How to Make Money With a Directory Website

How do you make money with a directory website? Paid listings, featured placement and leads, and all three depend on visitors, so this video starts with directory SEO: what every listing page needs so a search engine can read it.

Transcript

How do you make money with a directory website? There are three common ways. Charge a business to be listed. Charge more for a featured spot. And send leads to the businesses that are listed. None of that works without visitors. A business pays to be seen, so first there must be people looking. Those people come from search engines. And that is where directory SEO starts. Every business needs a page of its own, built so a search engine can read it. Here is what each listing page carries. Structured data, which tells a search engine that this is a restaurant, a hotel or a local business. Its own address, sharing cards for social sites, breadcrumbs, and a place in your sitemap. And reviews, written by real customers. This is one of those pages, on a real WordPress site. The services the business offers are listed with their prices, and customers add reviews. All of it is text on your site that a search can find. Categories get pages too, so someone looking for a whole trade can land on your site. The Pro version goes one step further. It builds a landing page for every mix of type and place, like restaurants in one city, or hotels in another. Each one is made from the listings you already have. Now the money. Start with free listings, so the directory is full. Let owners claim their page. Now you know who they are. Offer a paid plan, with a longer run and more on the page. And sell the featured spot to the ones who want to be seen first. An unclaimed listing shows this button. Every owner who clicks it is a business you can talk to about a paid plan. What does a business pay for? Proof. With the Pro version, the owner sees how many people viewed the listing, in their own dashboard. You see the whole business from one screen. How many listings are published, and which claims are waiting for you. Each claim is an owner who has raised a hand. Payment in the Pro version works with credits. An owner buys credits through Stripe or PayPal, and a plan costs a set number of them. You decide the price, how long the listing runs, and whether the plan is featured. Coupons let you run a launch offer. Compare starting next year with starting this week. No pages for search to find, or pages that are already there. No listings to show, or listings building up. Nothing to offer a business, or a page it can claim. Owners you have never met, or owners with an account on your site. Search traffic takes time to build, and it only starts on the day the pages exist. Every month you wait is added to the end. WB Listora is the directory plugin for WordPress. Publish your first listings this week, and let the pages start working. Get WB Listora. The link is below.