frey

Building a portfolio of directory websites and doing SEO. Sharing directory tips: |
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[frey @freychu]

@idoseo4you @firecrawl Built my first job board 🫣 good early signs. Have an interesting idea for monetization if I can get the traffic. Will require SEO + social for distribution though so lots of work

[frey @freychu]

Arrived in San Diego for @ahrefs evolve

Went to a fun lil pre-event networking thing. Open bar, live music, food, lots of cool SEOs and agency owners.

Everyone’s been super chill and easy to talk to.

First guy I talked to said he’d be my first customer if I launched a DFY link building service 👀

Ahrefs team is also so friendly. Apparently am the #1 referrer of ahrefs on YouTube which is cool too.

Excited for day 1 tmrw!

[frey @freychu]

@CichyKrzysztof @ahrefs Definitely curious about this as well

[frey @freychu]

Welp, looks like I’m going undercover to THE SEO conference of the year by @ahrefs

The speaker list is goated (Austin lau of Anthropic 👀), but I’m most excited to meet lesser known ppl who run massive sites.

Will be documenting my experience on my channel

Lmk if you have any ideas you want me to cover.

Curious what the sentiment is around AI SEO compared to what I’m seeing in the data (tl;dr listicles and tools getting cited by LLMs)

[frey @freychu]

We love a $75 relevant backlink with real root/referring page traffic

This was from a non-profit that was happy to add my link to their top page for free

Had to honor my pitch so made the payment as a donation

Sometimes all you have to do is ask 👀

[frey @freychu]

@nicheprojectguy Thanks for the watch 🙏

[frey @freychu]

@PatFlynn Throwback to the security guard and food truck blog days, congrats Pat!!

[frey @freychu]

@rupadizzle Sending you a dm now!

[frey @freychu]

Nice little DR 60 link built for my directory before bed

Negotiated from $150 👉 $85 👀

Question: would you let me build links for you??

Toying with the idea of creating a DFY link-building service. Real traffic, no pbns, topically relevant, etc.

Would only take a few clients at first to prove my system across different verticals/businesses

[frey @freychu]

@EricTan_86 He sold the site for $6k to his friend and the friend asked for his money back when he saw my directory ranking quickly I guess

[frey @freychu]

The owner of a competitor directory emailed me today very upset.

Said it’s his first directory and he’s been at $200 MRR and shared screenshots for proof

My first thought was “so you’re telling me I only need 9k users to hit $200 MRR with 0 quality backlinks?”

It’s been less than a month and I’m already on pace to hit 1.2-2k monthly visitors and built a few amazing links.

Tough lesson. I’ve been there. When I started posting YouTube videos, I invited 20+ copycats to compete with my first directory. It was getting 90k/visits per month and has since gone down to 25k/visits per month.

It sucked at first but it is what it is.

My site only reached 90k/visits per month because I outranked a competitor who was getting 120k/visits per month.

SEO can feel ruthless at times.

The site owner requested I take my site down.

Unfortunately, I can now justify spending $200/month in links and from display ads alone it’ll be worth it.

Respectfully, see you on page 2 of Google soon my brother man.

p.s. I will never build a competing directory if you’ve shared your idea with me in confidence (1:1 meetings, private community chats). I’ve signed multiple NDAs to give people peace of mind. This was a total stranger.

[frey @freychu]

@mathiasonea Guy was basically like “keep going, it’s worth it” 😭

[frey @freychu]

@mathiasonea Some variations of this keyword are dominated by local municipality sites and .govs

Other variations that have the same intent don’t have .govs at all, and they share the same intent!

[frey @freychu]

I just found a directory idea that might be the dumbest, most boring niche i ever build

But it gets 700k+ searches per month (US search volume) and everyone in the world uses this/looks for this on weekly basis

Highly likely that you’ve searched this up yourself at some point

A few competitors launched in the last few months and already get thousands of visitors/mo and hundreds of AI citations

But they all stink. Either incomplete or just really poor data curation

Surprised the exact match dot com was available too 👀

[frey @freychu]

@0xmech Looks good to me 👍

[frey @freychu]

Imagine you walk up to a random group of strangers and tell them a joke. No one laughs. You’re not a comedian.

You sign up for an open mic at the famous comedy store in LA. You tell the same joke. People laugh. They think you’re a comedian.

A comedy club owner sitting in the audience thinks “hey this dudes pretty funny, lemmie invite him to my club”

Comedy store is the parasite (medium/reddit/youtube/high authority site).

Laughs are rankings.

Audience is google.

Comedy club owner is a backlink.

Authority passes through the comedy club owners reputation 👉 the comedy store 👉 you

[frey @freychu]

@jasonsharrpe 🫡

[frey @freychu]

@itschrisray I agree, I feel like there are too few trustworthy link building services

[frey @freychu]

@mathiasonea It’s been exposed. Its trash pickup 🙃

[frey @freychu]

@IntelScout

[frey @freychu]

@rupadizzle I feel that. Same here, def spent thousands on hollow niche edits.

Thinking of just letting clients approve/reject as the opportunities come in.

Probs wouldn’t need to start at ~$150 so similar to other link services