Niche sites
Run a niche directory and sell upgrades to listed businesses
Start a directory for one niche with free listings, and collect visitors' emails on every page. Then follow up with the listed businesses to sell featured spots, sponsorships and paid plans.
The hard part: growing search traffic through a slow first year, then following up with enough listed businesses to turn them into payers.
Who pays
Businesses listed in the directory pay to claim their listing, get featured placement, or move up to a paid plan. Once traffic and the email list grow, sponsors pay to reach that audience. tothalpar1 points to a directory owner earning $600 a month in recurring revenue just from following up with free listings. hsaffiliate2025 reports that one directory reportedly makes about $10k/month from inbound sponsorships.
How to build it
Pick a niche people search for
Choose a type of business people look up often but that has no good directory yet. Use Claude to brainstorm the searches people type and to gather a starting list of businesses.
Build the directory with free listings
Set up a WordPress site with a directory plugin such as TurnKey Directories, which includes owner claims, Stripe paid plans and featured placement. Add every business as a free listing.
Write pages that answer real searches
Shape each page around what the searcher actually wants, such as 'best X near Y' or 'X that offers Z'. Use Claude to find topics the current pages miss.
Collect emails on every page
Add a Beehiiv signup form to every page and send a short regular newsletter. Search traffic can come and go, but the email list stays yours.
Follow up with listed businesses
Email each business to say it is listed, invite it to claim the listing, and offer a featured spot or paid plan through Stripe.
Sell sponsorships as traffic grows
Once traffic and subscribers grow, offer sponsor spots on the site and in the newsletter to companies that serve the niche.
Sources on X
- hsaffiliate2025 · Sep 29, 2026
hsaffiliate2025 reports, second-hand, that a 'boring' directory site reportedly makes about $10k/month from sponsorships, all inbound, after a first year of near-zero traffic. The founder reportedly got serious about search, built his own tool to automate repetitive search work, and added email capture everywhere. The poster says the site now gets 1M+ impressions, 15k clicks/month and 5,000+ subscribers. These are the founder's claims as relayed.
- tothalpar1 · Sep 18, 2026
tothalpar1, replying to a directory owner, calls the '$600 MRR from following up with free listings' exactly the right approach. The poster builds TurnKey Directories, a WordPress plugin for niche business directories with owner claims, Stripe paid plans and featured placement built in.
Ideas are curated from public posts and untested by us. Read the full note.