Integrating a paid vertical directory is an option to monetize your blog. The attractive thing is that it does not replace other existing sources of income, providing value for advertisers.
Carlos Bravo18
I started my first blogs when I was 25 in Switzerland. I have easily burned through about 20 blogs by going beyond what was allowed and always trying out the latest SEO “tricks” I had read on the forums I was on. This is the blog I have been running the longest (I just turned 3 years old in January) and the first one in Spanish, as I only wrote in German on the others.
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My beginnings with blogs and directories on the dark side of the internet
In parallel to my activity as a blogger, I created vertical directories with my partners. These were a kind of yellow pages specifically for hairdressers, electricians, psychologists, etc. We had easily created job seeker phone number about 30 of them in the same style. Given that 30% of search engine visits at that time (and it is still the same today) are regional, we thought it was a good idea.
We managed to rank well for long-tail keywords such as “electrician Braunschweig” or “hairdresser Ilmenau” without much effort. At first we had virtually no content in the directories as the idea was that companies would register themselves without us having to do the work. Our main goal was to generate income with Google Adsense, which we achieved quite well as people clicked on them due to the lack of alternatives.
If you now consider this to be spam and that the main activity was focused on creating pages like Made for Adsense, I agree with you. The curious thing is that these directories evolved over time, as companies registered every day. After a couple of months, they even provided real value for the user, as along with the ads, there were more and more internal results that did not come from Google advertisers. Over time, we decided to include a paid registration version for all those businesses that wanted to stand out from the rest and have even more visibility than Adsense ads. The surprise was that some companies began to be interested in this option and some even hired it. Our joy was only short-lived, as Google detected that we were using some blackhat techniques that were not allowed and our 30 directories went down the drain.