Making Money With An Online Local Directory

Making money with an online directory takes some considerable time, thought and planning. When setting up your directory you will need to determine whether or not you will offer free or paid listings. Then you will need to determine what services will relate to with each listing level. After this is done it’s time to get down to business which means getting the money.

So… Do you allow people to create a free listing on your site and then upgrade to a paid listing? …or do you work to monetize your site from the very start?

My vote is that you work to monetize your site from the very start.
I want to introduce you a model I have called:

PAY BEFORE YOU DISPLAY MODEL

Here’s how it works and why it might be important to implement into your directory structure.

Essentially You get people to pay as the very first step in their process of creating an online listing in your local or niche directory.

Why do this?

Most directories let you create your listing and then pay once your ready to publish it?

To begin with you should not let the responsibility of:
if…when… or how… an individual’s listing gets posted.
This needs to be their job. Giant sites like Craigslist, and Ebay can afford to let users move at their own rate… but you can’t.

Small local directories and Niche directories are different and require a different level of maintenance and monetization.

FOR example we work with Doctors. They are very busy and as with most professionals… anything that is going to take up valuable time is going to lose attention and fall to the side.

So when you are asking a professional to add a their listing… to YOUR DIRECTORY…and it’s going to take time they don’t have… chances are they are going to simply quit in the process.

That’s why you get them to pay first!!
Then you give them a listing.
Not the other way around!

After they have paid… heck you can even add the listing for them, and if they prepaid the year do you really care whether or not it took you 15 minutes to setup.

This is the cost of business and building and establishing professional business relationships.

ONE LAST THOUGHT ABOUT THIS MODEL:
You need to do your sales and marketing on the front end. What you want to do is to provide all the detail and information for what they will be getting on a nice sales page. Then provide a very simple purchase process.

IF you are allowing your clients to come in, play around with the listing, add, delete, edit… they get confused, waste time… and essentially can change their minds which means less money for you.