After publishing my quickly-approving directory list, I concentrated more on the directory business. It’s good and growing like wildfire. Here’s my little guide to getting started with these directories.
Directory biz is easy to set up. With little requirement, your business is on! You need a good host to set up your directory, as directories need good uptime and bandwidth. Choose your web host wisely. Directories can be general or niche-based. Both types of directories work well. TLD and subdomain affect results to some extent — better to have a top-level domain. Lastly, you need a directory script to set up your directory. phpld, eSyndicat, phplynx are great scripts with both paid and free versions. Installation of these scripts is simpler than anything else I’ve seen. Once installed, just get a nice template that suits the directory niche. Set the categories and mailer for your directory. There are many pre-made category dumps out there on the web. Use any of them or create your own.
Once you have set up your directory and are ready to enter the market to promote it, just post a thread at the Solicitation and Announcement board on Digital Point — this will get your directory running. Many hungry people are waiting on DP to add their links to new directories. All you need is to get listed in the directory submitters’ list, and they will make your traffic graph go higher.
The initial promotion will surely help you grab attention from advertisers, but the big money-making part of a directory is featured links. You need to entice directory submitters about your directory. Generally, featured link buyers are not easily found for new directories. Here you need to work hard. Go out to classifieds, banner marketing, and link ads.
For banner marketing, try the Entrecard network — as Entrecard works with blogs, you have a chance of good leads and traffic. For link ads, many options are out there with little risk. I suggest trying Spider Market, with its nice payment mechanism. You can buy text links and also generate backlinks to increase page rank.
The last way to make money is with Google AdSense — with proper promotion of your directory, you’ll get good CPM ads through AdSense.
Well, that’s what I think! Let me know your views too.
Image by Alexey05