My Journey with a Online Directory

Hello all! I have been on the forum for a few months and I have learned a lot! I decided to create a thread about my current projects. I welcome any and all suggestions as I am new to this.

I created a online directory that was directly related to a niche that I currently work in. I saw this as a opportunity to help my gain insight into other companies in the industry while also helping others in the industry increase their online presence. All while hopefully monetizing the site in some way shape or form.

The site is currently 4 months old and I am mostly happy with how it looks/behaves etc. I have 12 articles up on the site some I have written, others I have sourced out to writers here on BHW etc. I plan to continue adding more and more content as time allows.

Plans to monetize the site were to have companies pay for their listings on the site, with different tiers of listings being available. With monthly renewals and yearly options as well. Of course this won't currently work as people really don't want to pay for a site that isn't showing up high in the SERPS currently trying different ways to attract people to the site, most are working and we are starting to gain more and more traction with people adding their listings (for free now of course).

While waiting on that to gain traction I am trying to figure out more ways to help the site pay for itself. Currently way in the hole with only dedicated hosting, developer fees, link building etc. I applied for Ad-sense (currently only getting 5-7k ish page-views monthly) but I was denied for duplicate content. I am assuming this is due to the fact a lot of listing have text directly copied from another listing or website. I have started to add Affiliate links into the blogs (literally just did this two days ago though and I am not expecting anything from that for awhile.

My current and biggest conundrum is how to do SEO for such a large site. There are so many pages on there. I want this site to show up everywhere. I find that building links and content for every page will be very difficult. Over the next week my main goal is to find a real working solution and to start implementing it on the site a little at a time. I will be researching everything and will probably end up outsourcing some and doing some of this myself.

Aside from this project I am working with my wife on another project that is more Social/Blog oriented as well. Her website just went live a couple of days ago and we are figuring out ways to increase her IG followers etc.

Cheers and sorry for the long read! I will try to update this thread often!

Hey man!

good luck! I really love directories. I had one too then dropped it because I was doing some other things. I monetized using Adsense and did zero SEO. It was in a niche too and people started filling up the site which was cool.

I made a directory for my wife too. It was in the luxury goods niche for brands like Hermes, Balenciaga, Marc Jacobs, Givenchy, LV, Burberry and co. She did not put much on the site but rich Chinese and Asians came to the site and started ordering things from us. For example, they were looking for a Hermes handbag in a certain color that is only available in Europe. The bags and clothing cost between 1K and 25K EUR. We charged a fee for finding the items. It was fun but a lot of work. So directories can sometimes lead you on to a different path.

Keep us updated with your progress! I am interested to know if directories still make it in 2019.

Good luck mate! Keep us updated!
Following

sound interesting, good luck with your journey op

Following, good luck!

all the best

Sounds interesting wishing you all the luck with your journey

Thanks everyone, spending my day today mostly doing research. Editing some meta tags here and there. On the research end of it I am looking for a SEO package vs. hiring a VA to go through and build links page by page. Lots to do on that end.

I am thinking of working on link building in the cities that have the most listings for now and the spreading out.

Also set up SerpBook last week. Up till this point I haven't really been tracking rankings but figured i'd give it a go. These keywords all have really low monthly search volumes so nothing to write home about.

following, good luck man!