Monetize off of a free directory

Hi. I was just wondering what all ways people make money off of free link directories. Currently I have banner ads in place (but I can't sell because I am having trouble with Analytics getting my stats). I have $5 featured links.
Is there any other ways to make money? Also, I was wondering how many links your directory gets submitted daily. I was getting 10 a day, but did a bunch of work yesterday and have received well over 400 in the last 24 hrs. I am manually approving these and it has taken a chunk of my morning. Oh well, it is what I want.

 

You could place adsense or yahoo ads, bidvertiser, adbrite....

 

People would use the free directories to send spam email or advertise their other sites or services.

 

Unless you have a very large traffic base you’re probably wasting your time. The build it and they will come marketing approach is almost always a failure. You need to invest a lot of money into marketing a directory to make money from it.

 

Dear mmads, don't take WallaceYeung seriously. He is not *high* as you might guess, but he had too much whisky these holidays.
Spamming people will bring you lots of complains and no money.
Adding AdSense can bring you grief.
Make a good directory, popular, add unique content, REVIEW websites, not just mass-approve them, and blah blah blaaaaaaah and after a period of time turn it to paid only, or keep it free and paid.
PS: take a look how www.prolinkdirectory.com started. A free directory, now free&paid, selling 30+ links from the main page, and still doing good.

 

Very helpful "hyper". Thank you so much.

Should I only add sites with a certain PR or higher? Right now I am approving all sites that are not spam. Is that alright? Or should I just do high PR sites??

I see that their site-wide banner is $150/month. That is something to strive for. I realize that it is not easy. I am not trying to get rich. My goals for my directory is to keep it free, make $100 off of ads and featured links, break Alexa 250k, and gain a decent PR by the end of 2009.

 

I wouldn't put much faith in valuing a site by its PR...

Im sure after the first couple thousand submissions you will know
whats quality and whats rubbish as well as know all the dumb little tricks
that other webmasters pull to get listed.

@hyper

Its not nice to throw people under buses

good luck to you

thx
malcolm

 

I did not mention anything about PR. I am curious, how do you "review" a website ? Do you follow any (public displayed) guidelines ?

Here some ideas:
1) make sure every category has websites listed
2) don't accept website full of ads
3) don't accept pharmacy website (viagra, pills, etc)
4) don't accept websites with broken links, unfinished, etc
5) don't accept keyword stuffed titles
6) etc
7) etc

PS:I am getting sick of this forum and these threads...
Nothing new, nothing creative, I miss the threads from the old times...I even miss Jamie with his phplynx, pfuah...or I am just depressive now.

 

bahhhh humbug

Cheer up 2009 will hopefully bring us new options

Im considering releasing the video mod created by silky so that others
can hopefully prosper from it or add to it to there directories soon

thx
malcolm

 

I am optimistic, I saw some PR3(probably hand edited PageRank) that are now PR4 and PR5. They have much more traffic, rank a little bit higher, more websites listed, probably new hired editors, etc.

Who knows..

 

I see what you are saying about PR. My bad. I just thought that search engines would place me higher if I associated myself with all higher ranked pages.
I am just learning as I go. Thanks for all the useful information.

 

can you use all

 

you could try being an affiliate to one of the directory submission service... both share a similar target audience

 

how long you want to spend your time at directory? if you think want to try one year... just forget about it... people always think about make money online.... but not give a good service to they customer...