In this Brilliant Directories review, we’ll be covering how you can jumpstart an online business by creating a dynamic directory website using Brilliant Directories.
Making an income from the internet is great; to do it, you’ve got two options:
The first option: Start your own business, not a bad choice, but still somewhat risky. And remember the age-old adage:
“You can mine for gold, or you can sell the pickaxes.”
Which leads us to our next option:
Instead of mining for “online gold,” you can sell the pickaxes, or in other words: you can make your money by connecting leads with businesses.
Starting a directory website
Business directories are some of the best ways to take advantage of online traffic to make a profit.
Whether you’re creating a dedicated directory website, or you’re adding a directory to an already-established niche site, it brings a great way to further monetize your online assets.
When it comes to getting your directory set up, however, you’ve got to choose which platform to host it on.
Which leads us to today’s topic — Brilliant Directories
Brilliant Directories is a platform dedicated to building directories and online communities.
See, one of the biggest hurdles to creating an online directory is the work and knowledge required to do it.
Unlike with many run-of-the-mill business sites, directories have lots of moving parts and maintenance required. The stress of these high-maintenance sites is why so many people opt for dedicated directory platforms over more generalized platforms, such as WordPress (more on WordPress later, though.).
But what exactly makes Brilliant Directories any different from the other platforms out there?
Let’s cover some of the key features, and then we’ll discuss what differentiates it from a platform like WordPress.
A quick overview of Brilliant Directories’ features:
Brilliant Directories comes with a lot of integrated features that are hard to find anywhere else.
Today we’re going to cover the 6 top features that you need to know about before getting started with your custom directory website.
1) Excellent design
The first thing to note with Brilliant Directories is the design of its many themes.
With many website hosting platforms, you’re left with a rather basic set of templates to work from. They don’t necessarily look bad, but they’re usually not anything to brag at home about. So you’ll have to do a bit of work yourself to get them looking great.
Brilliant Directories, on the other hand, comes filled with excellent looking themes for various uses.
The options go from service provider directories to private communities, and more.
Which is one of the best things about the platform: it’s easy to use! You likely won’t have to do too much tinkering with your website to get it looking and working great.
Source: Brilliant Directories
Just some of the many themes Brilliant Directories has on offer.
2) Specialized SEO tools
As mentioned before, unlike with say, a blog website, for instance, directory websites have a bit more going on under the hood.
This includes SEO, as well. It’s not just about a simple blog and some pages of content, you’ve got a bit more to worry about. Take all of the listings, for example, you’ll need to make sure your platform (or plugin) supports SEO-friendly link schemes for each of them.
General WordPress plugins like Yoast aren’t built to support whole directories on their own. You’re going to need a plugin that caters to directory websites, which is precisely what Brilliant Directories comes stock with.
Rather than searching for the right plugin for the job, Brilliant Directories comes with SEO tools that make it much easier to optimize your website for search engine results right off the bat.
3) Plenty of ways to monetize your site
Next is one of the most important for running a profitable website, monetizing it in the first place.
Luckily, Brilliant Directories comes chock-full of different ways you can generate revenue from the site.
Listing Tiers
One of the best ways to earn revenue from a directory site is to charge for the real estate on it. Once your website has enough demand, you can start offering various bonuses to your members for premium prices.
For instance, you could offer multiple tiers of listings for business owners, each one with more features than the one below it.
This, paired with the way Brilliant Directories handles leads, is an excellent, built-in way to generate profit.
And speaking of leads:
Lead control
Brilliant Directories also gives you the ability to handle leads in a variety of ways.
Let’s imagine you run a property listing website.
When a user hops on to your website and clicks on one of the listings, you’ll want to keep track of that, since you could potentially charge businesses for those leads.
Brilliant Directories allows you to have total control over how your website handles leads; you can even set up a system to match leads with ideal members on your site for a set rate.
It’s a win-win-win, the lead gets the result they’re looking for, the business receives a new lead, and you get a profit.
4) The content management suite
Another vital part of any good hosting platform is how well you’re able to manage your content.
This is especially true if you’re looking to start raking in organic traffic through SEO (which you probably should).
With Brilliant Directories, there’s nothing revolutionary here, but what you get is a functional and respectable suite, not too different from what you’d have on a WordPress website.
From your content dashboard, you’re able to add new pages, edit content, and even manage the member content on the site.
5) Email integration
Another great plus with Brilliant Directories is the email integration.
When you start up your site, you’ll have a place to manage, send, and edit emails right within your admin panel.
You can send out email pieces to your members within certain groups, whether it’s separated by tier, category, or however else you’d like to organize things.
The email dashboard also comes with plenty of pre-made templates to choose from to make your life easier.
6) Flexibility with payment gateways
Brilliant Directories supports a wide array of payment gates for its websites, so you shouldn’t have much of a problem finding one that suits your needs.
WordPress Vs. A Dedicated Directory Platform — Which is Better?
Two of the most common ways to get a directory up and running are either a WordPress website or with a dedicated directory platform – like Brilliant Directories.
Each option has its benefits and drawbacks. So now that we’ve got an idea of how Brilliant Directories works, let’s discuss which platform is better for you.
The case for WordPress:
The first thing to note with WordPress is its immense flexibility. Unlike the specialist website platforms out there, WordPress is commonly touted for how versatile it is.
From e-commerce to directories or blogs, WordPress is able to take multiple roles on, and it does the job well.
This is in large part due to the huge amount of themes and plugins that allow you to morph your website how you’d like to.
WordPress has a plugin for pretty much everything.
Second, even with premium plugins and themes, WordPress is rather cheap. This makes it an ideal choice for tons of different groups. People with low capital or just getting into the world of online business probably won’t want to make any huge investments to start, so WordPress makes website-building super accessible (from a financial perspective, at least).
For people new to the online world, Brilliant Directories’ pricing plans may be a bit steep by comparison.
The case for Brilliant Directories
With that being said, there are some strong reasons you may want to go with a specially-designed directory software like Brilliant Directories.
First off is the fact that a specially-designed platform is — specially designed for the job.
With WordPress, you might be able to get a decently running directory, but at the end of the day, that’s not what the platform was designed to do.
Not to mention that it will probably take a bit of coding experience and website knowhow to get it running the way you want. So you’ll either have to learn the skills yourself or hire a specialist.
With a platform like Brilliant Directories, once you make the purchase, you’re much closer to having a finished website than you would be with WordPress, which is going to need plenty of plugins and work to function well.
The final verdict: WordPress or Brilliant Directories?
Here’s the thing:
With WordPress, there isn’t much that you can’t do with your domain, but it’s going to take some tinkering to get things working the way you want them to.
And by some tinkering, I mean a significant amount of tinkering, at least when we’re talking about directories.
Brilliant Directories, on the other hand, is much closer to being ready straight from the get-go. This also means that Brilliant Directories is going to come at a higher cost, and a website hosted with Brilliant Directories isn’t going to be as flexible as its WordPress counterpart.
So if you’re looking for flexibility, a good price, or you’re already very familiar with the WordPress platform, that may be your best choice.
If, however, you’d like to get your directory running through a much more straightforward process and aren’t worried about the price tag, then Brilliant Directories gets our thumbs up.
Want to check out Brilliant Directories for yourself? Learn more here.
Or feel free to give WordPress a check here.
