Opinions Wanted

I dont mean to be rude to be honest but you do SEO and you run an Internet Marketing blog, just a suggestion that maybe you may want to get some more experience under your belt before you offer other people support and suggestions for SEO and Internet Marketing.

Secondly your looks nice, clean and professional however it seems hard to use form my own opinion. So even if you did get traffic what then? Its not easy to search if its a directory. Directories should have big bold and in your face search buttons and category and location based clickable browse links.

Also how are you monetizing apart from adsense, will you charge for listings? And if so then are you talking about marketing your services to martial arts businesses or the listings to users?

If you want to target users i'd be going full steam ahead with SEO and even some offline ads. If you want to target martial arts schools I would cold call.

OK so it looks like you have a store as well as other paid ads. Now we just need to know if you are targeting businesses to get listings or end users to use your site?

This is advice that you must follow if you wish to be successful. To get traffic you must simply focus on participating in the forums in your niche and writing engaging content to your website visitors. To make money, you simply must build a list and market affiliate products to your subscribers.

Disagree totally with you here.

Google is a database AKA search engine. That is correct.

However based on how and where he advertises of course he can make his site become a very strong niche database and listings website for that particular niche.

There are so many reasons I can think of.

Firstly and simple with the amount of content he ads he will out perform most martial arts websites as well as other general directories and listings websites if he chooses the right keywords. Unfortunateley your theory does not hold up based on what we know about SEO.

Google simply compares one site to the other or should I say all the others for the keyword being searched. Google doesnt care about anything else so the ability for him to rank his site for keywords such as "Karate DoJo's in South London" is very very likely.

The only thing I can think of that he needs to consider is competing with places listings.

Then there are other things such as his webstore. Tell me google sells boxing gloves, please.

He could even use the merchant center to rank his products.

Also because he specializes in martial arts, why is it do hard to believe that he could A) collect more listings then what are currently online and B) actually make money from those listings?