How to Build a Profitable Online Directory with Frey

in this episode I sat down with Frey Frey is an online directory King he teaches us how to build an online

directory that does anywhere between two and $10,000 a month of actual passive income something that you can work on

Just for about 15 minutes a week he talks about how do you find an idea how do you validate that idea what tools do

you need um and this was a super special episode because uh this is actually Frey's first podcast that he's ever been

on he's an upand cominging Creator he's got only a few thousand subscribers um but the guy sits on a treasure chest of

gold um and you're going to learn a lot around how to build a directory from 0 to one in this episode I hope you enjoy

[Music] it baby okay we got Frey on the Pod how I met

Frey is actually pretty interesting he did a reaction video to my John Rush how to build a 10K a month online directory

video that his reaction video went viral I invited him on the Pod and what are we going to learn today Frey yeah so today

I wanted to show you guys how I built my first directory website um this was built back in October of

2022 and uh it's really different than what most people think of when they think of a directory website you know

most people think of just a simple and modern website you put in your address your ZIP code your city and then there's

a modern map that pops up um this is way simpler and the reason I love this is because um you know at least for my

first directory website it's been monetized for 18 months straight it's uh takes me you know about 15 minutes a

month to maintain so it's Evergreen and location based uh which is my favorite kind of directory to build um last month

I think it did around $2,300 in revenue and so overall it's just a really easy way to get started in your in your first

directory build and um yeah you don't need to use AI tools although I recommend it for some parts uh and yeah

it's just a it's a great start to get to your first 2 to 10K in mrr as an encoder which is which I am and by the end of

this episode what will people be able to do so by the end I really wanted to focus on finding and validating a niche

but I'm going to show you how you can go out and basically create a really basic directory that's optimized for SEO you

know it's a um it's a really simple step of finding an idea validating that the idea and making sure that the directory

Niche that you're choosing is actually solving a problem I'll show you how to get some data clean the data and enrich

it um and then we'll go into how to implement it on on a on a WordPress website but you can use any content

management content management system uh that you beautiful all right let's get our hands dirty all right so before we

go into the T tutorial before we go into the tutorial I wanted to play a game so one of the things that I like to do in

my free time is find different weird directory websites

and I want you to just guess how much monthly traffic this is getting and then I'll go into some stats around how much

I think it's making um and just just a couple stats but this is the first website we have

roadsideamerica.com right off the bat not the prettiest website but just looking what you know

and I'll give you a little context this is a directory on quirky roadside attractions in the United States So

based on what you're looking at what are you thinking here I'm gonna say 50,000 uniques a month okay that's pretty good

let's let's take a look here H reps yeah I and the reason I say that is first of all it's it's hideous

it's got like what is that is that comic Sands you know for Roadside America like if you're close to Comics SS like uh you

know yeah May Lord be with you you know what I mean you need all the help you can get but I do think that this

Niche I bet you that it's it's there's not that much competition yeah it's it's definitely an

interesting one so this one's getting 85,000 monthly visitors um pretty impressive here and um

couple things I want to point out so you know beyond the impressive traffic you know we have monetization through

display ads so it's plastered with a bunch of display ads there um I think it's around like 96% tier one traffic so

US Canada Australia UK those kind of countries and if anyone knows SEO you know the last two years have been insane

like the the Google core updates have been uh you know it's it's been a it's been demolished out here you know don't

get me started bro don't get me started yeah so this has been pretty resilient um if I were to guess how much this is

making I would probably conservatively say 5 to 7,000 a month very passively because of the display ads but um yeah

that's the first website um super basic like static directory as as simple as you can get and um I'll make a quick

note and say the tutorial I'm I'm showing today is a static website so it'll be kind of similar ilar to this

build all right let's move on to the second one here which is atlasobscura.com

this is um this is a directory about it's so it's a worldwide directory and it's about um like attractions that are

off the beaten path things that maybe only the locals would know if you're visiting a certain

country quick break in the Pod to tell you a little bit about startup Empire so startup Empire is my private membership

where it's a bunch of people like me like you who want to build out their startup ideas now they're looking for

content to help accelerate that they're looking for potential co-founders they're looking for uh tutorials from

people like me to come in and tell them how do you do email marketing how do you build an audience how do you go viral on

Twitter all these different things that's exactly what startup Empire is and it's for people who want to start a

startup but are looking for ideas or it's for people who have a startup but just they're not seeing the traction uh

that they need so you can check out the link to Startup empire.co in the description I'm going to say 35,000

uniques a month okay 30 okay okay 35,000 let's take a [Music]

look oh my God million uh insanely impressive uh directory website also

noticing very little to no effect from the Google core updates um you know we got 90 91% uh tier one traffic monetized

through display ads um you know we can start to see some of these ads from AdSense they're also selling a book

which is interesting but if I were to guess how much this is making I think a really conservative guess just from

AdSense is around 30 ,000 a month but I really think it's probably closer to 50 or 60 um it's always hard to tell but

very nice website and props to whoever owns this it's a nice one props to the millionaire who owns it from their

Chateau yeah yeah and um yeah I mean this is just super useful too so I'm all about creating directory websites that

actually like provide entertainment or solve a problem so that's that's really cool all right let's go to the last one

here this one's a little bit morbid but we have the findagrave.com website

directory you can find where dead presidents are buried you can find all sorts of interesting burial sites but uh

what what are you thinking here just based on what you see here in the niche I think I think it's big I think this is

at least a million uniques a month I think that is a pretty good guess

take a look 1.4 million monthly visitors absolutely crushing it um also resilient to Google absolutely killing

it absolutely killing it an amazing this is like one of my favorite because I've never heard of this website and I just

found it and I can't believe there's this much interest around um where where people are buried

it's just not something that has ever come across my interest I mean it makes sense right like it makes sense it does

it does you're trying to you're trying to find where someone's buried and you're looking for an easy way to do it

findagrave.com yep exactly so I don't see this going going away anytime soon um and this I would say so again 92%

tier one traffic AdSense um is their main form of monetization they have all sorts of stuff here this is I'm going to

put this I think this could be a $100,000 a month website but I think you know 60 70k like is a very fair estimate

here um but really like this just shows how large of a directory website you can go build and that is possible out there

um and uh it kind of breaks my brain I don't know about you it's it's kind of kind of nutty to think

about I think it's nty to think about also cuz my thesis on director and I kind and I spoke a little about this in

the John Rush episode is that it's a really good place like I think people are monetizing

directory is wrong like they're just putting AdSense we saw one example of someone literally selling a

book um the opportuni is actually to build software on top of these directories so you use directories to

get the traffic you get all these eyeballs in a particular Niche you build software now you can use AI to build

software instantly and you get SAS like multiples uh on that software business

and then you've got the consistent traffic that you're getting from the directory 100% 100% I totally agree um I

still like the I still will say AdSense has been the closest thing that I've ever experienced to passive income so

there's that if people are going to optimize a lifestyle business then okay that's fine but if you're going for

something that's you know that's big then I totally agree and I will just really quickly show you one boring

website that wasn't on the list but this is a directory on you know farms and csas and their biggest call to action is

their SAS so they actually just like have these little like advertisements for this software that they own um I'm

pretty sure they own it because it shares the same like business domain but yeah like this is a perfect example of

them funneling relevant website traffic into a SAS product that they own which I think is incredibly

smart so that's cool um awesome so should we dive into how to build a profitable directory I I

don't see why not all right let's do it um so the thing with my so like my favorite kinds of directories are

evergreen location-based directories and the reason for that is because

once you have a directory it's not really fun a year or two down the line when you have to upkeep data and so it's

nice to to find things that you don't have to update very often so the thing that I do to find ideas is I'll go to

HRS and I'll type in near me into the keyword Explorer and this is just going to show

me this long list of local queries that are getting tons of search volume and this is my favorite way to just on a

Saturday afternoon I'm just going to browse this and look for different ideas and you can basically start looking for

keywords that have really high monthly search volume and low keyword difficulty um these are quite big and in my

experience I've learned what to avoid uh my sweet spot is actually around 30 to 100,000 uh monthly searches so I'll

click you know into the later pages and start to look look for different types of ideas um but you know a couple things

that I'll avoid just sharing some things that I've learned the hard way um I personally don't like niches where it's

really seasonal so I think one of these said pumpkin patches near me oh yeah there it is so 152,000 monthly searches

um but it's so seasonal I don't really want a website that I put a lot of time and effort in just to monetize really

well for a month um the second thing I avoid are you know niches where the data might be difficult

to get so one of these says earthquake near me and I imagine at least for me I don't I wouldn't know how to go and get

data on earthquakes um and it also sounds like something that is kind of competitive and the third thing that I

would avoid are really big branded keywords so Taco Bell near me right um couple reasons why I avoid this the

first thing is that they're probably already going to have an updated directory and they' probably already

solved the problem of driving their customers to you know a Taco Bell near them but the second reason I think is

more important which is it's just two one-dimensional like people looking for taco B Bell near

me in Google aren't looking for different types of Taco Bell there's like very one-dimensional um search

intent and that's not what I'm looking for I want to um and I'll I'll show you an example that I found uh I actually

think it's it's somewhere on like the 14th page or something but we're going to be using the example dog parks near

me for this tutorial today so I'll show you that so dog park near me this is one

that I found using that exact same method and get 73,000 monthly visitors uh or searches I should say and uh not

too difficult a 27 out of 100 in terms of keyword difficulty so that's not too bad but check out all of these other

keywords that contain dog park indoor dog park offleash dog park dog water park there's a lot of fragmentation in

the search in tent and it's multi-dimensional if you will but the point is like people aren't satisfied

looking for just any dog park they're looking for certain types of dog Parks maybe ones that offer water fountains

you know benches to sit on shade and all sorts of different types of uh amenities that you could basically

capitalize on you know when you build out a directory like this I'm thinking okay I can include these uh to enrich my

directory and make it more useful save people more time rather than having to go to Google Maps and click around in

the reviews and figure out if there's shade or benches or not so that's kind of the first thing that I look for high

search volume relatively low keyword difficulty and a good amount of fragmentation when it comes to the

search intent which we can see here um what what what sort of keyword difficulty is good in your opinion I

think anything under 20 is pretty easy in my opinion um I think keyword difficulty is a little bit misleading

too because there are some uh very low keyword difficulty niches um and I'll give you a quick

example um it says that you know fast food near me is a keyword difficulty for but it's really not going to be easy to

rank for that um and there's a lot of examples where keyword difficulty is really low but there's a lot of

competition or there's few competition but their their backlinks are so dominant you're just not going to be

able would outrank them and get traffic to your website but overall generally speaking I think under 20 is a pretty

good bet um and um yeah yeah I would say under 20 um that's pretty good if you know what

you're doing then I think 40 to 50 is also possible uh I've had some like programmatic directories that I've built

where I've targeted keyword difficulty 70 keywords that are getting 60,000 monthly visitors and I've created like

on a fresh domain I was able to rank on the first page in like two months for some of the keywords so it just really

depends and keyword difficulty is kind of a weird metric but it's a start it's a good start to know how easy it

is um so after we figure out people are looking for different types of dog parks I'm going to go into some competitive

research and for that I just use good old Google so I'm just going to type in Dog Park Los Angeles for

example and I'm just going to scroll through and look for any kinds of directories that are on the first page

so you can see here I found this one right here this is a um pretty big dog related website I don't know if you ever

heard of it but bring fedo pretty massive website and they do have a dog park

directory and I might just click around and ask myself is this a directory that I can

improve on can I build something that's better than this um and so this is pretty nice um I also like to check how

much traffic uh some of these are getting but let's just compile a couple different um competitors so that was

kind of the main one I I'll also just type in dog park near me which is the exact match um I also found this one

this is an interesting competitor and it's a really basic directory so let's just see how much

this one's getting in terms of traffic all right so yeah I remember this one this one was interesting

because it's getting 21,000 monthly visitors but when you look at it it's super basic and if we put in a sample

zip code just put like a Los Angeles zip code it's so simple it just tells you the name and the address of the dog park

but if I were a dog park own if I were a dog owner which I am and I was taking my dog to the park I would want to know a

little bit more information so off the bat I'm already thinking there's ways to improve this there's features that

aren't listed here that aren't that helpful and it's are it's still getting 21,000 monthly visitors so this is a

great website where I'm making a mental note and I'm like this is this is my bounty I'm gonna set a bounty on this I

can do I can do better than this when you when you see something like this smile goes on your face right

you're like okay there's not only have I identified that there's an opportunity to build a directory here there's a not

the leading directory but you know top directory one of the top directories couldn't be more basic if it

tried exactly it's it's all it's got a lot of positive signals that yeah this is pretty unhelpful yet people are going

to websites like this and it just shows you that Google Maps is not satisfying everyone's needs if Google Maps was

doing that people would probably just not come to a website like this but this is a really really good sign that um

people are looking elsewhere and websites like these are taking advantage of that so why not just build

something and um take that traffic from them basically you know it is it is what it is right SEO is a a PVP game you know

we can't all be Top Rank and and unfortunately I'm gonna have to set a bounty on you nyab bone that's just how

it is it's nothing personal but it's just it's just what's going to happen um so this is really cool and um you know

this is also a good example um I think I looked up the traffic for so if we look at this example and we just

try to figure out how much traffic uh dog parks are on this website just get an idea real quick all right so 13,000

not too bad um it's significant enough where I'm still ex you know I'm still excited like that's that's not too bad I

don't think they specialize in or they're not targeting dog parks the general keyword that gets you know

70,000 monthly searches seems like offleash dog parks is kind of the the area that they optimize their their

pages on but still still good and for this I would say like it's more useful to

see what kind of competition I'm up against because it's way better than nyab bone it's much more filled out

there's better photos but again like where

you know where are the where are the features saying whether this has dog bags or water fountains or benches and

um all the all the other good stuff that I want to know if I'm taking my dog to the dog park so this is uh yeah so I I

would probably spend another you know 30 minutes to an hour looking at different competition on Google uh for dog park

related keywords but I think this is good enough especially in isab bone for me to go ahead and say all right this is

good so the next thing after I have my competition I'm going to just look it up uh I'm just going to try and use Reddit

to confirm or not confirm if this is a problem worth solving so if I just type in you know Dog Park Los Angeles

Reddit so looking on Reddit for dog park Los Angeles for an example we can already see a bunch of different forums

where people are looking for dog parks so again another great sign that people are looking elsewhere they're not over

Reliant and finding everything they need on Google Maps so there's always some discussion you can skim through um you

can also just compile a bunch of different links and stick them into chat gbt and ask for you know you can prompt

it for a sentiment analysis and do it that way but I like to do the good oldfashioned way look it up and read the

comments and one thing I found because I've been kind of using dog parks as a case study so I know I know this to be

true but I looked up dog park in New York and I realized that in New York for some reason they don't call dog parks

dog park necessarily they call them dog run and so that led me to a rabbit hole where I you know looked up all sorts of

Reddit posts and I landed on this this is a post from six years ago where someone literally just made a post

sharing their Google Map pins of all the dog parks and what's interesting about this post is it got a decent amount of

upvotes you know 115 upvotes there's a lot of interaction here around you know different dog parks in

Brooklyn um but there are some uh yeah so this this is an interesting comment I think this is the one that stuck out to

me this person said I wish I had time to visit all of them and make descriptions and take photos not all dog dog runs are

created equal so it' be cool to find out about really nice ones that aren't near nearby I mean you can't get more you

can't get more uh you know you can't get better than that in terms of a social signal that's showing you that people

want curation people want hypers specific uh features uh when they're looking for dog parks so this is just

another green flag that says yeah this is this is a problem that could be worth solving

um so just to recap you know we basically just found an idea that has high search volume low competition it

has fragmented search volume that we could take advantage of there is some competition out there so we set a bounty

on nyone that is already getting a decent amount of monthly visitors and then we

also verified through social listening on Reddit to confirm that yeah people are having a hard time finding these dog

parks and they're talking about it so let's go build out the actual dog park directory um that's going to cater to

these people's needs um at this point by the way Frey are you gonna publish like are you gonna publish this dog

park directory I think so I think there's like a couple things that I'm worried

about so I've noticed anytime I mention a website people make copycats immediately

and SEO is one of those things where you know I'm not going to have any back links if I launch something like this so

there a little bit of vulnerability but yes the short answer is I do plan on launching this eventually I'm just right

now optimizing the best ways to automate some of the data enrichment and some of the implementation on a CMS through Ai

and like using bolt. I'm playing around with different tools to streamline that but I do want to publish this and just

see how it goes cool all right let's build Baby Let's Do It um let's get some data uh that was a this was a big topic

I think a lot of people ask me where do you get your data and the simple answer is web

scraping tools I know there's a lot of different web scraping tools out there but I just

use outs scraper not affiliated just what I've always used and um they have this Google Map scraper here

and the first thing I do is I actually land what before I even scrape data I go to Google Maps and I type in you know

Dog Park Los Angeles and what I'm looking for here are actual Google categories for my

Niche so luckily we have this that says dog park you know there's some Athletic Park is Apparently one but I want to

look for a Google category because scraping data when there's an actual dedicated category for that is a lot

easier so this is cool um I've confirmed that we do have dog park which means we can just click on this category here and

we can click on exact match so it'll basically get us all the data for dog parks on Google Maps um now if you're

working in a niche where you don't have a category you can always just enter a plane

query so let's just say for example off leash dog parks was the thing you could go ahead and scrape all the data related

to off Le dog parks it'll be way more data and there will be a lot of junk um but it is one option so you're not

limited that way and by the way if you get I I I'd imagine that that's more common than people think like that

happens more common than people think if you do get a lot of junk data how do you normally parse that data to make it

useful yeah so I have um so there are ways that um I do have a really big data

sheet I have 100 I have a data sheet with 119,000 um rows that I basically parsed

it down to 5,000 uh there's a couple ways you can do it so with a lot of junk data you

can with dog parks uh with dog parks specifically like the way I would do it is probably just delete all the listings

and rows that don't have addresses so that's that's an easy one that will remove some and then there will be a a

good amount that have um you know no reviews or like one review you can get rid of a lot that way

um I uh I covered it in a video it's it's quite a long it's a tedious process um I've tried to use chat gbt to data

yeah that was basically my question like have you I was I was wondering if you're going to get there like do you use chat

GPT or Cloe as I call it Cloe everyone makes fun of me um Claude um to basically go through the

data to help you figure that out I do I think you just need to have a really solid prompt but sometimes it's easier

to manually parse the data first cuz you'll get some data like Big Lots or like you know Walmart and it's it has

nothing to do with dog park but because someone mentioned dog in the reviews it's just pulling up that data somehow

so I would yeah I would I would use Chad GT um but I would first manually just get rid of the big ones um and yeah

there there's yeah I guess you could use it off the bat too um but I guess I like to manually do it

because I like to make sure I get all the dog parks and I've noticed that it can get rid of a lot of the good quality

listings if you just go straight into chat gbt and have it remove what it doesn't think a dog park is if that

makes sense the the old uh throw the baby out with the bath water whatever that quote means really like I know what

it means but like I don't know where it's stems from um it's very odd all right yeah let's let's get back to it

all right um yeah I mean I never heard of that but uh let's uh yeah so basically um yeah so basically we're

lucky we have a dog park as a category um we're going to make sure to click exact match otherwise you're going to

get a massive data sheet with a bunch of junk and for me I like to create Nationwide directories because why not

take advantage of all that search volume so I just keep this as defaulted um and then really the only

place I touch um is the parameters and this is just the basics right think about what people would want to know if

they're coming to a dog park directory they're probably going to want to know the the name maybe a phone number if

it's some kind of like indoor dog park address Street postal code State you know there are some maybe some reviews

that you want to include dude I always like to add street view you know working

hours and most recently I've been adding location link which I'll show you why is really important in a moment it's great

for data enrichment and yeah so but these are the basics you know and then I'll go ahead and just click get

data it'll give us an idea of how much it's going to cost how many rows sometimes this is just completely

off like I know it's completely off but but you would go ahead and click confirm and I am not going to spend more

money so I pulled up the result uh it's usually pretty quick too uh I know most times it says it's going to take 12 to

like 30 hours or something but this took two hours um I've never had it take too long but um let's pull this up here cool

all right so here we have 6245 different dog parks so quite large you know this is a lot of data

and um probably not the most uh beginner friendly for a static directory build that I'm going to show you but it's okay

you will use it ex as an example if you wanted to start like cleaning this data a little bit um you know I'm not an

Excel Pro but I kind of just like to use the reviews maybe if it doesn't have that many reviews I would get rid of you

know anything under you know 10 reviews or something like that um but this is basically our data sheet and because we

do have that exact match category in Google we don't have to do too much cleaning um but if we did have a plain

query that's when you know you would really want to spend some time uh and there's a lot of ways you can do it um I

made a video on it it's maybe not the best but it gets rid of a lot of the junk um I I think I yeah 119,000 rows

down to like 5,000 rows and in that video but um since I know it's already

cleaned I'm basically going to jump to the data enrichment and this is really important because

I'm going to try to include all the different features that we were looking at um from our keyword if we go back

to dog park near me I'm going to basically enrich the data and use my knowledge of HRS you

know indoor dog park off Le dog park I want to rank for all these keywords that are getting traffic but I also want to

look on Google Maps and this is the way I typically like to enrich data let's just click on one

here and what I'll do is I'll go to the reviews and I'll just start looking at the different types of tags and as I

click through these reviews I'm making a mental note of the same types of tags and I guess features of dog parks that

keep showing up so this one has shade you know parking um you know we just kind of keep on going with um shade

again shade trees but I basically am going through and trying to do some pattern recognition water

parking a lot of the same stuff starts popping up um so because I already spent like 30

minutes doing this I can tell you that a lot of the most common things people want in their dog parks are water

fountains for their dogs they want some shade they want benches to sit on and they want you know dog bags some people

also want like you know apparently trash cans and stuff but for the most part those are the core things that I'm

making a mental note of uh in addition to it being an indoor dog park and off offleash dog park so what we can do

here and this is pretty manual but this is how I did it back when I first started it basically make all these

different um columns for data Arrangement you know water is there

shade and so you'd basically continue doing this we'll just we'll just use this as

an example the old way that I would do it back then was super manual like if you

think about the Journey of someone finding a dog park with this um or if you think about the journey that someone

has to uh the or I guess the way people go out and find dog parks with shade it's super

manual right they have to like look on Google maybe there's a shade button maybe there's not and they have to type

in shade manually it's just not that fast and not that convenient so um basically when you're enriching data

like you can do it manually but it's it's God awful and I wouldn't recommend it it's extremely tedious especially

with um a niche with 6,000 listings um so I am working on a tool that automates this uh and this is where the location

ID comes in so this isn't available it's just something I'm working on with someone but it's very much a scratcher

own itch project that we chose where I have this sample data if we look at it we can see I have the location ID um

and it's basically going to automate the data enrichment aspect of this which is easily the most tedious so if we just

put in shade and then have it look for the keyword shade I'll prompt it and

say um does this dog park have shade we can add different columns you know for benches and other things like

that but um basically I we'll process this and this is save this is going to

save me so much time I mean well yeah back in October 2022 I did everything manually granted that first directory

website I only had like 130 different listings so it was not too bad but something with this much data you're

going to want to be able to utilize um some automation whether it's you know CLA or Cloe or

something like that cool shots fired shots fired um this is it I mean basically

what it did is it read the URL so like if you're going to do this just a pro tip for anyone out there who's building

this um or wanting to automate the data enrichment it basically needs to read the Google URL for that specific dog

park and then it can basically look through the reviews and tell you if there's a sha a shaded area

or benches and stuff so using that we using that URL um it basically shows us the review

it created this new column for shade which we we had up there and in this case it says true because multiple

reviews mention the presence of shade um although some reviewers wish more so I'd basically like you know use this to

enrich the data rather than manually going and saying like yes and going down the line that way so that it's just

something that I'm building with someone uh just to scratch my own itch and uh it's it's not like available but you

know if if it is in demand I guess maybe we'll release it uh that's the plan uh but that's essentially the big

idea enrich your data because again we're trying to make something better than the bone we're trying to make

something better than bring fedo and as great as bring fedo is you know how how do I know if I

forget my dog bags how do I know quiet water Waters Park is going to have it you know I'm just it's a water park like

I don't know what am I going to have to call them so there are some opportunities even with the most

dominant dog park directories where I'm like yeah this data enrichment is going to be what sets me apart and it's going

to be what brings people back to the webs site because I went so deep to list all this

information um so imagine this is all you know cleaned out um we can now go into how we actually

format it onto the the website uh and for this I'm I'm doing it the dumb way I have WordPress up somewhere here I'll

clean this W I didn't expect you to say WordPress got to be real I've been playing with framer so I've been seeing

so many builds with framer so I'm I'm learning that um bolt. new is super interesting but I I I guess I just

wanted to bring people back to how I did it and it's easily probably the dumbest way nowadays but it's so dumb it's

inspiring it's like you can brute force it if you want and just start it's not the best way at all but um I did just

create a WordPress website as a example for the format so any CMS works I've seen some amazing

builds with framer so if you know framer I'd probably recommend that but you can use WordPress and really basic themes

like my first directory website was using Elementor Pro which is like I mean love them but not the best way to create

a website not the only option to create a website um but I created a sample directory here and

the reason I I'm showing you this is because this is what I call a static pillar page directory uh and remember

when I said that it it's totally different than what most people think of when they think of a

directory this is the kind of slept on format and the reason for that is it's basically a super long page it's

completely it's like level one of directory builds and um you know it's it works really well it uses what's called

a pillar page which I feel like is kind of an outdated SEO principle but essentially very comprehensive page with

all of your content on a single page and um as silly as this

looks it works really well from an SEO perspective so let's let's just break this down like I think anyone who's

watching this will be able to create a web website like this um but you know have your you know you have your header

one with your keyword you have your table of contents and then you essentially are

targeting all of these City specific um dog park keywords so Dog Park Long Beach you also have

Rosy's dog beach um which is an example listing a nice photo here is where your data enrichment would be and then your

basic you know address phone number hours and then we have a map Ed you can throw on some reviews or you can leave

it out but I would say don't sleep on this format like if you're just starting your directory and you want to create

one pretty quickly and see how well it does try this out because from an SEO perspective this is essentially taking

advantage of the highest search volume keywords which would be like dog parks Long Beach dog parks Los

Angeles and even if you were to go out and create a programmatic directory you know which I have those

directories the most searched pages on those directories are the location pages so I I'll give you a quick example

without veering too far off but if we look at this bring fedo website and we just look at the site

Explorer and we look at their top pages all of their most traffic pages are the location pages so dogf friendly

Restaurant New York work pet friendly hotels in Dallas it's not necessarily the actual

listings that are getting traffic so what you're doing with a really watered down pillar page static directory like

um like this one is you're basically targeting those keywords that are already getting the most traffic and

you're putting them on one page um so another thing with this is that um it's perfect for display ad

monetization uh there are naturally they really long pages so you're going to be able to fit a lot of

AD placements just like how a YouTuber would make more money from an hourong video with more ad placements it's kind

of the same way so if you were to go with that monetization it's pretty good another thing is that with

this um you know with this area down here this is basically your internal linking strategy it's super simple super

straightforward where people will end up clicking on different states to look at those dog

parks and that's really it um one of the biggest advantages with a pillar page static directory is the keyword clusters

that you're going to end up ranking for so with my first directory one of my state pages will

rank for like 1,300 keywords and it's because I'm targeting all of these kind of City specific keywords here so that's

kind of the Simplicity of it um again very very basic level one of directories but

amazing if you just want to dip your feet in in the water and um you know get to I would say like two to 2 to 10K in

Mr is definitely possible um that first website I showed you is a static directory so this is

like this is this is pretty nice it's actually kind of one of my favorite builds because of how simple and dumb it

is um yeah I think what's cool about it is you can go and build this use you know

use WordPress use framer use whatever um and have it just be this $2,000 $5,000 a month thing that just sends you what I

you know I use the term mailbox money um someone once told me that years ago the concept is every single month you know

it's like they send you a check and in your mailbox and it's enough money to just like pay for your bills pay for

your rent um which allows you maybe to work on other stuff maybe you have a full-time job that you really care about

um or you can actually like was saying earlier you can use this as the foundation of a really

much bigger idea so you can take dog park near me and eventually turn it into some SAS product for public parks

or maybe it's a consumer product that sells you know that's a competitor to um the farmer's dog which does $500 million

a year in Revenue so um the choice is yours and that's why I think directory that's why

I've been bringing on more and more directories onto the uh people onto the the Pod because I think that the

average you know Tech founder isn't thinking about building directories totally totally I think they're

extremely underrated and so 1996 as someone said in my comment section so boring look how

boring like look at this you know I couldn't I yawned in this in this interview at one point that's totally

acceptable in fact I'm happy you did because I think people are going to look at this and be like there's no way this

works but this is literally how I built my first directory and yeah you could doesn't take too many of these types of

websites to have enough to keep you AF float pay your bills um maybe leave your full-time job to build something even

greater uh something more similar to you know what we what like the directory websites I showed in the very beginning

but um I will say there's a lot of other directories that are like way higher in terms of earning potential um you know

programmatic SEO has been a really hot topic so that's been like a programmatic directory where you sell leads to

service-based businesses that's amazing there's so many different opportunities there um but even with this like I think

anything in the pet space is interesting because there's a lot of affiliate plays that you can include there's also even a

potential to create some kind of lead magnet where you collect a lot of data so I'm sure you've heard of um BarkBox

this is the company that Kevin oi I think on Shark Tank invested in and it's it's an interesting one because they I

think we're only doing like three or four million in Revenue but they got acquired for like 90 million and the

reason for that was because the actual like data so they sell DNA kits for dogs and cats the data that they acquired was

way more valuable than their actual like annual revenue so there might be a way to maybe create a newsletter on the dog

park directory somehow collect data around dogs um but even in its most simplest

form BarkBox does have an affiliate program if people are looking for dog parks maybe there some alignment with

the Searchers intent where people want to know more about the health of their dogs so this is a play like I would

definitely experiment with this if I were to publish a dog park directory so you have like money coming through ads

maybe an affiliate play perhaps build some kind of email list or lead magnet to collect more

information on dog owners there's just a lot that you can do once you start monetizing it and once you get a lot of

traffic um but yeah very simple format and kind of just speaks for

itself if you enjoyed this episode please let us know in the comment section I read every single comment uh

so we would love to see you in there Frey thank you so much for giving us this tutorial where could people find

you on the internet yeah so um YouTube I just started posting more directory content on YouTube it's just my name

foru um you can follow me on x again just freay chew and yeah that's the best way cool we'll include that in the show

notes uh hope everyone feels a little more sophisticated uh with online directories

in a way um we didn't create the most beautiful directory but we did create a directory that people needed and you can

always add the the lipstick afterwards so um I'm proud of what what you came I'm proud of what we built today and um

hopefully uh people enjoy this and we can have you on again Frey that sounds good yeah um appreciate you having me

and uh I I'll just end it on this which is whether you're going and building something big or something small like

this those first two steps are the same you know finding that idea validating that that idea getting and parsing data

so um yeah I I I I think it doesn't matter what you're building those are where you want to focus most of your

time and I'll leave it at that amen all right see you later thanks Greg [Music]