

Chris Koerner discusses the overlooked opportunity of building directory websites as a scalable online business model.
Directories like TripAdvisor and Care.com generate millions, yet many niches remain untapped with high demand and low supply.
Starting a directory requires minimal investment, a simple template, and a few tools like WordPress or Webflow.
Keyword research using tools like Ahrefs helps identify niches with low competition and high search volume.
The concept of 'bounties' refers to finding existing successful but small directory sites to improve and dominate.
Examples include niche directories such as thrifting, balloon animals, and dog parks, which can generate passive income.
SEO is competitive, but ranking even in the top 5 can yield substantial traffic and revenue.
Monetization strategies include ads, affiliate marketing, and e-commerce integration.
Building multiple directories can create a portfolio generating consistent passive income.
The episode encourages creativity and leveraging constraints to discover unique directory niches.

Chapters

What is a directory website and why is it a good business opportunity?

A directory website organizes information about a specific niche or industry, making it easy for users to find relevant businesses or services. It is a good business opportunity because many niches have high demand but low supply, allowing new directories to rank well and generate passive income.

How do I find a profitable niche for a directory website?

Use keyword research tools like Ahrefs to identify niches with high search volume and low keyword difficulty. Look for existing smaller sites that are successful as 'bounties' to improve upon and dominate the niche.

What tools and platforms are recommended to build a directory website?

WordPress and Webflow are recommended platforms for building directory websites due to their ease of use and flexibility. Additionally, tools like Ahrefs help with keyword research and SEO analysis.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

Speaker A

TripAdvisor, Care.com, Happyc, hundreds of directories making multiple millions and many more making over six figures. That one backlink that got me to rank one has resulted in two years' worth of like completely passive $2,300 to $3,000 a month. It's just one of those businesses that people don't even think of. They've all interacted with them, but they don't see it as an opportunity. There's still so many untapped opportunities out there where there's more demand than supply.

Speaker A

people don't even think of They've all interacted with them but they don't see it as an opportunity There's still so many untapped opportunities out there where there's more demand than supply 100% I think once you see it you can't unsee it So if someone's starting from complete scratch where

Speaker A

100%. I think once you see it, you can't unsee it. So if someone's starting from complete scratch, where should they [Music] start? What is a directory and why should you care? Travelvelocity.com, that's a directory, billion-dollar business. Dryice.nearme.com, that's also a directory. It's a five-figure business. Why should you care? Because there are millions, I'm not exaggerating, millions of opportunities out there to start a directory website for almost no money. It's just math. There's a simple template. There's about three tools you need. You log into the tools. You see where there's more search demand than supply. You build a directory with WordPress or Webflow. And then you wait for it to rank. And then you profit. And you do that over and over and over again until you have a portfolio of websites, maybe five, maybe 500, making you hundreds to thousands of dollars a month passively.

Speaker A

of opportunities out there to start a directory website for almost no money It's just math There's a simple template There's about three tools you need You log into the tools You see where there's more search demand than supply You build a directory with WordPress or Web Flow And then

Speaker A

Does passive income exist? No. Is this as close as you get? Yes. Freychu is a guy that I found on Twitter, and all he does is talk about directories, and he builds directories, and he tells people how to build directories. He has nothing to sell you. He just wants to talk about what he does in his free time. So thrifting directories, balloon animal directories, dog park directories. Yes, yes, yes. All the above. Anyone with about 100 bucks can start a directory and learn and hopefully profit when and/or if they start ranking. So enjoy this interview, share it with a friend, and we'll see you next time on the Kerner office.

Speaker A

I found on Twitter and all he does is talk about directories and he builds directories and he tells people how to build directories He has nothing to sell you He just wants to talk about what he does in his free time So thrifting directories balloon animal directories dog park directories Yes yes

Speaker A

You shut down your business. You were bummed out. You had to flip items at garage sales to make rent. That sucked. That got you thinking creatively because constraints equal creativity. You just started looking online, passive income websites, how to make money, what's scalable. You came across directories. You thought, "Okay, if this isn't the thing, then this could be the thing that helps me learn SEO to do other things." You started your first directory.

Speaker A

at garage sales to make rent That sucked That got you thinking creatively because constraints equal creativity You just started looking online passive income websites how to make money what's scalable You came across directories You thought "Okay if this isn't the thing then this could

Speaker A

Months later, you found out it worked. What was that directory like? Do you mind telling us what the actual website was and what made you choose that niche? Yeah, I'm happy to share as much as possible without giving the domain just because the first time I did that, it invited like three copycats within 24 hours. And yeah, it's just one of those things, but it's in the thrifting niche. And I really just found it scrolling on TikTok actually. I noticed these viral videos of people showing their thrifting hauls, like a lot of Gen Z. They had millions of views and all the comments were like location-based queries. They were like, "Where is this? Is there one in Pennsylvania?" You know, people were very curious, and I was like, "Why aren't people just going to Google Maps looking this up and then visiting it nearby?"

Speaker A

without giving the domain just because the first time I did that it invited like three copycats within 24 hours And yeah it's it's just one of those things but it's in the thrifting niche And I really just found it scrolling on Tik Tok actually I noticed these viral videos of people

Speaker A

And that's when I discovered that there was a bottleneck. Like Google Maps was not very good at very specific location-based queries. If you typed in the keyword that I built this directory around, it pulled up like a bunch of irrelevant businesses and locations. So yeah, I researched it. I saw one website that did cover it, and it was getting 100,000 monthly visitors, and I was like, I could do better than this. I could, I could, I could improve on this. So I did combine some of the stuff I learned from YouTube, and that's kind of how I landed it.

Speaker A

looking this up and then visiting it nearby?" And that's when I discovered that there was a bottleneck Like Google Maps was not very good at very specific location-based queries If you typed in the keyword that I built this directory around it pulled up like a bunch of irrelevant businesses

Speaker A

Did you use SimilarWeb to look at their traffic? I use Ahrefs. Ahrefs is always my go-to. Oh, you use that for traffic as well? Mhm. Yep. All right. So and then you use Ahrefs, I imagine, to find the demand. And you're, I'm guessing, you're looking at keyword difficulty as in difficulty to rank highly for it on Google and keyword volume, and you're looking for asymmetric bets there, right?

Speaker A

on this So I did combine some of the stuff I learned from from YouTube and that's kind of how I landed it Did you use Similar Web to look at their traffic I use Hrefs Hrefs is always my go-to

Speaker A

Yep. Exactly. You always want to find the balance between something that's low keyword difficulty with high search volume. And then there's some deeper stuff, like sometimes keyword difficulty is not the best metric to really uncover the competitiveness of a niche, but it's good enough at a top level. And yeah, that's essentially what I did. Also always find a bounty. So like finding a website that already succeeded that looks like kind of a mom and pop publisher. That was really, really nice to see. You call that a bounty like a template basically?

Speaker A

Yep Exactly You always want to find the balance between something that's low keyword difficulty with high search volume And then there's some deeper stuff like sometimes keyword difficulty is not the best metric to really uncover the competitiveness of a niche but it's good enough

Speaker A

I call it someone that's gone before you. Yes. Yes. So someone that's come before me that's successful, that's not like a Forbes-looking website. So I know it's viable. And I call it a bounty because SEO is a PvP game. Like I don't know if you played video games, but like not everyone can rank in the top 10. So you're gonna have to be okay taking them over and completely dominating them. And so that's why I call it a bounty. And it's a good sign. It's a green flag in my eyes when you're looking for directory ideas.

Speaker A

before you Yes Yes So someone that's come before me that's successful that's not like a Forbes looking like website So I know it's like viable And I call it a bounty because SEO is a PVP game Like I don't know if you played video games but like not everyone can rank on the top 10

Speaker A

A lot of the times, you don't need to take them over. Like you can be second or fifth and still do really well. 100%. Oh, 100%. There's so many niches where people are like, "Oh, like can't win in that." Well, actually, like the food niche is a great example. If you look under the hood of any, like, like I think food near me is searched 13 million times a month or something like that, and there's so many directories that are winning in that space because they're specializing in like only food trucks that do Mexican food, for example, and they just have a directory around that. So yeah, 100%.

Speaker A

directory ideas A lot of the times you don't need to take them over Like you can be second or fifth and still do really well 100% Oh 100% There's so many niches where people are like "Oh like can't

Speaker A

What's a good example of a food directory that you know is just crushing it? There's a couple that come to mind. There's one for food trucks. I think it might be like foodtruck.com. I would have to double-check, but the other one that came to mind was Happy Cow. That's a really famous directory. I've heard of it. It's for vegan restaurants and vegan food. And my f, like, I have a lot of friends and family who are vegan. So that has just become such a sign of trust. Like when you go to a restaurant and you see the Happy Cow badge, you're immediately like, you trust that restaurant. So it's definitely grown to something really impressive. And that's a good example of like a food niche that's crushing it.

Speaker A

there's so many directories that are winning in that space because they're specializing in like only food trucks that do Mexican food for example and they just have a directory around that So yeah 100% What's a good example of a food directory that you know is just crushing it There's a

Speaker A

So Happy Cow just started as a directory, and now they're kind of a vegan authority then. They're almost like the TripAdvisor but for finding vegan restaurants. Interesting. Okay. I think what people often find when they go down this rabbit hole, I found this myself. I'll get an Ahrefs account, and it's not cheap. It's like 150 bucks a month, and it's like, "Okay, I'm going to get the most out of this for 30 days because I'm probably going to churn." And then I go in there, and I start digging around, and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, this one's good. Oh, this one's good. Oh, this one's good."

Speaker A

I have a lot of friends and family who are vegan So that has just become such a sign of trust Like when you go to a restaurant and you see the Happy Cow badge you're immediately like you trust that

Speaker A

Is it just me, or there's still like so many untapped opportunities out there where there's more demand than supply? 100%. I think once you see it, you can't unsee it. And like if you just think like where's the last place you and your friends or you and a partner went that you were really excited about? Or another framework I like to use is think about the most meaningful or impactful things that happen in your life. Graduations, you know, getting into a relationship or getting married, finding a new job, moving to a new city. Like a lot of those can stir up new ideas for directories, and they're everywhere.

Speaker A

Interesting Okay I think what people often find when they go down this rabbit hole I found this myself I'll get an Ahf's account and it's not cheap It's like 150 bucks a month and it's like "Okay I'm going to get the most out of this for 30 days because I'm probably going to churn."

Speaker A

A personal example is I'm actually in the process of moving right now. So I've been obsessed with like water quality and looking up like gravity filters and like stainless steel dispensers and everything. Yeah. Everything. So I've been finding myself on the...

Speaker A

out there where there's more demand than supply 100% I think once you see it you can't unsee it And like if you just think like where's the last place you and your friends or you and a partner went that that you were really excited about Or another framework I like to use is think about

Speaker A

the most meaningful or impactful like things that happen in your life Graduations you know getting into a relationship or getting married finding a new job moving to a new city like a lot of those can stir up new ideas for directories and they're everywhere A personal example is I'm I'm actually

Speaker A

in the process of moving right now So I've been obsessed with like water quality and looking up like gravity filters and like stainless steel dispensers and everything Yeah Everything So I've been finding myself on these directories that help me understand what the like best way

Speaker A

to find water quality is And something that niche can be a directory So it's like yeah there's there's so many untapped opportunities Okay So how many directory sites do you own today So I own six but technically like I've spoken about this recently in my community where you know

Speaker A

I I have six but I've really only put like full A through Z effort in three of them Like I'm talking keyword research like organizing the data properly building out the website doing the SEO monetizing it like everything Luckily I've been three for three in that sense They're all cash flowing and

Speaker A

profitable and ranking So I think two are like basically dominating the first page of Google The other one is in a very high competition niche It's in plasma donation Yeah it's a little smaller one It gets around 6,000 monthly visitors but that one's interesting too What was the signal that you

Speaker A

saw that made you want to launch one in that niche even though you knew there was high competition I think it's because my first directory was B TOC So I wanted to try a B2B one and I wanted to try

Speaker A

a different way to monetize So the original game plan with the plasma donation one was okay like let's go B2B and let's let me try to get this $300 million revenue a year plasma company to like pay me thousands of dollars to either promote their business And that didn't really end up working

Speaker A

as planned cuz the market for plasma donation I learned is very small There's like eight plasma companies that might be able to buy your sponsored listings But yeah it was like a combination of a challenge because I felt pretty confident and even though it was really high keyword difficulty

Speaker A

like it was like in the 70s or 80s there was a lot of search volume and there were definitely like few competitors like it was competitive but there were only like 10 or 15 competitors So the quantity of competitors was small So I was like okay well maybe there's room for for me to take

Speaker A

a little bit of this market share So what is your monthly traffic across all your directory sites The first one gets around like 60,000 monthly visitors The second one's around like 8 to 10 kind of fluctuates And the last one six So probably like it it ranges from like probably

Speaker A

70 to like 90,000 monthly visitors cuz yeah it really fluctuates The the first directory at one point was getting 85 90,000 monthly visitors So it does fluctuate a good amount And it's like 100% organic or 100% organic Yep That's really my main distribution channel I only deal with organic and

Speaker A

I mainly deal with like passive evergreen niches So that's kind of my favorite And what kind of revenue do those three pull in combined It also ranges but like completely passively it's probably around like 2300 to $3,000 a month So nothing crazy but with my specific like high standards way

Speaker A

of finding niches and building directories I think you do give up some revenue like as opposed to if I were to go with the sponsored listings route or there's a lot of other ways to monetize where you can have a much higher ceiling for much more work right It's the trade-off between profitability and

Speaker A

work And you'd rather have multiple sites doing 500 to 5,000 each than a couple sites where you're going out and like at a certain point you become a sales business You're just finding sponsorships and selling ads and that's a that's a grind And one site could be a six-f figureure business

Speaker A

but it's it's a different lifestyle It's a different strategy 100% You're essentially a marketing agency at that point you're handling clients and to put it in perspective like I don't think I've touched any of the my websites for like six months and they just continue to to bring that

Speaker A

in So that's my preference It's not everybody's you know people who you can build a directory I mean I think you know tripadvisor care.com happy all there there's hundreds of directories making multiple millions and many more making over six figures in the 100 to 500k range I just want like

Speaker A

a very hands-off like I just want some lunch money at the end of the day Yeah Yeah Okay Where is your revenue coming from Is it affiliate links Is it ads like AdSense or Mediavine So yeah right now

Speaker A

I'm on Mediavine and I'm on Mediavine Journey So it's for Mediavine's main network is for websites I think doing over 50 or 100,000 sessions which my first directory qualifies for but it actually got denied for some reason but I got into Mediaine Journey I think it's depending on the type of

Speaker A

content But yes Mediavine Journey is my display ad revenue And then I also sell digital products on one of them It's just like a $19 PDF that I built in Canva like a year and a half ago and it sells

Speaker A

like almost every day Wow Okay So plasma niche thrifting niche What are the other kind of niches One of them is like kind of adjacent to thrifting and like you can think kind of liquidation stores Maybe that's a better way to describe it I have ones that are kind of halfbaked in the portaotti

Speaker A

rental space Flea markets I think that that's the one I'm building out right now And then I do have a dog parks directory that I built that's really underoptimized that I need to tweak a lot But yeah Sniff Spot right Sniff Spotspot is Yeah that's not my directory No I know I But similar

Speaker A

similar They're kind of like an Uber for you know backyard dog parks but they're broadening the market for people like you to come in and pick up the leftover traffic Yep Yep Sniff Spotspot does like private dog park rentals Mhm I kind of just created a directory for all the public free dog

Speaker A

parks just to give people some more options and a easier way to navigate those I would love if you could share your screen go to AHF's or I I can I have a paid a AHFS account I could do the same

Speaker A

and like let's just kind of dig around and show me what you look for what stands out to you Sure let's do it And for anyone listening on audio only I'll I'll be describing what we're seeing So let's share this screen here So do you want to kind of understand how I find ideas Are we looking

Speaker A

at a specific niche Maybe even Let's do both Let's let's go inside your brain for a minute and see how you find ideas and then we'll go from there Okay So I think one that I talked about on like

Speaker A

pretty publicly is just typing in near me Okay And the reason I do this is he's on the keywords explorer part of ahrefs.com Yes So right now I'm looking at the AHFs I just typed in near me in

Speaker A

the keyword explorer And this is just one way to kind of you know find ideas in a very kind of random and broad way And I basically don't look at anything here I stay away from branded keywords for the most part like Target near me McDonald's near me Those aren't good directly What are you

Speaker A

going to do with that Yeah exactly Like people have no problem finding McDonald's near me So I usually just scroll all the way to like you know sometimes the 10th page right So I'm just going to keep on clicking down and we can see that of course the volume every month is going down Show

Speaker A

us show us in the columns where the keyword difficulty and the search volume are So right there Yep So here's the keyword difficulty And you can see it's a range between 0 to 100 Zero being the easiest to rank for 100 being the hardest to rank for And search volume is a number for monthly

Speaker A

search in the country that you're filtering for in the United States Okay So yeah like I'll just scroll down this list There's so many random ideas because it's by default showing us the keywords that have the most search volume and I'll look for green right Green indicates that the

Speaker A

keyword difficulty is lower So interesting Dubai chocolate bar near me Zero keyword difficulty 82,000 searches So if I'm you I'm seeing wow like on the surface that's amazing Zero and 82,000 But then because of the fact I just posted content about this this is probably a viral Tik Tok trend

Speaker A

And I don't know if this is going to be around in two years so I'm going to pass Is that what you would say I think that's very valid I also think of anything product based you're going up against

Speaker A

e-commerce stores Yeah You know if you're looking to buy chocolate Yeah Those are going to dominate the search engine results page So it's not really like it doesn't make sense for people to go to a directory to find Dubai chocolate Yeah I did see towing If you can scroll up back up towing near

Speaker A

me was like a 26 Mhm Yeah 26 difficulty and 84,000 What do you think about that one Towing is not bad I think that it seems too broad for me and I would be curious to see something like emergency towing

Speaker A

maybe you know overnight towing or something really really specific So in that case why is that Just because this is lacking the like to me it's not clear what the search intent is right Like okay you're towing near me Are you probably like infer that people are looking to tow a car near

Speaker A

me But do they need their car towed Has their car already been towed Are they looking for an impound lot Exactly You're going to get lower volume on emergency towing near me but you're going to get lower competition and it's probably a higher like cost per click It's a higher ticket item because

Speaker A

it's higher intent right 100% And so actually that's a good example because I might even see that and I'm like well let me look into it deeper So I'll look up the keyword explorer and I'll just type in towing and then I'll go to matching terms And one thing I'll do is I'll also sort in

Speaker A

hrefs by keyword difficulty So I can say I don't want to see anything above a keyword difficulty 20 which I think is generally a good rule Is that kind of your your rough barometer Very rough It's not a hard rule Generally speaking yeah it's it's a rough rough estimate for what's lower

Speaker A

competition to rank for So video is cool but you know what's better Long form audio via podcast and my newsletter tkopod.com Go there to subscribe for free to my newsletter It's one email a week very tactical And then go to my audio podcast Three episodes a week stuff like this You're going to

Speaker A

love it All free No sleazy sales pitch tkopod.com So this is interesting There's lizard liquid towing So there's like this is interesting because sometimes you can build a successful directory just leveraging the search volume and reputation of other businesses right Maybe they're famous

Speaker A

So if you if you were to build a directory and mentioned lizard towing then you might be able to get a little bit of traffic from that you know and that starts to add up if you were to create a

Speaker A

nationwide directory Cheap towing kind of gives us a little bit clearer of intent of what people are looking for There's interesting keywords around specific like Tacoma towing capacity Towing capacity Yeah But essentially I would look through this and I'd ask myself you know

Speaker A

what longtail keywords exist in the towing niche that might be worth it Nothing I'm seeing too much A lot of this it seems like towing capacity is actually a very commonly searched query So maybe I'm thinking okay is there opportunity to make a directory around just towing capacity for

Speaker A

different trucks or different types of vehicles Because look at this There's literally zero keyword difficulty for toy to Toyota 400 towing capacity gets searched 4,000 times a month and that trend continues throughout tons If you add up all those all that search volume across thousands

Speaker A

of makes and models it's a lot of traffic starts to add up And I do kind of take a look at this too SV at the very top says 2 million So this is saying that of all the keywords that contain

Speaker A

the the keyword towing and that's under a keyword difficulty of 20 there's 2 million people a month or two million searches a month being being made So that's a lot Even if you get 20,000 of that you know 30,000 now you're scratching the surface of what could be like a $1,000 a month directory

Speaker A

Well and you look on the left side the the most commonly appearing word in towing is capacity They're not looking for to get their car car towed at all which perfectly proves your point It was too broad of a keyword Exactly Yeah that's a great observation And I didn't even know that

Speaker A

Like this is I think we stumbled upon like lowkey a pretty interesting directory niche Look at that Someone listening towing capacity website Yeah I guess like one thing I would be concerned with is if this is a you know likeformational content I think we've seen in the last few years with

Speaker A

the Google core updates are pretty vulnerable to AI So that's like one angle that I might be a little bit concerned about But just I would research it and try to understand where people are getting this information If if I look it up on Reddit you know if I copy and paste this

Speaker A

and type Reddit and there's a lot of people asking like this person a year ago as Tacoma towing capacity question mark as 20 comments 20 plus comments how much can you tow in your Tacoma Like these are good signs that people are looking elsewhere Like people may not be

Speaker A

satisfied with the AI overview or going to chat GBT So what a what a great framework in general of if you see something appearing over and over on Reddit it's probably because they're not getting what they need on Google which probably means that something needs to be on Google that answers that

Speaker A

question because we'd all prefer to go to Google first right 100% Yeah And just to add on to that like I'm sure there's nuance Like I don't really tow anything so I don't know anything about this niche but I would be willing to bet if we spent like two hours going through every single Reddit

Speaker A

thread there would be nuances to why people are asking this question Like it's not that's not as simple as seeing like you know Subaru Outbacks can pull 7,000 pounds And so that's your answer It's like there's probably some nuance within this niche that you can use and make your

Speaker A

directory more valuable All right I didn't want to derail you from what you're doing on the near me page Yes If you want to go back to that Yeah So essentially I This is a good starting point This is a good starting point And what I just showed you is really what I do whenever I find

Speaker A

something interesting And truthfully I would never have researched towing near me So like but you it was interesting to you and and I think that's where a lot of the opportunity lies Like what I think is easy to rank and and the vision that I see for my directory is very different than

Speaker A

than literally anyone else So yeah I'll just keep scrolling down I find a lot of promise in keywords that hover around like 15,000 monthly search volume to like 60,000 I think I found the most opportunity in that range Not a hard rule but just mentioning just observations Batting cages that

Speaker A

looks I coincidentally I have a friend that lives across the street that just opened a batting cage and they are thriving Really Okay Great So yeah So that's that is interesting And right off the bat my mind goes to affiliate plays people I used to go to the batting cages all the time I played

Speaker A

baseball for the first 14 years of my life and we'd go and sometimes you forget your bat and like it's just like there's opportunity there where you can you know yeah sell something related a glove a bag whatever it is So that's another angle Whenever I'm going through this I don't just look

Speaker A

at the keyword difficulty or the search volume I'm thinking about what the monetization potential is here How passive is this You know according to my standards if I want something really passive and evergreen batting cages might be a decent move because the chances are batting cages aren't

Speaker A

going to change in the next 20 years very much It's just going to be a metal cage and a a ball that dispenses at a high speed and and that's it You just It's very simple So that might be worth

Speaker A

researching more for someone like me What are some other like overarching trends similar to near me like other ways that I find ideas Yeah That you could use to start your search For sure Yeah that's a good point I like to research successful directories that are already getting

Speaker A

a lot of traffic and I like to kind of snipe their keywords and get some ideas there So so I do have another way to find ideas but I do want to show you a few different directories first And what

Speaker A

I'd like you to do is just guess the traffic and then we can go into how I find ideas from these successful directories So if that sounds good then I will show you the first directory here Drag it around here Okay I have a story about this actually for those listening He's on penguin dry

Speaker A

ice.com And it is so funny you brought this up because I ownund and something domain names and you know a lot of them are stupid but I used to own a third party logistics company that we we helped food brands ship their food and we were getting dry ice on a regular basis and there was

Speaker A

no directory of dry ice We'd have to go to Kroger or Albertson's and buy it and you didn't know the cost or whatever and so I bought the domain name dollarry ice.com to be like a directory of dry

Speaker A

ice facility So here you are showing me penguin dry ice.com which seems to be a dry ice directory Mhm Yep And yeah just like you It's a very ugly website Very ugly website A single page website So the directory just lives on this page There's Wow Not a lot of detail It just sort of says the

Speaker A

name the address the proximity how far it is But if I'm like buying dry ice like for example my dad has a family business where he ships frozen food across the country We're not looking for like Albertsonsized dry ice We're looking to buy a lot of dry ice Mhm B2B business There's not really any

Speaker A

clear data enrichment around Hillsboro New Jersey dry ice on the quantity You know what about their service I want to know so much more So based on what you see how much traffic do you think this directory is getting Oh man So if if I understand this correctly Penguin is the company that sells

Speaker A

dry ice And this is just a directory of their facilities that sell it So many of these are probably just grocery stores I'm going to say 40 40,000 a month All right let's take a look I'll head over to the site explorer So a little bit off This is a small directory but it still shocked me

Speaker A

15,000 monthly visitors and from climbing it's climbing and at its peak it was getting an estimated on target of 83,000 monthly visits back in October of 2024 So it does peak and I would guess that maybe there's some seasonality to this but you know pretty consistent you know

Speaker A

they've had some some of their LOLs but pretty impressive for just a dry ice directory And they don't have separate pages for all those which is not optimized at all Right It depends It just kind of depends how you structure your data But yeah this is a single page website And you can see

Speaker A

that this single page ranks for a 100,000 keywords Holy kind of crazy Dry Ice Boston Dry Ice D Like yeah they're completely dominating the space and I'm sure it does wonders for Penguin as a brand So very niche though Like this is so niche and they're This is believe it or not not the only dry

Speaker A

ice directory I found Otherwise they're smaller but it's just proof that you can go that niche and still win to some capacity Can you speak for a second about authority because that's probably why they're winning because like they're doing the hard thing They sell dry ice It's relevant

Speaker A

Like Google wants us Google wants to show us things that are relevant that have high trust and have high authority And Penguin has all the all those things right Yep How do you get around that If you're not a Penguin and you want to build a successful directory is it helpful to go in niches

Speaker A

that don't really have a high trust high authority player Sure that's definitely one way to do it Ultimately the game is back links You know I think a lot of people whether they're in SEO or not they know backlinks have been the main driver And so to your point yeah Penguin is pretty authoritative

Speaker A

It's a 37 domain rating which is an indication of how authoritative a website is but in my mind like I think this is still viable to overtake And the reason is one of the competing directories for dry ice that I found it looks really bad and I'll pull it up here It's this website right

Speaker A

here Oh okay For those listening one of the worst websites I've ever seen in my life That's just all I'll say It's really bad Holy cow Like 97 Yeah So just just for a quick comparison right Like if we

Speaker A

just see because obviously this directory dry ice directory.com Yes It gets a little bit less traffic It has its moments as well but I actually analyzed and did a side-by-side comparison between these two websites and they're not too far off If we look at the keywords it's ranking for let's see

Speaker A

this is dry ice near me There was I mean dry ice near me now rank five They have some keywords on the first page Penguin dry ice is more or less like dry ice for for sale near me They're rank

Speaker A

they're position sixish So it's not like a massive difference If I were Dry Ice Directory this ugly website I think there's a world where you just do a lot of link building and you can start to slowly overtake Penguin Dry Ice But from what I see it's like dry ice is pretty competitive right

Speaker A

Like would you enter that space based on what you've seen If I'm okay with a directory that just based on the volume that makes like maybe tops $500 a month passively then yeah I would And I've done that before I mean I could probably make this in like a week and be a decent competitor I

Speaker A

would give it like a a B minus in terms of like grades opportunity opportunities Yeah Just just for me would you agree that people often put too much weight in the appearance of a website Like I'm over here making fun of this website and it's it's objectively ugly but it works And if someone

Speaker A

goes through seven clicks to get to this website and it has what they need they're not going to click back and find a prettier website right So like all else equal yes make a pretty website but like these are winning because they're answering questions not in spite of how their website looks

Speaker A

right Yeah Yeah I don't want people to listen to this be like I'm going to go find an ugly website and then compete with them It's like that's like it I don't think it moves the needle all that much in the grand scheme of things I would agree I would agree I think people do put way

Speaker A

too big of an emphasis on design I think there's a difference between having something really modern and and and looking good and something that's mobile optimized which is much more important Like across all my directories I think it's like 80 to 82% of website visitors are on mobile So

Speaker A

yeah you can have a pretty website but if it's not really easy to navigate on mobile then then that's that's a really big missed opportunity Yeah Did you want to show me a couple others The next one one that I talked about recently and it's called movie locations It's to help you find

Speaker A

the locations that certain movies and films were were were shot Movie-loations.com is what we're looking at Lot of ads going on is what I see very cluttered More updated than the ones we've looked at but still fairly outdated Movie films places Yeah this is there's a lot going on here There

Speaker A

is It's hard to know where your eyes should look but it's a very simple directory So I'm going to think this is like movie theater locations This is just like if you were curious where Harry Potter was shot or if Lord of the Rings was shot in a certain country or something like that Yeah Yeah

Speaker A

I mean this is huge TAM total addressable market Like everyone's watching movies A lot of people want to know I would think this is six figures worth of monthly visitors over 100,000 Okay let's take a look here I'll just grab this root domain and let's take a look All right overshot

Speaker A

it a little bit but 81,000 monthly visitors Wow And I think I was still surprised by that I know there's a large addressable search market for this niche but how many of the millions of people who watch Fast and Furious actually care to know where this was shot Like it's probably

Speaker A

got to be a very small percentage But this is a great example of an evergreen niche because you can always just keep this information It doesn't go out of date And just look at this graph It's so consistent Like it's just been like that for the last 5 years So whoever whoever owns this is

Speaker A

making I would assume close to around $5,000 $6,000 passively a month maybe more because they have a lot of ad placements And yeah walk us through that math That's the question I was going to ask you next anyway How do you convert 81,000 visitors a month to $5,000 a month Yeah So

Speaker A

it's really honestly difficult because it's not arbitrary but it's very depend there's a lot of variables So it depends on could be affiliate could be AdSense could be Mediaviaine could be e-commerce like so yeah that's that's exactly one angle like how many monetization strategies

Speaker A

are there even if there's ads is it a private ad partnership or not and then not only that it's like nichebased gaming is a notoriously low RPM niche if you're monetizing through display ads so you might need like a million monthly visitors for a gaming directory that earns the same as

Speaker A

a directory that gets 50,000 monthly visitors in the finance niche or something along those lines So it's very difficult and I always just use what I get as far as RPMs in my thrifting niche in my other niche directories because they're I would say pretty in the middle of the road So you

Speaker A

know decent RPMs nothing insane but for me those listening RPM is revenue per thousand views Yep So it is an educated guess At the end of the day it's very very difficult to say Not only that but Hrefs is third party data So we can only kind of take this 81,000 monthly visitors with a grain of

Speaker A

salt I know with Hrefs it shows my thrifting niche to get like 35,000 monthly visitors and it's just off by like 20 20 30,000 So they could be getting more and so that makes it even harder Okay So but

Speaker A

what is like what is the RPM that you get on your thrifting niche for example I think it's right right around $16 or $17 ballpark That's good And it fluctuates too Like sometimes it really fluctuates So it's it's hard to say And I think it scales based on how much traffic you get because

Speaker A

it gets more it's get it gets higher RPMs than my healthcare directory which is not what you would think but I think the more traffic you get maybe it's the case that advertisers are willing to pay more I'm not really sure how that works but yeah it is interesting Outside of AHFs what other tools

Speaker A

are in your tool belt for building these sites and for researching opportunity in these sites Yeah for research it's really just a combination of href's Google Maps reviews I look at these Google Map review tags a lot which we can we can pull up and Reddit I would say those and then Tik Tok

Speaker A

of course was kind of naturally one I feel like people don't filter their true thoughts on Tik Tok when they're leaving a comment which makes it a great area to do some social listening And then what do you use to build this your directories It really depends but I guess WordPress has been

Speaker A

the chosen CMS for me in the last couple years Right now I'm kind of diving deep into Lovable and trying my hand at AI coding But yeah so I'll use WordPress and it's funny like I use Elementor Pro which is like the most basic theme I've used that And yeah it's like a lot of people which

Speaker A

gets a lot of hate by the way People are like "Oh it's slow and clunky." And I'm like "Yeah but if you can build fast sometimes brute forcing your way to an MVP is way better than trying to

Speaker A

automate everything and then like forgetting the big picture of what you're doing which is like consolidating valuable data on the internet that people are looking for Do you use any like thirdparty tools Not like a WordPress plugin but stuff outside of WordPress to connect things

Speaker A

Sometimes I'll play with I've used Geodirectory which is a dedicated directory plugin It's more for programmatic builds So what I mean by that is with a plugin like that you know if you have a a directory that has 2,000 business locations it would take forever to make to create those pages

Speaker A

individually So you can publish those all at once because kind of it's it's built with a database You can just fill out the information and you can publish that So that's pretty good For other types of directory builds I've used WPL import just to bulk import my data and jet engine which helps

Speaker A

you filter the data Right If I'm looking for a dog park specifically like a specific type of dog park that offers like fenced in area for small dogs only like you might want to create a specific filter and that's how you can accomplish that You can use that jet engine and build that out

Speaker A

How much weight do you give an exact match keyword as the domain name It's a leg up for sure Like exact match domain names are they're effective I mean it's been proven I don't I think it might So

Speaker A

that would be like dry ice near me right I'm just trying to explain to those listening what an exact match domain name is Yeah like petcremation.com would be in insane Like that'd be amazing You don't need to mention near me in the actual domain because any query that says near me like dog parks

Speaker A

near me It's like it's based on your location So like you don't need to include that You can just include the main keyword And you always want to go for tldds if possible I like to choose.org or if

Speaker A

it's really if I'm out of options but I would rather have a hyphen in my name and I choose a.com than than just go straight to a.org But yeah you want your your main keyword for sure Are you

Speaker A

using AI at all to build these or to do research Directories is a multi-step process and AI is used in multiple steps of that process In terms of ideiation sometimes but I like to rely more on user generated content because it more accurately depicts what the challenges are in terms of like

Speaker A

finding dry ice right I'd much more I'd be more interested in what people are saying But yeah AI is definitely a very big part especially when it comes to data enrichment You know you have your idea How do you bring it to life How do you make it an actually valuable directory people want

Speaker A

to visit Well you have to enrich the the hell out of your directory You know you have to offer data and information that's going to save people time And if you had a horse that needed to be cremated

Speaker A

you might go to Google Maps and type in horse cremation But what realistically might happen is a lot of business profiles will will show up and you'll have to spend a lot of time sifting through the reviews maybe typing a keyword in review to see if anyone's cremated a horse at this specific

Speaker A

cremation service It's it's timeconuming So AI is used to essentially automate parts of that process where you can essentially enrich your data I built a enrichment tool called enrich.directory and it essentially does that You can type in horse and it'll look at all the cremation companies in the

Speaker A

in the United States and look for the keyword horse and then you can prompt it and say can I cremate a horse at this place and it'll say yes So that's cool Yeah So long-winded way to say yes AI is definitely used in in the process So if someone's starting from complete scratch the only

Speaker A

thing they know about directories is hearing this one podcast Where should they start and how do they get from where they are today to they have a website built ready to go A lot of my recommendations and advice actually has less to do with practical tactical advice

Speaker A

I think people who see directories think it's like super simple which relative to other businesses they are But I think what led me to succeeding with my first three directory websites initially it was just to learn SEO Like I think people realize they have to believe that SEO works And

Speaker A

a lot of people I'm noticing are choosing the wrong niches and they can't rank and then they just give up They're discouraged They're like "Oh this doesn't work Directories don't work." So I guess my tactical recommendation is use your unique personality and character your

Speaker A

life experiences the same way I did with the thrift stores and try to come up with unique and quirky niche directory ideas that probably no one's building a directory in There's literally thousands of opportunities There's thousands of people looking for very specific information on

Speaker A

the internet and you can cater to those people So that's kind of what I would recommend But start in a low competition niche Don't go for something broad like towing near me That's an intermediate niche Intermediate to advanced You you need to know the fundamentals of SEO and know need to

Speaker A

know what you're doing to succeed in that niche So prove to yourself that it works Could you dive deeper on that on why something like towing near me is too advanced for a beginner Yeah it's part of just me and my experience knowing that anything service- based with a high with the opportunity to

Speaker A

make a lot of money right Like towing companies is like I don't think you have to be a genius to know that there's a lot of towing companies Why is that Well people are making money towing cars So there's naturally going to be more competition which if you place all that knowledge in an SEO

Speaker A

environment you know that you're going to need a lot of backlinks to rank for a directory website or any website for that matter Yes it's the driver of SEO but with that said you need high quality backlinks It's not that easy for someone who's just getting started right Requires a little bit

Speaker A

of creativity being crafty being knowledgeable about all the ways you can acquire these back links So in that sense intuitively I'm saying that I think it's an intermediate niche What would be a more beginner niche A beginner niche I would say the dry ice if we're if we're staying on topic Dry

Speaker A

ice is a pretty low competition niche I mean it's it's it's pretty pretty in there The thing is like every competitive niche typically has some low competition niche layered underneath Is there like a generalized keyword difficulty or or search volume that you'd look for on a more beginner

Speaker A

niche or is it just totally industry dependent Keyword difficulty is is a big one I would look at zero to five Like if we if we looked up the near me method that I described and and you set

Speaker A

your keyword difficulty at a maximum of like five or even three I'm sure you'd find some pretty low competition stuff Backlinks could be a three-hour long conversation But in your experience what's the 8020 of getting good backlinks Like the the growth hacky clever way in your experience Before

Speaker A

even thinking about the clever ways you have to decide how black hat you want to be how if you're okay crossing the lines of you know Google toos and here's a secret that's not so secret Everyone breaks the rules in SEO No one really plays fair They do what works But if I'm just strictly saying

Speaker A

okay here are some ways that you can go get back links One thing that's really worked well for me is to look at a bounty right A existing directory in your space use hrefs or a tool similar to hrefs

Speaker A

and look at their back links Reach out to those people giving those back links to your competitor and you can pay them You can leverage anything of value that you have You can say "Hey my directory gets 10,000 monthly clicks We're proud to be the most accurate pet cremation directory online and

Speaker A

I saw that you linked to this this website Can I pay you 50 bucks to swap out the link for ours You know we we we think we do a better job Not just to add mine but to swap it That's the key To swap

Speaker A

it And so you have this situation where now your competitor loses a very good backlink You gain that backlink without overpromising anything Like it's literally taken me one strong backlink with that exact method to rank one in a low competition but high search volume niche which is kind of

Speaker A

bananas That is like one Now the domain authority of the backlink is is everything right If you have a backlink from CNN.com versus an a backlink to Martha's Pet Cremation Facility Nashville Tennessee.com it makes all the difference It makes a big difference So like if I were to break down

Speaker A

what makes a high quality backlink it's definitely like domain authority domain rating That's that's a great indication But it's also how much traffic is that referring page getting right If that CNN page that's backlinking to your website if it's getting zero visitors yes it's kind of

Speaker A

worth something But what would be way better is if it was getting 500 monthly visitors and people are scrolling the article then clicking on the backlink landing on your directory Now Google's like "Oh wow This is a highly relevant blog post or article." And people are engaged Those user

Speaker A

signals are becoming increasingly important in a world of AI spam So traffic for the referring page is a biggie Link domains right So if that CNN page is linking to a 100,000 websites it's like there's not that much link equity or link juice as people call it And a simple way to

Speaker A

think about that is like imagine trying to split a birthday cake a 100,000 ways It's just not going to you're going to get like a crumb So that's kind of the same you know thing that happens with with a backlink that's refer you know linking to a bunch of pages So you want low link domains

Speaker A

Okay What about those many services that sell back links 500 bucks a month for X number of backlinks Do you put any stock in those I think it could work You just have to be really careful I think a

Speaker A

lot of gray hat stuff going on there Oh black hat Gray or black hat Yeah Like I feel like a lot of those backlinks that you pay 500 or thousands of dollars a month for very low quality I would for

Speaker A

the most part never just go on Google and type in backlink services and choose the first one I think that's kind of crazy Same with Fiverr backlinks Like oh $5 for like a thousand back links Those are spammy backlinks They may result in well first of all they're not going to help Second of all

Speaker A

it might even get you penalized which could lead to being de-indexed which is like the worst case scenario Like your your website will not be able to be searched on Google So it's just really risky and you want to be very careful buying backlinks is like I guess technically against Google to but

Speaker A

again no one really plays by the rules there So you just have to be very yeah you have to trust the backlink vendor If you don't trust them you can always buy the backlink and then don't send it to your direct site Send it to a you know an article that backlinks to your website So you're

Speaker A

bumping up the backlink if that makes sense and there's less risk there There's a lot that we can talk about around backlinks The best way to get back links in your opinion like let's say it's a pet cremation site is I'm gonna go find like a high domain authority a very relevant site in in

Speaker A

this case maybe about like end of life care for pets and I'm going to reach out to them manually because the harder way is often the better way and say "Hey we provide a really good service Would you would you mind linking to us If no then like can I give you 50 bucks to link to us?" Like

Speaker A

that's the 8020 of it That works That's reliable I think it's the best balance between what's like in your control right You can aggressively reach out to people and like yes it's out of your control that you respond and accept the offer but it's the balance between like highest

Speaker A

quality backlink speed and like being aggressive with your link building and price That's because if you were to buy the same quality backlink if they knew what they were giving you it would be 500 bucks 1,000 bucks for that backlink Because like I said that one backlink that got me to

Speaker A

rank one has resulted in like two years worth of like $2,000 a month you know to $2,500 a month revenue you know and I bought it for 50 bucks So wow Which niche was that in That that's in

Speaker A

the thrift store niche Okay That's And I've tested buying back links I've spent thousands of dollars on different link building services and like I can say that yeah this is the best bang for your buck and for for quality any other like closing best practices you'd like to leave people with

Speaker A

on just how to build a profitable directory Any advice that you could give that would help them save themselves a world of hurt that you you had to go through Oh man there's a lot You know it's funny because the best advice is oftentimes the most cliche like just just build it Learn learn

Speaker A

while building right That's what I did I didn't have a massive emphasis on making money from my directory website As I mentioned it was more of a playground to learn the skill It's very hard because once you start building and you have a successful directory you never know what's going

Speaker A

to follow Like you literally don't know if you're end up you're going to end up like talking about it and then people want to hire you and become an SEO consultant and that's going to lead to building an SEO agency like this is a very common route and so I would say just like be convinced

Speaker A

yourself that SEO works Choose a low competition niche Try to focus on the skill development not just the monetization efforts because those will come Once you have traffic it's like you have like a dozen ways to monetize You get you can just choose but you need to get traffic before that

Speaker A

And yeah it's a slow game Like that's a really big one People are like I don't see any progress two weeks after I launched my directory I'm like "Dude show me one business in general where maybe SAS but that's like with years of experience where you can whip something up that quick and

Speaker A

it gets like a lot of organic traffic." Yeah Like while you wait go build another one and then another one and then next thing you know it's going to be six months later you have 15 sites and seven of them are cranking Yep Yep A numbers game Yeah So it's all the cliche stuff

Speaker A

you know It it it's true It's it's Yeah At the end of the day it is true Well this was amazing Thank you for your time Frey Where can everyone find you No this was awesome This was really fun

Speaker A

I post on YouTube just under my name Freychu You can follow me on X or Twitter also Freychu Yeah if you want to join a free community I have that as well People are building their directories so you can hop in there if you'd like And yeah I'm around I'm around on the internet

Speaker A

What' you think Please share it with a friend Someone could use this episode about directory

Topics:directory websitespassive incomeSEOkeyword researchonline businessAhrefsniche marketingdigital entrepreneurshipwebsite monetizationChris Koerner

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