How Jesse Cunningham Builds AI Directories

0:00I want to make as much money as possible with directories. AI directories are going to be a big thing on this channel. We're going to go over a lot of different things and it's going to be fun, right? We're going to build from the ground up here, kind of figure out what the scene is. I have my lunch right here. Look at this thing. Before we begin, look how good this looks. So, I'm happy. I have my lunch. I wanted to show that off. Let's talk about how to build AI directories that can boost your microsites. But, more so, you can make

0:27money with them just straight up. So, there's a lot we're going to go over. Freight Choo has a good channel, right? Check this guy out. He's building directories. He's been doing this for a long time and we're going to be inspired by what he's up to. Now, what we are going to do and our goal here is to build a directory, at least get the framework in place to power our microsites. So, we do AI rank and rent via microsites. These websites right here cost $11 and some change to build.

0:55Crazy. That's assuming that you have an AI builder such as Claude or GPT. Now, if you have a website that can rank on Google, how do you power it up? There's different ways, but if you stay in a particular niche, this tactic is going to be pretty darn powerful. So, let's just jump into it, the directory stack. So, why I went down this rabbit hole.

1:16One website about 50 pages built by copy and paste in 2022. So, this is how it used to be done and it still pays every month with almost no maintenance. And those stats are based off of Freight's interview with Jared, my friend Jared over at Niche Pursuits. Very, very cool interview. I recommend you check it out. So, he was able to build a directory site before AI was a big thing.

1:35Right? Can you imagine building a thousand, I don't know how big it was, but a thousand page directory site using WordPress? Nowadays, we have AI, so the game has changed. It'd be very, very painful. I wouldn't even consider doing this if it was with WordPress anymore. So, we're going to find a different way, right? So, let's keep it going. A directory is a curated list optimized for on-page SEO. And this is the structure and we're going to have a use case I'm going to show you. We're going to build it for our microsite. So, we have that cool microsite I showed you earlier on

2:02Orlando Custom Pools. We're going to go into that. So, you have a homepage, you have state pages, you have city pages, and then you have listings. It's very, very basic, right? And what you're trying to do here, if you come over here, dog parks near me, dog parks in Florida, dog parks in Orlando. Basically, I mean, when you look at the intent of a directory, it's the same as a microsite just on a larger scale. Now, no matter which road we go down, it seems like this is the same seven steps every single time for a directory. So, we're going to find the niche, we're going to

2:30scrape Google Maps, we're going to clean the rows, we're going to enrich, and I'm going to get more to specifics here. We're going to enrich the data with attributes, build the pages, rank it over time, and monetize. How you monetize can be done in different ways. For us, for the sake of this video, we want to boost other websites. So, we are kind of creating a PBN of sorts, of sorts, but you can make money a lot of different ways. So, let's keep it going.

2:53So, finding the niche is the slow part if you're starting from scratch. If you are already in the Rank Expander Academy and you have a niche and you have a vertical and you've already built your microsites, well, you know exactly what to do, right? Let's say you were doing Orlando Pools or Pools in Florida. Well, you have your niche, build a directory around that. But, if you're not, here's the the method. You can open Ahrefs keyword, type near me, filter keyword difficulty under 20, then scroll past page one. The boring terms on page 10 are the opportunity. Oftentimes people freak out about low volume keywords.

3:26That's okay, let them freak out. There's a lot of opportunity for low volume keywords. Now, Outscraper seems to be the tool of choice to do what we need to do. We need data somewhere, right? I've used Outscraper, it's a good tool. I I'm curious now if you can do it with different vibe code and techniques, probably APIs, but if it's cheap and it works, let's just go with it. So, Google Maps is the raw material. So, Outscraper is going to scrape Google Maps, right?

3:52And you pay per row. So, you pick the exact Google Maps category, you choose the states and pull these different fields. All these different fields you can pull to your website. And then you can have AI nowadays enrich the data, which is very cool, and inject unique data, which can help you rank better. We can get into that. But, $100 for a typical scrape, you know, not too bad.

4:12So, most of what you scrape is going to be junk. So, raw rows without scraper, let's say it's 100,000 plus, remove rows with zero reviews. Um the names must contain whatever's in your niche. And then you're left with, you know, 5% 6% of what you were going for to begin with. Just realize most of it is going to be junk. And then enrichment is what makes a list into a tool. So, where do the attributes come from? Google Maps reviews, tags, Reddit threads, and Ahrefs modifiers.

4:41Um and then how they get filled filled a tool reads every list and review and returns true, false, or not enough info. Um I know Frey, he has his own tool for this, very very cool. I'm imagining we are going to vibe code a similar thing. And then descriptions, GBT for sheets with a custom prompt. I prefer Claude. Um nowadays, and and some of this stuff, you know, is dated because, you know, I went to Frey's YouTube and learned, you know, from his past 2 years of, you know, or 1 year of video. So, things are going to be different because we have

5:11different tools now. Things are always going to get better. So, now you pick a stack, right? Path A is WordPress, path B is AI coded. We're definitely doing AI coded, right? WordPress, we can do AI coded with WordPress. We can certainly do that and give it, you know, FTP access and just have the AI do it. If your preference is WordPress, fine, but we are going to to make sure we're doing AI coded cuz that's how we just build things. The WordPress directory stack, this is what it can look like, you know, have Hostinger paid for WordPress if you go that route. I think, and this is

5:40based upon some of his videos, but I think we're going to do it a little bit different, but we're just getting all the tools out there so we can figure out what's, you know, not good or bad but just what we want to do. Like obviously he knows what he's doing, right? He's great at what he does. We just want to figure out, you know, what he does so we can customize it to our liking. So hosting her geo directory, programmatic list and CSV import and batches, very cool. WP all import bulk listings and bulk images, rank math, okay. Elementor

6:05Pro, jet engine, the image optimizer and interactive geo maps. Now as we get on in this video we're going to incorporate it into microsites. So microsites is the AI ranking and rent at scale. The whole point with microsites is you can build it and host it. You can build the website and host the website, which is crazy for $11 and change. Very, very affordable. Basically all you're paying for is the hosting because it's that affordable. It's crazy. So classroom, let's come over here. You have the microsite playbook, you have the microsite empire. These are the two places how we built that pool website I

6:36showed you earlier is right here. It's a zip file you give to the LLM. Actually I tried it with GPT Astra and Astra kind of fell on on its face. Some people in the comments were saying I didn't prompt Astra well. I gave it the same exact prompts. I don't know. I'm just preferring Astra or Claude fable at this point and even Opus. Now this is the Rank Expander Academy. We have a 7-day free trial and if you decide to stick around we have a 90-day money back guarantee. It's one of the fastest growing school communities on the platform. You can come here and see

7:03wins. For instance, Brandon right here had 59 leads from this Sunday. He posted this 11 hours ago. Crushing it. And you can just come down here and see different wins. But the idea with this video is how do we take something that is proven, microsites, it works, right? And supercharge it. And the idea of supercharging it with a AI directory is very, very appealing. The static pillar pages beat programmatic more often than you think. I can understand this. I'm hesitant to go down this road. So static pillar pages can be accomplished with how I want to do it, how I want to do

7:36it. My best case scenario is a static HTML website. Can we do it with this? It'll be a pain in the butt to update. Tell me if you have any experience with that. So, static pillar pages are some of his best sites according to his YouTube. Programmatic, right, is what I'm interested in. I'm not interested in doing geo directory or Jet Engine if we can help it. I want to do it ourselves because we have these crazy tools, right? If you have crazy tools, might as well use them. The AI coded directory stack, Cloud Code, Inside Cursors, Superbase, Versel, Next JS, JS, Stripe,

8:07you get the point. Now, this next part we're going to go over why I think WordPress is out and AI is in. So, seven features that were one prompt each opposed to WordPress being an absolute pain in the butt. City pillar pages, 4,800 pages with local frequently asked questions would be terrible in WordPress. With AI, it's easy. Claim your list and you can do this featured list and add a store schema everywhere.

8:28This kind of gets into how you make money with a directory outside of microsites. So, there's, you know, you can rent spots on your directory. Back in the day, affiliate guys who had affiliate websites with listicles. A listicle is like the best products for XYZ. Think of like the best coffee mugs for Christmas gifts, whatever. But, you could sell the top slot if you ranked number one, two, or three in Google for that. And you could sell it for a lot.

8:52So, the product at the top, right? They're going to get a lot of traffic. They're going to make a lot of money. And then the same way, these people here, right? If you have a directory, let's say for Florida pool builders or Florida custom pool builders, someone's going to be willing to pay you to be at the top of your directory. Now, the new data pipeline is about 250 bucks for a lead gen directory. Okay, let's talk about this. So, for 250 bucks, we can build this thing with AI. Now, I can build 20 to 25 microsites with that. Is

9:22it worth it? We can talk about it. So, Outscraper, Cloud Code, Crawl for AI, Classify, Enrich, Cloud Vision, and Superbase. I like it. Pretty darn simple. Now, this is a good slide, the monetization ladder kind of going in depth. So, you can have display ads. I kind of forgot about that. but at this level display ads is going to be the smallest and nowadays getting into Mediavine or Raptive is a total pain in the butt. Good luck with it. So, you're left with and even Ezoic nowadays requires tons of traffic, 250,000 visitors per month. Pretty interesting.

9:52So, that's kind of out in my opinion. So, featured listings is more in, right? Night 29 to $500 a month each. I can see that. You can sell leads as well. Right now you've entered rank and rent in some aspects. And then your own service. So, the directory is the marketing hardest to run, high ceiling. So, if you have a business or if you have a portfolio of microsites, then you're really cooking.

10:14But, something that's not here, right? What is missing? Let's look at these. 1 2 3 4. What I would say is influence. So, whoever has traffic to the website and I learned this. One of my first projects, my first SEO project ever was a local directory. This was in 2000 like 8 or 9. And what I learned was instead of monetizing the thing immediately, I should have just gobbled up more influence, right? Influence because then you can you can do a lot with that. I mean, your imagination is your only limitation at that point when you figure that one out. So, the four kinds of

10:46directories winning right now, um like social first type of stuff. I don't want to get into that right now. Outbid, lol. I could show you, but I don't think it's worth it for this type of video. Lead generation, so boring high ticket niches. That's what we want. We have a utility display ads, not into it. And then hyper niche communities, not into it. So, what we are into right here is lead generation. And this next part is going to tie in the whole kind of game plan that I have. So, the directory that boosts your microsites. This is what I

11:14want. And like I said before, we have a 7-day free trial to learn how to do all this. We're going to build it out in the community, figure it out together. The microsites are locked down. They work. We're crushing. But, let's build directories to boost them. So, the directory that boosts your microsites. So, you have a vertical directory, one niche in one state. That's what I'm thinking here. So, in the case of a custom pool builder, okay, this would be one Let's come back here. This would be one website in our portfolio. Custom pool builders in Orlando, Florida. And you could have one in Naples, Florida.

11:45And you could have one in Miami, Florida. You get the point, right? So, you have all these different ones. And then your vertical directory is going to list other businesses, too. But, it just might have preference towards your, you know, microsites. Depends on how you want to run it. You can make You can double dip, right? You can reach out to And this is the cool part. You can reach out to custom pool builders, which is already going to be part of your job, because when you have a microsite, you have to sell the leads to someone else.

12:11So, you can say, "Hey, look, Bob. I know you own XYZ company in Orlando for custom pools. I own this directory. And I also own five websites around your area that get leads." And then all of a sudden, Bob, or whoever the business owner is, is really listening. Like, leads? Exclusive leads? Right? Not shared like Angie's List does. That's the goal here. We want something that is going to be 1 + 1 = 3. And I think this is the ticket.