The Most Passive Online Business No One Talks About

Most people overthink starting a business, but some of the easiest wins are hiding in plain sight inside of Google, Reddit, Facebook, and even bad websites. So in this video, I'm going to show you how to find low competition, high demand directory ideas that nobody else is building. And at the end, I'm going to give you five niches that I would build today. No product, no audience, no code, just pure traffic plays. Here's one of the most slept on online business models right now. Directories. I put out a video about it and you guys loved it. So I wanted to dive even deeper. And I know directories sound kind of boring, but that's kind of the point. They're boring and they work. And here's why. First of all, directories can rank stupidly fast, especially if you're targeting the right keywords. You don't need 4,000 word blog posts, you don't need backlinks. You have don't. You just need to list the right stuff in the right niche for the right person. Second, directory websites can make money like a vending machine. Set it up once and it starts generating ad revenue. Affiliate clicks, paid placement, lead gen forms, whatever you want. And you don't have to refill it with Fritos. It's just sitting there on the Internet working for you while you're off building the next directory. And the third reason your competition is weak. It's usually some busted, broke WordPress site from 2012 that's run by a guy that hasn't updated his favicon since the Obama years. That's gonna be your edge. If you show up with clean design, strong filters, and a little SEO, you instantly look and sound like the most legit option on page one. And fourth, this is the real cheat code. You don't have to be an expert. You don't have to offer the service. You don't. In fact, you rarely will. And you don't have to do anything except organize all the noise. You're not the contractor, you're the clipboard. You're not the one building the house. You're just telling everyone else how to do it. That's the play. And everyone else can fight over running the actual service. You're building the map. So let me show you how to actually find all these gaps. And we're going to start with one of my favorite methods, digging into the near me keywords inside of Ahrefs. But we're going way past page one before you turn this off. I know we already touched on this in the last Directory, video, podcast. But we're going to go a lot deeper than that little hack. So if you remember, you just want to search near me, go past page five, scroll past the obvious stuff like McDonald's near me, Chipotle near me, and boom, you're going to find these weird long tail gold like goat rentals near me or mobile car tinting near me. So that works. That's valid. But I'm going to show you a few ways to go even deeper. Number one, you're going to search in URL, colon, directory. That's all one word, no spaces in Google. And you're going to pair that phrase with with a niche such as inurl, colon, directory, space, martial arts. And if you're watching on video, I'm going to show you how that works real quick in URL, colon, directory, space, martial arts. So I see a result for D magazine, which is Dallas magazine, which makes sense because Google knows I'm near Dallas. See a book about a martial arts directory. See a website called go number two karate.com, which is a directory of martial arts styles. And then result number seven, I see a website entitled Directory of Martial Arts Schools. I click on this and holy AI generation. This website is 100% AI generated, which, hey, no shade from me. And it's a martial arts directory. But let's see what Ahrefs has to say about the competition on this. We're going to click on keywords Explorer. Type in martial arts. Okay, keyword difficulty 57 search volume, 44,000 per month in the U.S. okay, that looks a little hard to me. 57 is pretty difficult. In the UK it's even more difficult. You have a 48 difficulty score and only about a fifth of the traffic. Now let's go back to Google and look at Inurl Directory, Mobile Dog Groomer. And while we're at it, let's see what Ahref says when you search martial arts near me 37 keyword difficulty 33,000 search volume. Still don't like it? Now, Mobile dog grooming near me 48 keyword difficulty 15,000 search volume. But when you look at this on Google, the top two results are newstar, localeasy Biz and the Holistic Grooming Academy. I love the fact that a biz website commands both number one and number two in the organic search results. That tells me there's promise here. Ahrefs tells a lot of the story, but it doesn't tell the whole story. It's kind of like the difference between looking at a house on Google Images or Google Street View and then actually driving into the neighborhood. Sometimes you just gotta go there yourself to get a feel for it. It looks like Local Easy is a transunion company, so they clearly have a lot of firepower on their side when it comes to backlinks. Now if we go to Inurl directory Bee Removal near me I see the Texas Beekeepers Association, Denton Agrilive, which is a city in Texas. And then I see bees-made-easy.com which is a beekeeping directory that looks absolutely terrible, like it's from the late 90s. Then I go to Ahrefs and I type in Bee removal near me I see a 4 keyword difficulty and a 5300 search volume. This looks like an amazing opportunity actually, especially for a beginner. My point is when you use this in URL directory Google hack, you find old gross websites ranking in the top five outdated links, no photos, just junk sites. So if that's ranking, then you can definitely build something better. Here's another hack I love. Use this tool in Google called Keywords Everywhere. You're going to type in any local service. You'll scroll way past the ads and the maps and then you'll look for a little thing called People also ask and related searches. 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 that you hit the subscribe button and maybe even the notification bell. Just like that. Thank you. I'm going to do this by searching H Vac near me. If you go to the very bottom of the page you'll see people also search for. And then right past the maps results you'll see people also ask, how much does the average H Vac job cost? What is the cheapest H Vac option? Google is just handing us free ideas for directories. You can use these suggested keywords and search terms to build a new directory. Then you can even look at the modifiers within Google Business profile such as Women owned Minority owned accepts ebt Kid friendly. Those are all directory ideas. Kid friendly Restaurant directory, Women owned hair salon directory. These filters are things that people are actively looking for and searching for that most directories totally ignore. So instead of just thinking of like best dentist near me, you're going to build the best dentist near me that take Medicaid and speak Spanish Directory this is defensible and it's sticky. And another move, go to Craigslist in the services section. Boom, right here. Services and then skilled trade is my particular favorite. Here you can find real world demand, especially when you look for random categories like labor move or farm plus garden. If people are posting about it, there's demand. So don't overthink it. If there's not a clean website that you can easily find organizing all this stuff, there's demand. That's your opening. And then my favorite hack along these lines, you go to YouTube, you type in best niche in city, see what shows up. If you see someone ranking in the top YouTube search results with some shaky vlog with only 400 views and it's on page one, then Google is begging you for something, something better. And that's going to be your job. That's why we're here today. Let's try best cookies. Cheyenne. The top result has 197 views. All right, now here's how you can find spammy Google listings that are ranking purely by accident and how you can eat their lunch with one clean directory. This is the GBP section, Google Business Profile, AKA the Google Map gold mine. And I promise this is slept on. So we're going to use Google Maps to find some easy SEO wins that almost no one is talking about. I like to call it spam spotting. You're going to open up Google Maps and search for something weird plus local like mobile tire repair Plano. Let's do that now. So now we're going to scroll through the results on the left side of the screen. Look at the names of these businesses. If you see stuff like best tree trimming, McKinney, Texas or what we see right here, Dallas Mobile Tire shop or Zohar Mobile Tire Shop, North Texas Mobile Tires. They're putting the exact match keyword in the name of the business. I do the same thing whenever I buy an RV park. I rename the Google business profile City State RV Park. Very simple. And my traffic immediately goes up. So no shade. But that's an opportunity for someone to come disrupt this category. Plumber near me 24 7. Dentist near me. These are all examples of keyword stuffing. You're looking for a business name that just sounds like someone mashed a bunch of relevant keywords into a business name map. Spam. These listings are going to naturally rank purely because Google doesn't have anything better to show us. Click into them. What do you see? How does the website look? Is there a website? This is the equivalent of Naming your business AAA Locksmith. Back in the Yellow Pages era. Do these websites have stock photos? 0 reviews, no lead form, no lead magnet. Or maybe it's a website that looks like it was built in 07 by a dude named Chad. If that's what you see ranking in Google Maps, then Google is starved for legit results. So here's what you're going to do. You're going to document the keyword they're ranking for. You can take the site, plug it into Ahrefs, or use a tool like Keywords Everywhere, which is a Google Chrome extension. You do that right there in the search and then you're going to ask yourself, could I build a one page directory that lists 5 to 10 real providers in this niche, in this city, with clean filters and legit info? If yes, then that's your play. And here's a bonus for you. Open up the actual site, use a tool like Built with and they have a Chrome extension too to see what tech stack they're using. If it's Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, GoDaddy, even better. Weak tech equals weak competition. And you can beat them with a better domain, a better host, webflow, WordPress, real listings, real photos, real reviews. And once again, remember, you can even build directories around those filters like Open Now Mobile Only Kid friendly. You are becoming the aggregator that Google was hoping to find all along, but it had to settle for the spam that showed up in your search results. And if you really want to get tricky, you can go to their Google Business profile listing, scroll to questions and answers, and you're going to see stuff like, do you offer after hours? Do you speak Spanish? Do you accept insurance? And then you can use tools like Manus, OpenAI's Operator or Replit to go in here and scrape all these things and find categories that have a disproportionately high percentage of people that offer these things. Kid friendly, women owned, etc. Each question is a filter that people care about. And you can add all of these filters to your directory, or you can make a directory out of one filter entirely, and then you just 10x the value of what you're trying to do. But now let's go into Facebook groups. You know, I love talking about Facebook, and one of the fastest ways to crowdsource what people are already searching for without guessing is, you guessed it, Facebook groups. So number four, we're going to talk about Facebook group mining. And this one is so obvious that it hurts, but almost no one is doing it right. And there are millions of Facebook groups. So let's do this. Let's go into Facebook groups because we are going to see where people are actually asking for recommendations unfiltered and in real time. This is hyper local demand, hyper specific and relevant. It's kind of like scraping search intent directly from the source. So you're going to start by joining a bunch of local Facebook groups. Luckily, I have my personal Facebook account pulled up and I'm in a ton of groups. Over a hundred. Mostly because I'm always reverse engineering things just like this. Search for things like moms of your city. My wife is in a moms group called Moms that get around and it's not what you think it is. It's just moms talking to other moms about normal mom stuff. Also, by the way, I do have a community called tkowners tkowners.com where we talk about all these hacks and the best of the best stuff doesn't make it to YouTube, FYI. Or you can search for things like city contractors, Dallas contractors, Minneapolis contractors. Find all of the many Facebook groups in those niches. State homeschool network, Alabama Homeschool network, Weddings in upstate New York, weddings in Tri Cities area. You want active, messy groups with a ton of people that are quote, looking for something. Those two words are gold to you. Looking for. Let's go into this group. Airbnb booking VRBO professional host. 495,000 people in this group. You think there aren't valuable people in this group? Half a million people that already own or want to own Airbnb properties. So let's go in here and we're going to search the group right here. We're going to type in the phrase looking for in quotations. Boom. Here's what I see. Looking for recommendations. What's the best course or resource for beginners to learn how to launch a short term rental business? Oh my gosh. Low hanging fruit. Please sell me a course. Looking for recommendations for business insurance for short term rental business. Of course people get a short term rental and they either need or they think they need specialized insurance. Looking for cleaner recommendations. Looking for small business cleaning services. Looking for linen rental. Looking for recos for a full service property manager. So you could use operator or manus to scrape all of these and find the commonalities. What are people searching for the most and or what are people searching for most recently? Because maybe three years ago everyone was looking for cleaners and then someone figured that out and it's really not in demand anymore. You can Also search for terms like recommend a in quotations or anyone know a good in quotations? Then you just start scrolling and you'll start learning. You'll be seeing patterns like looking for a mobile notary who's available tonight. Anyone know a face painter for kids birthdays? And you can even filter through these things. On the left, posts. You've already seen posts that are most recent posts in certain locations. This is a gold mine. Every single one of these posts is a directory idea waiting to happen. It doesn't mean that they're all going to be good ideas. You still got to find two or three more data points that back up your thesis, but is an amazing starting point that you can't find in Ahrefs or Google or anywhere else on Facebook for that matter. Quick question. What if there were a private community out there of people that were building businesses based on this podcast? Well, I just made it and it's only for business starters and business builders. It's called TK owners and it's basically like having me and 100 other business geniuses as your business partner, but you give them 0% equity. Also, there's going to be exclusive new trends, growth hacks, business ideas, and a database of everything I've ever talked about. You'll find thousands of startup case studies. You'll have weekly ask me anythings with me while I'll answer your questions directly. You'll be in my Slack channel where I'm hanging out every week and helping members one on one. We've got exclusive guest speakers including some names that you'll recognize and if you're building something cool, I'll introduce you to anyone you need. TK Owners is the fastest way to plug into a smart, ambitious group of builders and accountability partners that are sharing wins without the fluff. And it's 99 bucks a month about the cost of an energy drink per day. You can join now@tkowners.com link in the show notes and then step three is you're going to build a swipe file as you scroll. This is just a fancy way of saying a Google Doc or a Google sheet. You're going to take screenshots of the best posts you're going to track. What are they asking for? How many comments are they generating? Because every like or a comment is another data point that says yes, there is demand here. Maybe the comments all show that the demand is already being met. People have good cleaners. You got to dig into the comments. The gold is really in the comments there. You don't even really need to guess what filters to add to these searches. They're giving you the structure in the comments or in the original post. And as a bonus, you can kind of ask without asking. I like to say you make a post that says something like, hey, if you could wave a magic wand and instantly find the best insert category here in town, what kind of filters would matter most to you? What's your budget? Do you want it to be mobile? Kid friendly? I'm just curious. And let the group crowdsource your entire directory user interface. You're going to get a list of filters, keywords, service gaps. Maybe you find there's no vegan restaurants in town and you're getting this data in real time from the most relevant people in the most relevant markets. Even a little messier. We're going to jump into Reddit, which is a lot more chaotic than Facebook, but also can be gold if you know what to search for. And then there are some third party Reddit tools built on top of Reddit where you can get even more out of Reddit. So this section number five I like to call Reddit mining. Yes, Reddit. It is full of trolls, it is full of chaos. But it is also one of the most underserved platforms for finding underserved service categories straight from the mouths of frustrated users. So here's exactly how you mined it and how you find directory gold. Step 1. Pick a subreddit. You're going to be searching for subreddits where people need recommendations or are planning things. R Frugal R slash wedding planning R/ buy it for life R slash Personal finance R slash Moving r H Vac A lot of these communities are gold because their engagement is so high. Just because it's a subreddit with a lot of people doesn't mean it's a good subreddit. A lot of the bigger ones are toxic. With poor engagement and toxic moderators, you gotta find the ones that are diamonds in the rough R Parenting r Chronic illness dogs van life. Each of these subreddits could be high friction, high intent service categories. Step two. You're going to use search queries like Recommend A or Anyone know a good A Or anyone know a good or how do I find a good where to get a best blank for blank? You're going to find posts like anyone know a good dentist who doesn't treat me like crap for not having insurance? Like how is Google going to answer that question for you? Or trying to find a therapist who takes Medicaid and actually Answers, emails. There's no filter for that on Google Maps. Or where do you find a mobile vet that doesn't charge 300 bucks just to show up? Every single one of those is a directory idea with emotional urgency baked in. Step three, you're going to analyze the comments and scroll the replies. What names are coming up? I'm telling you over and over on every platform. The gold is in the comments, not in the like rate or the like ratio or even the post. The comments are where people are having difficulty finding answers to their questions. Are people linking to sketchy sites in the comments? Do the comments look like they're just bots and they're full of emojis? Are people arguing in the comments and saying, hey, I've been looking too? That's your demand. That's your validation. You can build a clean site that lists just what people are begging for in in the comments, and then in doing so, you could outrank the Reddit thread itself. And if you really want to get tricky with it, in any given subreddit you can sort by all time, by week, by month. By last year, those posts are golden. And it's also side note, another great way to reverse engineer how to go viral in any given subreddit. Not that you're going to want to do that for this directory idea, but it's just a great little hack to know when you sort by top posts, you're going to find repeat questions with hundreds of upvotes. Most of the times when people are asking questions in Reddit, they're not looking for when people have already asked that question. So all of those upvotes on the same types of questions is pent up demand. Furthermore, you can piggyback on Google's search capabilities to skip Reddit's awful user interface. So you're going to type in site Reddit.com r wedding planning open quote recommend a close quote. That exactly is a search query. Swap out wedding planning with any subreddit. Swap out recommend a in quotations with similar question queries. This is faster and it's better because you still get the data from Reddit but the user interface from Google. Also, you can use tools like Glasp to highlight, save and tag certain comment threads as you're researching. There's all kinds of third party tools like that. One of my favorite Reddit tools is called Gummy Search. It costs like 50 bucks a month or something, but I recommend using it for at least a month because it will organize Reddit topics in ways that Reddit doesn't do natively and it can help you find things that are trending on Reddit before they're trending anywhere else. Forget directories. That's just a great tool to use for reverse engineering or researching any business idea. So now let's look at some ways that we can pull ideas straight from the Facebook Filters that people are wishing exist, but they don't. Okay, the filter gap. This is the part that most people completely miss. The real power in these directories isn't who you list, it's how you let people filter. Because most dedicated directories are only sorting by city or category. That's too broad. That's too boring. That's why people are bouncing. Real users don't search like that. They're searching for things like open late, kid friendly takes Medicaid, speaks Spanish, pet friendly, kids safe, female owned, LGBTQ affirming on and on. Now remember, those are filters, not categories. So the play is to build micro directories where the whole point is in the filter. So forget best therapists in Dallas. Do therapists in Dallas who take sliding scale and actually answer emails. So instead of like something like event venues near me, you're going to do event venues that let you bring your own food, take a niche problem and solve it with a single beautiful filter. Remember, the beauty is in the filters here. So here's a good real world example. Search for dentists that take Medicaid near me and you're going to find outdated PDFs, you're going to find state websites from 2009, you're going to find broken links and you're going to find people giving up in these Reddit threads. Getting frustrated. Now imagine a world where there was a clean site that had location insurance accepted, languages spoken. Are walk ins accepted or not? What are the weekend hours? What are the holiday hours? Are the reviews pulled into this directory site you just built the product Google wish it had to rank. Google wants to show the best stuff and it's not there. There's too many niches for everyone in the world to cover. And if you really want to get smart with it, remember what we discussed a few minutes ago. You want to check out Google's people also ask boxes because all of those questions equal a filter and no one's organizing around them. You're not trying to build a massive site or the next Uber. You're building tiny answers to big pain points. So one of my favorite things to do is to talk about tools. Ahrefs is good, but it's not the end. All be all so I'm going to show you the stack that I use to find these angles fast and to build even faster. So section seven I'm calling the Tools stack. These are the tools that I actually use. So let's break it down. I just know someone's going to ask do I need Ahrefs to do all this? No. It helps but it's not required. So here's what I actually use and how let's get it out of the way. Ahrefs. I use it for two things. Finding weird long tail near me, keywords that no one else is touching. Looking at the volume attached to those keywords and plugging in spammy competitors to see what they're ranking for by accident. That's it. That's the 80 20. You don't need the fancy stuff. Tool number two keywords everywhere. This is a browser extension. So if you're on a budget, this is gold. It shows the keyword volume inside of Google. So you can use it on Google Maps searches, you can use it on Reddit, YouTube, Facebook group threads. It's just nice because you get instant validation. You don't have to log in, you don't have to export. There's no fluff. Number three lowfruits IO this is a really niche tool that finds keywords where the competition is more soft than average. Stuff like SERP equals Quora plus Reddit YouTube plus low domain authority blog. That means you can win. You can stack all these tools together with this low fruits tool and it'll even pull in the people also ask questions. You can filter those by niche. Number four Built with. I use Built with and the browser extension when I click on a spammy site from Google Maps because it tells me are they using Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, Webflow, WordPress. Most people think you have to pay 450 bucks a month to use Built with but just use their free browser extension. We're not doing this at scale. We only need one or two sites to get going. It'll also tell you if they have analytics installed, what is their form builder, what CMS powers it. If it's an old outdated janky tech, then that's going to be one of your signals that this is a good arena to compete in. Number five is going to be Glasp or Evernote. You've probably heard of Evernote. You can also use Google Docs or your Apple Notes. Apple don't get fancy with it. You don't need notion. This is what I use to save Reddit threads or Facebook posts or random weird search results and these niche directory examples that I'm trying to swipe by later, I can.