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Earlier this year, I started an experiment with an SEO-driven directory site. The idea was simple enough – target a specific, in-demand keyword and see what kind of traffic I could generate.
Now, just over six months later I can say it worked.
The site is closing in on 8K page views per month, which is beyond anything I’ve achieved to date. It’ll most likely hit 10K/mo before the year is out. Organic clicks from Google are at 2.6K/mo.
So it leads to to question, what do I do with this?
I'm not making any revenue yet, although that wasn’t in my thoughts when I started. I was just trying to learn to get sites ranking.
Now I’ve validated the idea, really I should move on to the next logical step – sell or monetise.
Not as simple as it sounds, as I didn’t put much thought into the commercial viability when I researched the idea.
Here’s a few things I’ve tried, and other ideas I could use:
Site sponsors
General site sponsors aren’t that keen due to the word ‘free’ in the name. They don’t think it’s a good investment if users are only after free stuff. I think this is shortsighted, but I get their concerns. It’s not worth fighting it.
Affiliate links
These are working, but they only deliver revenue once people upgrade pay the free tiers. Which is not their priority as they’ve come here for free apps.
Upgrades
I've offered listing upgrades for $, but have had no takers so far. I will experiment with the pricing a bit more here, as I set it fairly high to start with.
Other ideas
- Put ads on the top traffic pages. Offering ads to the competitors of the apps most viewed could work. Some of these are getting 300+ views/mo, so it’s a worthwhile idea.
- Create my own education material, both free and paid. This would be lot more work, but could be a better long term business plan.
- Sell the site in the coming months to someone who wants the traffic or data.
So I've learned a few lessons here for sure. Not that I had any expectations when I started this project. I will keep pushing to see what I can do with it for the time being.
It’s a new and nice problem to have, to be honest. Normally I’m busy chasing early traffic on new side projects, so to have a project with good traffic means I can experiment and learn in other ways.
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