How much do you spend in promoting and marketing your directory? What sort of minimum budget are we talking here for promotion and marketing a directory? After all that, what returns are you expecting?
I can for my part say $0 My idea is if you make the service good enough then time and mouth2mouth will do the work! And sofar that is working splendid! I cant even keep up with the queues I sure you can boost alot with marketing, but a natural growth is for me the right way. (For the record I have tried 1-2 payment options on a specific directory, and they are not worth it in my eyes) And the returns I get is all profit, when the only expences is for domain and server
For the record, I'll never say how much I spend in promotions. What is important though is what I expect from my paid promotion. What that equals is profit, and I average 6 times what I spend in promotional fees.
I have paid till date on featured links and footer links around 400$ for promoting one my biggest directory. But the problem was it got penalised due to a number of backlinks at a time
The type of promotion I use is dependant upon the result I'm after. If it's exposure, I tend to think outside the bun and look for places where I believe other online business owners may find value in adding a paid listing in my directories. Just think outside of the directory world. If I use a directory, the only real exposure I can count on are other directory owners. This is where "Featured" listings are a must. PR is secondary in this scenario. The bulk of my paid efforts though are in the directories through Top or featured listings. I offer quite a few ways to list a web site on my directories, which are not always evident and this is where paid promotions work best for me in my situation. I use to believe that free was always the way to go.. No risk, and a million and one places to get it. I've since learned how to manage that risk.
0 cents but many hours, and i getting a good quality traffic from google and yahoo, and offcourse adsense revenue
so far i spent nothing but i been trying my luck with adword and can't get the key words to work in my favor. I will keep trying with adword until something changes,thou?
0$ but many hours building links and spreding the link . I only whant to get some back with adsense as my webdirectory is free totaly free still not geting quite enouf ....
$0 on my general directory and about $150 on my niche directory through sites that were related to the subject.
~$1,500 on www.azook.com ~$300 on www.freewebsitedirectory.com ~$200 on www.goglance.com (and counting) Does not include my time and submissions to free directories. I expect the return to take 6-8 months in most cases, as what income they make is recycled over and again until I run out of places to get links (then again they're always more places popping up everyday). Directories are more for fun than profit.
Ahh I spent about 500 on my new directoryRedPines Update has not happend yet so have not seen an affect. But spent 350 on design I think somewhere around that.
it depends how many paid and featured submissions i got. As many as paid submissions i get, i spend at least %70 of revenue on the promotions and marketing for our paid directories.