Speaking of Niche Advertising: Create a New Stream of Income

Yesterday I posted about finding good deals on niche advertising space. As soon as I finished reading I knew I needed to come back and share a profit tip for website owners who operate niche websites.

If you have a niche site with a respectable amount of traffic and good rankings in the search engines you could easily open up a new stream of income for your project by adding a niche directory.

I’m not talking about going to a lot of time and effort in setting up a complicated directory script, although I will share a few ideas in that area – for the most part I am a big fan of small, hand tended directories that can be created simply with HTML or Wordpress pages.

Want some Examples?

Take a peek at the little directory I have on Mom’s Talk Radio.

We created a handful of pages in Wordpress for categories and then made a parent page that links to them with a simple PayPal ‘buy it now’ button.

When a customer buys a listing they receive an email from my VA requesting the ad info. We encourage them to use 50-100 words to describe their products, services or website and to choose good anchor text for their links.

This particular niche directory is only about a year old. We do nothing to promote it other than having the link in the navigation and it has earned us several hundred dollars since it opened.

Our stats bear witness that the directory pages get quite a bit of traffic month after month which not only benefits our listing customers, it certainly helps to draw new potential listeners to our podcast network.

Another example can be found at Advertising Moms.

This is also a pretty young directory that has yielded a hundred dollars or so in extra income.

Even though these directories are managed manually they take very little time or effort. My VA has form letter responses for everything and inserting new listings only take a moment.

One directory only accepts text but the others offer a ‘premium’ listing that includes a graphic for an extra cost and quite a few customers do choose the higher priced option.

Another good example of a hand tended directory on a niche content site: Internet Based Moms WAHM Mall.

What if you really want to automate the process?

I did try a link directory script several years ago. It was free and easy to install and I enjoyed it for about six months until the spammers found me. The spam submissions rose to 400+ a day and required manual handling to remove – so we killed it.

There are feature rich directory scripts that have spam prevention functions, but to be honest – I found them complicated and awkward to customize. I only have so much techgeekery in me to go around.

A few scripts that come well recommended are:

• phpMyDirectory
• Free PHP Directory Script
• eSyndicate

The paid version of the last one mentioned is wildly customizable and can do so many cool things that I wish I had the desired right now to create a new niche directory so I could use it.

For Wordpress users there is a handy plugin directory.

How much to Charge?

I charge $10-15 for a text only lifetime listing. Some sell listings by the month, quarter or year – but I don’t want to keep track of expiring listings. I did try selling listings by the year on subscription at USAWAHM and though I sold about a hundred or so in a years time, when the year rolled around customers has usually forgotten about their subscription and were ticked off about the money coming out of their PayPal account!

You will have to decide what your niche is willing to pay. If your niche is hot and there aren’t many options, you can easily charge $25, $50 or $100 for a text listing that lasts a year or a lifetime.

It’s not just about Money

Besides income, I use my niche directories to bless friends with one way links when they’re needed. I also use them to swap for services and products.

Adding a directory to your site isn’t a ticket to sudden riches but it does bring in extra cash, in most cases more than enough to make it worth your effort.