The Most Overlooked Way to Make Passive Income Online | Ep. #164

Tripadvisor, care.com, happy cow. 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 passively, $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.

100%. I think once you see it, you can't unsee it.

So if someone's starting from complete scratch, where should start? What is a directory and why should you care? Travelocity.com that's a directory. Billion dollar business. Dry ice near me.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. Does passive income exist? No. Is this as close as you get? Yes. Frey Chu is a guy that I found on Twitter and, 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 a hundred 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. 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, months later you found out it worked. What was that directory like? Do you mind telling us what the actual website was and, 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 halls. 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? 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 a hundred thousand monthly visitors and I was like, I could do better than this. I could, I could, yeah, I could improve 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 ahrefs. Ahrefs is always my go to.

Oh, you look use that for traffic as well.

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?

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. 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, 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. 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, it's a good sign. It's a green flag in my eyes. When you're looking for 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.

A hundred percent. One hundred percent. 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, a hundred percent.

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 food truck dot 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 that. It's for vegan. Vegan restaurants and vegan food and my family, 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.

So Happy Cow just started as a directory and now they're kind of a vegan authority then.

Mm. 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 150 bucks a month. And it's like, okay, I'm gonna get the most out of this for 30 days because I'm probably gonna churn. And then I go in There, and I start digging around and I. I'm like, oh, my gosh, this one's good. Oh, this one's good. Oh, this one's good. 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. 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 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. Everything. Yeah, everything. So I've been finding myself on these directories that help me understand what the, like, best way 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, 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 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 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 B2C, so I wanted to try B2B1, and I wanted to try 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 as planned because 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.

So here's how this works. I make you free videos. I actually know what I'm talking about. I have no greasy sales pitch at the end. And if you implement what I talk about, you'll make a lot more money and have a better life. And all I ask for in return is, is that you hit the subscribe button and maybe even the notification bell. Just like that. Thank you.

But yeah, it was like a combination of a challenge because I felt pretty confident. And even though it was really high keyword difficulty, 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 me to take 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's 6. So probably like, it ranges from like, probably 70 to like 90,000 monthly visitors because 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 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 2,300 to $3,000 a month. So nothing crazy, but with my specific, like, high standards way 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 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 it's a grind.

One site could be a six figure business, 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 you, to put it in perspective, like I don't think I've touched any of my websites for like six months and they just continue to bring that 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 Cow. There's hundreds of directories making multiple millions and many more making over 6 figures in the 100-500k range. I just want like 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 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 mediavine Journey. I think it's depending on the type of 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 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 half baked in the Porta Potty 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 under optimized that I need to tweak a lot.

But yeah, there's Sniff Spot, right?

Sniff Spot is. Yeah, that's not my directory.

No, I know, I bet. Similar, 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 Spot does like private dog park rentals. I Kind of just created a directory for all the public free dog parks just to give people some more options and an easier way to navigate those.

I would love if you could share your screen, go to Ahrefs, or I have a paid Ahrefs account. I could do the same. 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 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 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, pretty publicly is just typing in near me.

Okay.

And the reason I do this is.

Because he's on the Keywords explorer part of ahrefs.com.

Yes. So right now I'm looking at the Ahrefs. I just typed in near me in 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 direct keywords.

What are you 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 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. 0 being the easiest to rank for, 100 being the hardest to rank for. And search volume is a number for.

Monthly search in the country that you're filtering for.

Yes, 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 keyword difficulty is lower. So interesting.

Dubai chocolate bar near me. Zero keyword difficulty, 82,000 searches. So if I'm you, I'm saying, wow, like on the surface, that's amazing. 0 and 82,000. But then because of the fact I just posted content about this, this is probably a viral TikTok trend 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 e commerce stores.

Yeah.

You know, if you were looking at 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 me was like a 26. Yeah, 26 difficulty and 84,000. What do you think about that one?

Towing's not bad. I think that it seems too broad for me and I would be curious to see something like emergency towing maybe, you know, overnight towing or something really, really specific. So in that case, 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.

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 it's higher intent. Right.

A hundred percent. 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 ahrefs 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 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 gonna love it. All free, no sleazy sales pitch.

Tkopod.com so this is interesting. There's lizard lick toeing. 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. 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 nationwide directory, Cheap towing kind of gives us a little bit clear of intent of what people are looking for. There's interesting keywords around specific like Tacoma towing capacity.

Yeah.

But essentially I would look through this and I'd ask myself, you know, what long tail 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 different trucks or different types of vehicles? Because look at this, there's literally zero keyword difficulty for to Toyota 4Runner. Towing capacity gets searched 4,000 times a month. And that trend continues really through Outback tons.

If you add up all those, all that search volume across thousands 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 the, the keyword towing and that's under a keyword difficulty of 20, there's 2 million people a month or 2 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 thousand dollar a month directory.

Well, and you look on the left side, the most commonly appearing word in towing is capacity. They're not looking for to get their 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 like this is, I think we stumbled upon like low key, a pretty interesting directory niche.

Look at that. Someone listening. That's towing capacity website.

Yeah. I guess like one thing I would be concerned with is if this is a, you know, like informational content I think we've seen in the last few years with 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 and type Reddit, and there's a lot of people asking, like, this person a year ago.

Yeah.

Asked 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 satisfied with the AI overview or going to ChatGPT.

So what. 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 question. Because we'd all prefer to go to Google first, right?

A hundred percent.

Yeah.

And just to add on to that, like, I'm sure there's nuance. Like, I don't really toe 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 thread, there would be nuances to why people are asking this question. Like, it's not. That's. It's not as simple as seeing, like, you know, Subaru outbacks can pull £7,000. And so that's your answer. It's like, there's probably some nuance within this niche that you can use and make your 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 something interesting. And truthfully, I would never have researched towing near me. So, like, but you. It was interesting to you. And I think that's where a lot of the opportunity lies. Like, what I think is easy to rank and the vision that I see for my directory is very different than literally anyone else. So, yeah, I'll just keep scrolling down. I find a lot of promise here 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 looks. I coincidentally, I have a friend that lives across the street that just opened a batting cage and they are thriving.

Really 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 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 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 going to change in the next 20 years very much. It's just going to be a metal cage and a ball that dispenses at a high speed. And that's it. You just, it's very simple. So that might be worth 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 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 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 penguindryice.com and it is so funny you brought this up because I own 100 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 no directory of dry ice. We'd have to go to Kroger or Albertsons and buy it and you didn't know the cost or whatever. And so I bought the domain name dollardryice.com to be like a directory of dry ice facilities. So here you are showing me penguindryice.com which seems to be a dry ice directory.

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 not a lot of detail. It just sort of says the 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. Where not looking for like Albertson sized dry ice, we're looking to buy a lot of dry ice. B2B business. There's not really any 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 I understand this correctly, Penguin is the company that sells 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, 40,000amonth.

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. 15,000 monthly visitors and 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, they've had some, some of their lulls, 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 that this single page ranks for a hundred thousand keywords.

Holy.

Which is kind of crazy.

Dry ice. Boston Dry Ice.

Like, yeah, they're completely dominating this space. And I'm sure it does wonders for Penguin as a brand. So very niche though. Like this is so niche. And there. This is, believe it or not, not the only dry ice directory. I found other ones, 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. Google wants us. Google wants to show us things that are relevant, that have high trust and 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 that don't really have a high trust, high authority player?

Sure, that's definitely one way to do it. Ultimately, the game is backlinks. 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. 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 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.

It's like 97.

Yeah. So just, just for a quick comparison, right. Like if we just see.

Because obviously this directory, dryice 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, 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 sale near me. Their rank, their position, 6ish. 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 Char Ice is pretty competitive, right? 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 would give it like 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 objectively ugly, but it works. And if someone 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. Right.

Yeah. Yeah.

So I don't want people to listen is like, I'm going to go find an ugly website and then compete with them. It's like, that's like. 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 too big of an emphasis on design. I think there's a difference between having something really modern 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, 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?

And next one. One that I talked about recently, and it's called Movie Locations. It's to help you find the locations that certain movies and films were shot.

Movie- Locations.com is what we're looking at. A 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 is. It's hard to know where your eyes should look, but it's a very simple.

So I'm gonna think this is like movie theater locations.

This is just like if you were curious where Harry Potter was shot.

Oh.

Or if Lord of the Rings was shot in a certain country or something like that.

Yeah, yeah. 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 a hundred thousand.

Okay, let's take a look here. I'll just grab this root domain and let's take a look. All right. Overshot 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 gotta 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 five years. So whoever owns this is 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 it's really honestly difficult because it's not arbitrary, but it's very dependent. There's a lot of variables. So it depends on.

Could be affiliate, could be AdSense, could be Mediavine, could be E Commerce.

So yeah, that's exactly one angle. Like how many monetization strategies are there? Even if there's ads, is it a private ad partnership or not? And then not only that, it's like niche based 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 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 know, decent RPMs, nothing insane.

But for me 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 ahrefs is third party data. So we can only kind of take this 81,000 monthly visitors with a grain of salt. I know with Ahrefs 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 what is, like, what is the RPM that you get on your thrifty 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 it gets more, 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 ahrefs, what other tools 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 Ahrefs 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 TikTok of course was kind of naturally one. I feel like people don't filter their True thoughts on TikTok 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 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 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 automate everything and then like forgetting the big picture of what you're doing, which is like, yeah, consolidating valuable data on the Internet that people are looking for.

Do you use any like third party tools? Not like a WordPress plugin, but stuff outside of WordPress to connect things.

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 directory that has 2,000 business locations, it would take forever to make to create those pages individually. So you can publish those all at once because kind of 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 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.

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 be.

So that would be like dry eyes 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 insane. Like that'd be amazing. You don't need a mention near me in the actual domain because any query that says near me like dog parks 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.connects if possible. I like to choose.coms.cos.org if it's really if I'm out of options. But I would rather have a hyphen in my name and a choose a dot com than just go straight to a dot org. But yeah, you want your, your main keyword for sure.

Are you 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 ideation sometimes, but I like to rely more on user generated content because it more accurately depicts what the challenges are in terms of like 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 to visit? Well, you have to enrich 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, you might go to Google Maps and type in horse cremation. But what realistically might happen is a lot of business profiles will show up and you 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 cremation service. It's, it's time consuming. 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, 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 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. 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 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.

So I guess my tactical recommendation is use your unique personality and character, your 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 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 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 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 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 of creativity, being crafty, being knowledgeable about all the ways you can acquire these backlinks. 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 staying on topic. Dry 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 niche, or is it just totally industry dependent?

Keyword difficulty is, is a big one. I would look at 0 to 5. Like if we, if we looked up the near me method that I described and you set your keyword difficulty at a maximum of like five or even three, I'm sure you would 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 growth, hacky, clever way.

In your experience, before 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 tos. 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, okay, here are some ways that you can go get backlinks. One thing that's really worked well for me is to look at a bounty, right? A existing directory in your space. Use Ahrefs or a tool similar to Ahrefs and look at their backlinks. Reach out to those people giving those backlinks 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 I saw that you linked to 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 it.

And so you have this situation where now your competitor loses a very good backlink. You gain that backlink without over promising 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 bananas.

That is like one. Now the domain authority of the backlink is everything, right? If you have A backlink from CNN.com versus 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 what makes a high quality backlink, it's definitely like domain authority, domain rating, 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 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 signals are becoming increasingly important in a world of AI spam. So traffic for the referring page as a biggie, link domains, right? So if that CNN page is linking to a hundred thousand websites, it's like there's not that much link equity or link juice as people call it. And a simple way to think about that is like imagine trying to split a birthday cake a hundred thousand ways. It's just not gonna, you're gonna 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.

Okay, what about those many services that sell backlinks? 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 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 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 backlinks. Those are spammy backlinks. They may result in. Well, first of all, they're not going to help. Second of all, it might Even get you penalized, which could lead to being de indexed, which is like the worst case scenario. Like you're, 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 ToS but 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 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 backlinks in your opinion, like let's say it's a pet cremation site is I'm going to go find like a high domain authority, a very relevant site in, in 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 that's the 80, 20 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. They respond and accept the offer. But it's the balance between like highest 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, a thousand bucks for that backlink. Because like I said that one backlink that got me to rank one has resulted in like two years worth of like $2,000 a month, you know, to 25amonth revenue, you know, and I bought it for 50 bucks. So.

Wow, it's. Which niche was that in? That.

That's in the thrift store niche.

Okay, that's.

And I've tested buying backlinks, 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 on you just how to build A profitable directory. Any advice that you could give that would help them save a 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 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 this skill. It's very hard because once you start building and you have a successful directory, you never know what's going 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 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. 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 SaaS. But that's like, with years of experience where you can whip something up that quick and 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.

The numbers game. Yeah.

So it's all the cliche stuff, 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. I post on YouTube just under my name, Fray Chew. You can follow me on X or Twitter. Also at 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.

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