I am planning to start a directory in the near future. I would like to know the money making opportunities in directories. Consider if i am offering free regular links in my directory. This is how most directories grow. I can make money by offering featured listings. what are the other ways directory owners make money. Is adsense a good idea for directories? Your experiences please Advanced Thanks from Rajanmr
It is very hard to make money with a free directory, when most folks are offered a free link vs. a paid link they will almost always take the free one, unless there is a compelling reason to go for the paid one. If you got a PR6 with PR5 inner category pages you would probably get lots of folks buying featured paid links but it will take you 6 months and quite a few dollars of investment $x,xxx to get there. You can sell site-wides but without lots of traffic or a high page rank you won't make much off those.
I would say to get a PR6 you would need at least one nice PR7 link and a few nice PR6's. You would need them for 6-8 months till you got page rank on the inner categories and you would still have to continue building links from there but your directory revenue should catch up around that time too. I would say you could give it a try with $3-$4k, worst case is you should end up with a PR5. But that is for link building alone, you will want to invest in a nice template and the paid version of phpld probably with link removal. So you should budget another $300-$400. Round it all up to $5k and you should be good-to-go.
I spent $3100, praying i got it done in time for PR5, if not PR4 aint too bad. You need several thousand to do well in this business.
Mikey when i read your posts yesterday you said you spent 3000$ on your directory. New investment? On topic, it is not that hard for blog to get PR6 and it can be done without buying links, so why do you need spend so much money on buying links?
Depend upon your experience....if you have no idea about tracking good links then xxxxxx$ too will not give you fruit... but if you have a good selection then syou can make it even in xxx$ ..*cheers*
If you could make PR6 for directories for $xxx then you just got yourself a very profitable business. Because there are tons of folks, me included that would pay $xxx to only have to spend another $xxx to get PR6. Let me know when you have opened.
I agree that is only for getting PR6 & then maintaining backlinks with more promotions will cost u few more $k's.
Free and payed options is good Seling some side wides Afiliates/adsense similar programs But yes directorys don't earn very mutch
I think the best option to get money is to promote the dir as good as you can and then allow featured (expensive featured links) links There will be many people that want to have first link on directory with so many sites.
Charge for Advertising banners having a category sponsor mod. Each category is an advertising venue; some sitewides and page sponsors for everything including your submit page. My thoughts, Rob