🎁 You Get A Directory, And You Get A Directory...

Seems like everyone and they momma out there making directory sites right now.

It’s all over Twitter. People in my newsletter group have been talking about it for a little over a month.

Now Jacky Chou spun one up real quick like with AI.

Easy Money? Or Just Easy?

I’m in the free ‘ship your directory’ group that Frey Chu runs and things are poppin’ there, too.

I think directories are the new newsletters. And yes, that is a hysterical thing for me to say as someone with a failed local newsletter…who is now working on a directory.

🙃

But I’ve not completely given up on my local newsletter. I’m just taking some of the time I was spending on it and re-allocating it to building a niche directory.

Anyways, one thing I’ve noticed that the newsletter rush and the directories rush have in common is the people jumping in to do it with AI.

I still feel like taking that extra step beyond AI is how you’ll stand out with a newsletter or directory. Frey’s value add is what he calls “data enrichment.”

For him, that’s putting things on the directory pages that you can’t easily get by spinning up a scraper, getting data, and then having an AI tool put all that into directory website format.

I’m essentially doing the same with my site. Though I’m just calling it extra research cause that’s what I’m doing.

In some ways, stuff like “data enrichment” is your moat…except for all the assholes who just straight up scrape your site.

But most of them are too lazy to really compete.

We’ve got a restaurants directory on the website for our local newsletter and we’re actually going to the restaurants, taking pictures, making notes about things like ‘limited parking’ etc.

And there was another local newsletter that was just copying everything we did like that. The last issue they sent out was October 10, 2024. The website now directs you to a suspended hosting page.

So, expect copycats but don’t worry too much about them.

Coming up…

More on what I’m working on and how it’s going.

Stay awesome,

Shawna

P.S. If you’re looking for high level discussions or tips on things like local SEO and Rank & Rent, I highly recommend Jacky Chou’s Advise community. I’ve been in it for several months and there’s tons of value in it, including a SOP for local SEO.

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