While building an Online Directory there are certain behaviors that it’s considered to avoid right at the beginning of your idea. By visualizing all the business and strategies written along the journey can give you a second point of view to fix some relevant details not yet solved in the early stage idea.
1. Don’t shoot for everywhere!
Having focus while building your first online directory allows you to identify some needs. Every niche has some problems that a directory can solve some of them. Picking one niche at a time will give you a better idea of how to develop a better solution for your users.
2. Keep prices down!
A directory and its strategy for profits work totally different from the actual market. Identify a good pricing margin won’t scare your users in case you need to adjust to cover costs with taxes, regulations in the long run. Online Business works differently from off-line markets. A good margin relies on the number of users vs recurring plans.
3. Services need to be applied correctly!
A lot of aspiring entrepreneurs get anxious to build the next million dollars without giving enough time to mature the business and its brand. It’s worthless to include commission base system, booking management system, events management system and others, without building a strong strategy behind it. Remember the step 2. and define a period of time for these features release. This way your business seems fresh and up-to-date. An all in can make you lose a huge opportunity during over time.
4. Don’t be penalized on Social Media!
You’ll find many tips and tricks about social media and what’s the best time to post on these platforms. Don’t take these articles too serious, and define your own path. Having a good learning path about your competitors, your engaged users, and its results will give you priceless data to identify the best hour for posts, invitations, offers, webinars and others. Don’t ruin your brand with strategies that don’t apply to your type of user and your country.
5. Delegate tasks when needed!
Running a Directory at some point will be needed to hire and build a team. Whether it be to manage social media, writing articles, solving issues with customers and welcoming new prospects. In the beginning, you’ll be all alone and you can do everything step by step. But at some point, these same tasks will get harder to keep track of everything. Especially when you start serving services for more than 100 thousand businesses.
6. Automate to take control of the results!
As explained in step 5. things will get bigger and bigger. There are many platforms and resources to automate and scale your business. It’s important to keep in mind that automation makes part of today’s businesses. If you don’t apply it when needed, you’ll more likely to fail.
7. Please, don’t host your project in a shared hosting!
It’s ok to use a shared hosting in the beginning, but it won’t last forever. Most online businesses fail to deliver their services while using shared hosting. It’s fanciful to believe that everything there for as less as $4.99 bucks will allow your business to enjoy its full capacity totally unlimited. Read the hosting details and be aware the limit of traffic per month. When you get close to the allowed limit, it’s time to deploy your directory into a cloud server.
Love this post
I think it should be pinned to the top of the blog
I would also add a suggested articles tab to the docs page and place it there
Thanks for the awesome theme