mobile-appsI started developing a business directory for a certain niche, initially to learn native Android app programming. I have been looking up a lot of businesses on my own and adding to my database.
Later I found out that a business directory app/service for this niche might provide a lot of benefit to both the businesses and customers. So I thought about monetizing my idea.
For mobile app, I have considered offering lite and full (paid) versions.
I’m also thinking about launching as website but am not sure how to monetize that.
Would you go the website path or the app path to monetize a business directory (with a lot of data already available)?
If website:
Would you launch a mobile version of this site too (maybe responsive)? This might be in contradiction to my original Android app which now is 90% ready?
I would like to bring my idea to a more business level now since I really believe in the chance of monetizing it.
Therefore any advice on how to monetize a niche business directory is highly appreciated.
The typical way listing services make money is by posting either all or nearly all of the data for free. You need to attract a lot of users and its incredibly difficult to sign up paid users with a new kind of service. Keep it free, have them sign up so you can track them and email them. After a few months you hopefully have grown your user base and now you can add ads to your site, but keep them to a minimum, this way you can try to break even with web hosting costs.
The way to really begin to make money is by signing up premium accounts that want to highlight their listing so they show up on top. Since its a business listing, they may be more willing to pay than individual users, but I’m not sure about your data.
It sounds tough, but the you cannot try to make much money in the beginning. Google took away all of Yellow Pages business slowly, and now Google charges a huge premium to businesses for special placement in their results for the different business listings.
The best way to make money is to make yourself a brand, then charge only a few users for it.
Just as a qualifier, I work in affiliate feed arbitrage and specifically oversee a large part of our business dealing with business listings. I have a few questions and comments that may help you figure out exactly what the right course of action is.
To start with, you said that this is a niche market. That’s good and bad, in the sense that it will be easier to target specific users when marketing on your end for more users, and it will provide higher value to businesses who choose to advertise with you, but it will also limit your users. I would suggest that you be prepared to create multiple versions of this app in order to target other niches just to make sure your taking advantage of the code you’ve already created.
I would highly discourage you from offering a paid version of the app. Nobody is going to want to pay for information that is already easily accessible through many other sources, even if it means digging through non-relevant information. The key is to build a user base where you can offer extremely targeted advertising to businesses who would like to be “featured”, etc. Advertising online has surpassed the spend on TV, but businesses want to make sure they’re not just throwing money into the internet abyss. If you can make sure you’re targeting people who are looking specifically for their business, they’re going to be willing to pay more. It’s about quality over quantity at this point. If they were just looking for traffic, there are literally thousands of other outlets that offer that. You’re giving them simple, valuable, quantifiable access to potential customers.
How do you plan on selling your service to the users? Will this be something that they will want to use regularly (at least once a week) on their phones? What sets you apart from someone searching on Yelp?
-David
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