How do online directories make money

Besides earning money from directory listing, you can charge when listing owners want to add event, promotion news to their listings. This is preferred to listings that have been on your site for a period of time. Promotion campaigns, discount news, giveaway events, etc. Another revenue model to monetize from listing owners is lending them your visitor database.

You will help them send promotion news , advertise marketing campaigns to the list of subscribers on your site. By this way, listings will be promoted not only on site but also personally to their email addresses. As long as your site has collected a big customer database, this method is expected to be an effective money making tool.

And, if done well, you will provide useful and relevant information to the target users. Needless to say, once users got interested in what shared from your site, the chance they access such information is higher , which is the goal of listing owners when using this marketing plan. Moreover, besides monetary benefit, your site also earns good reputation from this strategy. Your site will be seen as a quality site for helpful and reliable knowledge sharing, which in the long run leads to higher traffic and bigger revenue.

You can sell advertising by allowing banners, text ads, and video ads to be put at some specific positions on your site. Collecting membership fee from listing owners is another business model.

It can be made on an annual basis, or month. Similar to Paid listings, but, instead of charging per listing, this method will charge per listing owner allowing them to be active on your site in a predefined period of time.

Based on the quality of audience on your site, listings owners will decide whether to join or not. Membership fee is beneficial for listing quality control. Once deciding to join, listing owners will be more serious and act accordingly, and of course, spammers will be reduced significantly.

You can also apply this fee for site visitors. However, consider this method carefully. In my opinion, membership fees should only be applied to high quality listings, to which members are willing to pay to get access. Otherwise, it should be easy and convenient for visitors to join your directory site so that you have more opportunity to build a solid traffic to your site, which provides an ideal condition to attract more listings.

As a result, it will create the balance in the number of both sides of customers: listing owners and site visitors. More directory owners pay to have listings on site whereas visitors will keep coming back to your site due to its rich and informative content.

In a nutshell, there are a number of ways to make money from Online Directory Business:. The content — in the form of blog posts, resources, video or social media posts — is either created by the sponsor themselves, or is created by the website owner who then sells advertising in the form of a sponsorship of that content. The business listings on your niche or local directory are what visitors ultimately come for. But, you will stand a much better chance of getting them there with relevant content, in the form of blog posts and other resources.

Those blog posts actually account for more than half the traffic coming to the website. Your directory is based on a list of businesses and their contact information. If there are related businesses who would be interested in reaching your listed businesses or users, you can sell sponsored messages. You should make clear in your business or user sign-up process that they may be sent promotional messages from partners.

Besides email addresses, you can also collect telephone numbers for sending SMS messages. You can also implement a push notification feature so users can receive notifications on their desktop or mobile. We said earlier that your listed businesses are essentially a list of prospects you can then market additional services to, cheaply via email and SMS. Your advantage is that you can use the influence you already have in their business to promote these additional services to them that can be done quickly and cheaply.

Some of the digital marketing services you can provide to your listed businesses are able to generate Monthly Recurring Revenue for you, which in turn can begin to stabilize your revenue stream. The easiest ways to promote your marketing services to your listed businesses are through 1 regular email: newsletters, series, transactional; and 2 your directory dashboard.

For the email, you can start with a free account at a provider like Sendinblue. They provide you with both transactional email and marketing emails and you can send up to emails per day with their free tier. To keep costs down and delivery fast, your offer can be to develop WordPress websites with a combination of the Elementor page builder with a free theme like Astra or OceanWP. Those come with pre-built templates and full websites.

You can also outsource the work to a provider on Fiverr or other freelance portal and make it a regular gig. You can host multiple small client sites on that set-up while charging each an annual fee of about the same as they would pay for web hosting themselves. They would be free of the hassle of having to manage their own hosting; one less thing for them to have to worry about. They will thank you for this. Why do a lot of small businesses operate with free email accounts like Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo!

The client needs a domain name for their website, but they can also get a domain name for stand-alone branded email accounts as well. A service that has popped up in the past few years is maintenance services or care plans for WordPress websites. This is an opportunity to earn monthly recurring revenue. For a monthly fee, the service provider will do everything regarding maintenance of a WordPress website, leaving the owner to look after their core business, including:.

Some also include web hosting in their monthly plans. Many small businesses also claim that they are short on time to post on their social media regularly. This is another opportunity to earn monthly recurring revenue by offering social media services.

If you do it in-house, you can use a design tool like Canva for your image posts. They have also recently started offering quick video creations as well. Use Buffer or Hootsuite to manage multiple social media accounts and to schedule your posts. The cost and accessibility of promotional video has been reduced in the past decade, due to the increased quality of video cameras on smartphones, drone video and the rise of easy-to-use web-based video creation tools like Wave. If you want to offer a low-cost promo video product, you can standardize your offering and create a promo video with a collection of stock video clips, photos and text.

Or you can outsource it on Fiverr. On the higher end, you can outsource or partner with local video production professionals to do some great promo videos for your clients. There are a number of event web directories that offer free listings to access local and global audiences who are regular event visitors. Some event web directories enable users to book tickets to listed events and also allow them to contact event organizers directly through the website.

Moreover, many event directories aim for some personalization. So that they recommend events to users to match their previous interests and browsing history. Eventum is an easy-to-use and fully customizable Event directory theme for WordPress. It is a feature-packed WordPress theme to create a location-based event website where organizers can advertise their events in an attractive way.

A well-known event directory website is Eventbrite. Tourism has constantly grown in popularity as a niche mainly due to the eCommerce and advanced capabilities involved in the related products and services.

People always look up information on the internet when they need to find a foreign hotel to book a room or buy an air ticket. A travel directory provides information about all travel-related businesses from lodging, dining, shopping, attractions, recreation, and event venues.

Each travel web directory is different and features different categories on the site. Some major categories of travel-related business are accommodations, food, and dining, shopping, tours and activities, travel insurance and agents, sightseeing, etc.

Businesses that fall under these categories should consider listing themselves in travel directories in order to increase their visibility and reach. Moreover, businesses in cities with swarming travel scenes should also consider listing their products and services on a travel directory website. Adding listings in an online travel directory is a great way of exposing your listings to a new base of potential customers.

TripAdvisor is a real pioneer among travel directory websites. They are collected by third-party review listing sites in order to share with potential customers. Review directory websites are online platforms that gather user reviews for specific niches. Customers often take online reviews into account when making their purchase decisions and they are more likely to buy products with lots of positive reviews.

Therefore popular online review directories are something businesses should consider. Usually, review directory websites do not offer advertising options. But you can consider such features as monetization options. Another option for making an extra income with a review directory is to review affiliate products and services.

Review directory sites provide a great opportunity for small businesses to improve their reputation online and reach more customers. Furthermore, by analyzing those customer reviews, businesses can measure customer satisfaction and improve their customer relations. Customers love deals and discounts while shopping online.

Offering a discount for a purchase someone makes over an eCommerce site has become a trend now. They are very useful for online shoppers, sellers, and store owners. Online store owners can sell more with the help of these coupon directory websites by advertising and marketing their products online for free.

Additionally, small businesses can increase their visibility by using these directories while offering a suitable discount for online buyers. Affiliate marketers can also make money by listing coupons and discount codes of the products they are affiliated with.

For online buyers, there are great deals and discounts available to purchase online while dealers will find more sites for online advertising. With the internet being an important tool to reach out to potential clients, classifieds directory listings have become an important form of online advertising.

Classifieds directory websites allow visitors to register and add their own listings about their business or classified adverts about the items they sell or services they offer. The revenue model of a classifieds directory may vary from site to site. Some websites offer free submissions up to a certain number of listings per month while some offer only paid submissions.

Building a professional classifieds directory will be much easier with our powerful Classifieds WordPress theme. Just as the name suggests, Classifieds is a theme built especially for online classifieds directory websites. An article directory website is a collection of articles written on various subjects. These articles are constantly updated and added upon various topics from business, politics, entertainment, so on.

Article directories are very valuable tools not only to increase the credibility of websites but also to enhance the visibility of your site and thereby expand the client base. You can give a significant boost to your site by carefully monitoring the quality of content posted on your site and fitting products into the right niche.

One of the best advantages of an article directory is the use of backlinks. Many article directory sites allow you to add quality backlinks to your site or blog within the article content, which works as an excellent off-page search engine optimization method.

Websites can be effectively promoted using these backlinks. If you want to create an article directory of your own, our Article theme would be the best choice. It is an SEO-friendly and fully responsive WordPress theme for making a unique and awesome article directory. One popular example of an article directory is. Contact directory website is solely a database of contacts that acts in the same way as an online telephone directory or a staff directory.

Some examples of contact directories can be named as employees of a company, students of a university, or businessmen from a specific area or niche. These portals allow users to find contact information of other people if they are available online.