John Rush

speaker

297 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2024 last heard Nov 2024

John Rush’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Startup Ideas Podcast · The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories · 21 Oct 2024 podcast

It's very difficult, because if there's no traffic, then something is wrong fundamentally. Maybe the domain name is wrong. Maybe the keyword looks easy, but in fact, it is not. That's why my recommendation is to never fall in love with the idea for a directory, but rather make maybe five bets, and then in 30 days, look at the one that does the best, and then put more time into that.

Otherwise, you will be trying to push the dying horse and will just never work. And in 30 days, I find the directory that does the best among all I did, and then I do the next phase. And the next phase is the data. And that part is even more important.

Because at the beginning, you're just selling the idea and people click that just to validate that they really care, they have the pain, but you don't focus that much yet on whether your directory is actually good. Because if you focus on everything at once, it's difficult to be good at anything, right?

So that's why the first 30 days, I focused only on validation of potential SEO traffic and the interest from people. But after a month, I go full into the data. And a lot of people who build directories fail here, like must fail here, because they don't put enough effort into making the data great. And here's what happens.

If somebody opens your directory and they know the topic, they understand it, they are probably experts. they can quickly see whether your data is high quality, whether you understand the topic yourself and you're not someone who just used ChatGPT to come up with the items, right?

And if that expert who sees your directory sees that the value of the content is high, the quality is high, they really respect that and they really want to share with their audience. And that happened... with all my good directories.

So they all have this moment where an influencer or few shared with their audience because they think it's really good and they will never think it's good if it's actually not good because they understand the data really well. If they come to, uh, let's say I made these directory, it was, um, LLM models. And then first I had, I just hired a guy to fill it out with data and

Then I open it and I see that it's missing Mistrel. There's no Mistrel there. And this is the example where if an expert comes in and they see you don't have Mistrel in your directory, they will quickly realize that you don't know the topic. You would never miss the most important open source project back at the time. So if the data is great, the influencers might share it with their audience.

And from there, your job pretty much ends because now it just turns into the organic system that people share. If somebody shared, then other people also want to share it. Like people work in a collective mind, right? And the only thing you have to do from there is to make sure the data is great. You keep running your SEO business activities, like I run the agent and others can do other things.

But then the key focus is making sure that you check the data, you check the space every week or month, and you make sure that if there is really hot item, appearing, like new item that everybody talks about on Twitter, you have to add it there. You have to add into your directory.

And you have to do it fast because if you do it fast, there's a chance you will actually get the traffic from Google, from people who search for that new hot item right on your directory. And That's why there's very little work to do, but you have to have put attention into the space almost every day. So I have a lot of directories. I don't really do stuff, but I scroll Twitter every day. And

Once I see that, oh, this item is relevant for this directory, I just bring it in. And that's kind of the next wave of growth comes from being early to list hot items on your directory. And Google will find nothing else on the internet to supply to the user who is searching for that. And Google will show your item, your page for that. So that's the whole path.

Yeah. Yeah, so there are multiple ways depending on your audience. So if your directory is B2B, it's easier to monetize it because obviously you can go to businesses who have the same audience as your directory and you can pitch them in the banner spot or the sponsor options. That's what I always did.

I had directories of all GPTs and I just sent an email to all GPT owners saying that, do you guys want to be featured on top of this directory? Because we have 30K items. You're just one of 30K. Do you want to be the number one on the top? And then a lot of people said yes. So that's one way. The other way is the affiliate links. And that way works pretty good.

If the items you have on your directory cost a lot. So if you have items costing $10, then you'll make a little money on that because you need a lot of clicks. But if you have items for 500 or a few K, then there is good money to be made there. For example, I have a directory for Next.js boilerplates and I have affiliate links to all the boilerplates and they all cost $10.

quite a lot and it brings quite a good money good income so i would not exclude one way or the other i would say do the first one do the second one like do the sponsoring do the affiliate links and then the third option is uh is to sell the data be careful to not sell the data as a risk because obviously you can't sell people private data but you can sell the

the anonymized data, or you can sell the insights. And that's possibly bringing good income if you find somebody who needs that. And usually you have to sell it to the corporates and you have to pitch that to the bigger companies where they are interested in the percentage, in the distributions and things like that. And the most obvious way to monetize directory is to have a paywall to list.

For example, in this case, it's probably harder for business ideas because why would someone pay to list their business idea? But for example, if you're making a list of nannies,

search for nannies and then every nanny would pay quite good amount to be listed there if you have traffic and if you have the buyers and the same the buyers so that's number four paywall for listings charge 500 or 50 dollars for listings And then the number five is charge for access for those who are most interested.

In the case of director of nannies, if you are interested in hiring a nanny, you would probably pay good amount to get access to the whole database. So you show top five or you show nannies without their contact data, without their photos. And then to unlock that contact data, you have to pay and then you get access to the whole directory.

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