Learn how to start a web directory. In this episode, I will go over what a web directory is, how you can choose a niche, what you need to build a website and how to choose a hosting company. In this series you will learn a step by step process of how I am creating my web directory for paintless dent repair.

Welcome to Casey's SEO, and today I'm going to be starting a new series which is going to go into how to create a web directory. So a web directory is basically any type of website that is going to list a directory of, let's just say, locations for a particular niche or business. So these things have been around, i think, probably since the beginning of the internet, but i think they can and can still be profitable if you kind of change up the way that you go ahead and run your directory. So if you want to take a look at you know one directory, that's been around forever. You can look at yelp, so yelp obviously goes into any type of business that is online.

Now i have kind of used yelp before with some previous businesses, and i really don't like it, but that's just kind of how everything is laid out and of course they always try to sell you on. You know making your profile better. These types of things and that's just how their business is and that's how most directories are, but i think you can kind of take it a step further if you specify it into one little niche and you can really kind of make it your own. Take a look, what everybody else is doing change it, and hopefully you can end up creating something: that's a little bit different and will get some traffic to your site and potentially, maybe make you some money down the road. If that is your end goal, but first before you can even start with this, you need to look at what type of business you want.

You want to get into check out the competition of that business. You know learn how you can make things a little bit different, try to come up with a little game plan. First now, if you are new to making websites, there are a couple different things that you need to take a look at. So what type of platform are you going to be putting your directory on? I think the easiest is WordPress.

You don't even have to know too much about creating websites to get into WordPress there's so many tutorials out there. There are plugins for almost anything. You can probably make it work without learning exactly how to do everything so definitely check out WordPress, and then you will need hosting so I've tried a couple. Different companies for hosting I've worked with Godaddy in the past with their shared packages, which, in my opinion, are not great you're limited a lot of resources. Of course, they are a little bit cheaper, you're, looking anywhere from you, know, ten dollars a month kind of for their shared services.

But if you have anything more than one website, it's not going to be great for you. You might get a lot of timed out. Um resources, when you're trying to either even back up a copy of a website things like that so um, i would kind of I'd, probably stay away with them. Then I've moved over to Hostgator and i thought their service was a little bit better. Pricing is relatively the same, but if you are running once again, a little bit larger site or potentially want to run a larger site.

You're going run out of resources, also like on their shared services. I've used the VPS with them and even with a larger website that gets very slow and you're, still looking at, like 20 to 30 dollars a month for one of their cheaper plans. If you pay ahead, but i really think you can find some better options. My the newest option that i have gone with is end was in motion um hosting on this one. I actually just came across somebody else that was using it online and they're talking about how good it is and for the price.

So i went ahead and tried that out you're looking at at least for the package that i did um i prepaid for the year, and so i got that down to about thirty dollars a month. Now you can prepay up to three years and i think i brought it down even less, maybe even 20 dollars a month. That is with the VPS. It has a solid state disk, so everything gets loaded a little bit faster. I'M just you're working with the cpanel trying to think what else um i think, you're getting four gigs of, or maybe it was four core four gigs or eight gigs something around there, but even if you needed to scale up with them, you'll be looking at.

I think around a couple hundred dollars a month, but there you're running like eight to 12 gigs um and then there's like 32 gigs of ram and tons of memory. It's still working with that solid state, uh drive, so i think for their price. So far it's been great everything's been fast on the front end on the back end. Customer service is great, so you have to look at just how much money you want to spend per month and then go out and find a good hosting company and then find out how you want to make your website. Are you using WordPress?

Are you going to go kind of old school just do some CSS and HTML, you know figure out what you're going to do. What's the easiest way for you to build a site and maintain it, so that is kind of part one for today. So we just looked at you know what a directory is, how you can create one find a niche for one um: how to build one, what kind of what type of CMS platform and then, what type of hosting that you would want to use. So we'll be back with a part two here and we'll kind of look into WordPress and what plugins i use specifically for my directory and what other options might be out there so hope you guys enjoyed this little brief introduction to starting a web directory, and i Will be back soon with part two.