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Making money online is easy. Making a living by making enough money online is hard.
About 4 years ago I worked in a software company. I had a few sites based on free scripts and made some extra money from them. I wasn’t holding it in a secret and one of my co-workers asked me how to get started. Took me about an hour to set him up with hosting, adsense and free directory based on phpld script. I even showed him all my traffic sources and told him that he WILL make money online (just like most gurus selling ebooks 
). Well, he did. $5 the first month while his directory was PR0. I had a PR4 one back then and it made $300 or so a month. I also showed him what the landing pages and simple 2-3 page sites were. That’s when he started to dive in SEO, affiliate marketing and do his own thing. A few weeks down the road he showed me his new ugly ass site built around clickbank product. I laughed at first, but 2 weeks later it was pulling couple hundred bucks a week and he sold it a month later for 5K. Back then things were different, it was a lot easier to SEO a site, however, I was really surprised how quickly this guy picked it up. He put some time into learning + trying and it payed off.
A few months later another coworker (lets call him Hacker J) asked me how to make money. I did EXACTLY the same thing for him. Got hosting, set him up with adsense, showed my traffic sources and set up a directory. He took his directory more seriously, looked through the sites, made sure they were all quality, etc, spending several hours a day to go through about 300+ listings and verify the quality ones. While he made the same $5, he spent a ton of time reviewing his submissions. A month later he decided to stop. The reason, as he said, was that he was not in India where $5 may get you by.
3 years has passed. I still talk to my friends. It happened that Hacker J got laid off and asked me how to make money again. This time instead of explaining everything, I shared a few blogs with him. After a few days of learning, he asked what kind of sites should he make. Even though directories lost it’s peak, I still advised him to start with those as he already knew how to get 300+ visitors a day. Except this time he learned his lesson.
He is a programmer, so automation is not something he is not familiar with. He learned to automate creating these directories and bought over 800 of $0.79 .info domains (aff link). I checked with him today, 37 directories are up. He made around $5 yesterday and about the same today from his 37 sites. This time he spent some time writing the scripts to automate 99% of approval process and still keep the quality of the directories by adding a spam checking algorithm. He still has a long way to go, but according to his plans, 800 directories should make him $100 a day, while they are pr0. Not sure if it will be more, but I get around $100/mo from 12 older ones that I still have. As a matter of fact he may even get lucky and sell it as a network for 20K+ ($25 each is reasonable). However, his business model seems to work so far. It should take 8 days to pay for the domains once he has all the sites up. This may also be a good bottom layer of his new site network.
Based on this real life example I can see how:
1) One person gets it easy while another one fails based on exactly the same material.
2) A person fails but succeeds down the road trying to do the same thing from a different perspective.
3) People waste time trying to build something they can call a quality product rather than collect a quick buck while they can. I don’t think it matters much anymore. phpld directory is a phpld directory, not going to make dmoz out of it.
Learn to automate as much as you can. If automation is not an option, learn to outsource. If you do it right, it may be even cheaper that automation. Perhaps I will talk about outsourcing in my next post or a series of posts. Not sure when, still super busy working on my new house…
As for now, you can read this post and forget about it or do something to get started. 
Very good post Rasim. I am a program nub myself and don’t automate, but the directories have probably brought me the most profit overtime, how to setup automated dirs? I would love to know that
Thanks. Just seeing how it installs and have a script that copies everything into the new folder for all the other ones, replacing the name and other settings from the URL, copying pretty much everything, including the categories. The only thing the script needs to do is replace “domain1.name” with “domain2.name” wherever it sees one, emails, titles, urls, message texts, etc., and create “noreply@domainX.name” for each of the directories. It also needs to randomly select a theme from a set of 20-30. The hardest part is approval process, the more sophisticated the spam filter is the better. Removing titles with repetitive keywords, and looking for XXX related ones, flowers, escorts, etc… I believe he has a grease monkey (firefox plugin) script made that does the rest of the approval on client side as a second layer and manually goes through the list every once in a while.
I just payed the guy in Uzbekistan to approve the sites before, but its pretty much impossible to maintain 100% quality since some sites go down within a month, some change to parked pages, etc. Even 100% quality approval needs to check the older submissions. There is a way to make it a lot better, but I think directories kind of lose it’s value no matter how much time and effort you put into it. They can still make a dollar though.
Automation of directories is necessary in order to maintain ones sanity. There simply is no way to keep up with large networks of sites without it. I am learning in the process, first doing adhoc hack automatons on a need basis. Understanding and streamlining the process is essential. I have always known that if you can analyze something and functionally breakdown the process into its constituent parts, it can be automated. I figure if you can tie your shoe laces once why not a thousand times? Complexity is merely simplicity compounded.
Yep, that’s what I’m talking about…
Very nice! I agree that directories totally lost their value (the small, medium ones) The real big ones are still worth a lot though, but very hard to create a directory like that. Should need a whole team for 1 dir.
About the dollar that can be made out of directories; I agree.. You can still sell dirs for a few hundred after some time. Hacker J took one of yours i see rasim?? hehe
Yep, that’s what I’m talking about…
Yes, but it is complicated to make a big one on unmodified phpld… As for Hacker J, no. That is the first one I helped him with.
Mine are [color]dir.coms
ohh yes hehe
It’s true! One person success while the other fail, that is probably why we have different occupation. Are you outsourcing right now? Can’t wait to see your next post about it. Thanks for sharing.
I used to outsource a lot more when I did custom web development, but still do for some of the internal projects.