Directory success stories

Hello All,

I see seemingly hundreds of directories promoted here every month and I am wondering which of them will actually become popular and profitable. Do you have a directory that gets say 1500+ visitors/day? How do you promote it? Is it profitable? Why and when did you launch it and what do you think contributed the most to its success? Knowing what you know now, if you could go back to the time you started the site, would you launch this directory again or instead concentrate on other (perhaps easier to grow) types of sites?

 

I second these questions!

 

Liminal, a web directory with 1500+ visitors a day is a lot. But at the moment I'm about 1/10 of this figure. Hopefully when I get out of the 'sandbox' thing the traffic will rise. dirSpace is a profitable directory to me. I'm promoting the direcotry via web directory lists, banner advertising and text-link advertising. My directory is about 8 months old so it will need to grow in time..

I believe the next big directory thing will be more niche directories.

 

A couple of things...
Once you get pagerank, people are willing to pay you for featured links, and also you can join programs such as the one offered by text link brokers. You can also make money on Google Adsense and YPN, but you certainly need visitors, and that is only going to come by creating a quality directory.

 

i dont think a web directory in and of itself can garner that many visitors. You need more features than that. Mine gets about 500-600 / day, but that includes people looking a templates, clipart and other stuff that is there too. I think adding more features to them is imperative to get more visitors. People do not want to come to a site, to search for something, to find another site where they have to search again.

 

I would be willing to bet that Jeremy's directory gets near that. (User name is mia, I think)

Its actually one of the best modifications of a biz directory script I have seen and it gets a lot of links because of that.

 

Yeah I've been to that one. It has additional features too, though. Shopping, images, news, etc. So its more than a directory.

Look at uncoverthenet.com; it used to be a straight directory, now its a portal more or less with lots of neat features. I bet the addition of those features vastly increased its visitor rate and return rate as well.

 

True, to get to those dailys you need some return visitors. There are very few basic directories that can get anywhere near that

 

Ok, scratch that number (1500/day). Since I don't run a directory myself, I was trying to quantify success in terms of traffic numbers based on other site types I've dealt with. The approach is wrong, of course.

 

500 a day can generate a decent amount of revenue (not enough to live on of course)

Once you near that 1,000 a day mark, it can start to be pretty good money.

THose are uniques of course

 

We are doing quite well, and growing fast! We have managed to accumulate around 11,000 individual listings with around 1100 categories since February of this year. Here is a graph of daily requests that should give you an idea of the growing popularity of http://kingbloom.com

 

I agree. Feature rich is the key. We added things like Shopping, Images Searches, News Feeds, etc. Anything you can do to your directory to make sure that the visitors coming to the site are not just webmasters listing their sites, but real people looking for things will help 10 fold!

 

I may be a bit off topic here...
I have a link exchange directory with about 70 cats and 200 links (exchanged) and I have put AdSense in the link category pages (it looks like a normal directory). It is PR5 main page and PR4 category pages. I get very little traffic from Google on it but a high CTR and eCPM. With a small traffic of about 10-30 hits per day to these pages, I make upto $30/month. My link categories are focused on competitive health keywords.
I am saying this in order to make a point that directories have potential if worked on. If I start a directory I would:
1. Make it focused on a single market like health or computers etc. The good thing about a focused dir on a health market for example is that there's a truckload of sites that would provide a reciprocal.
2. Focus the categories on competitive keywords.
3. Make my own descriptions on the links, so that the directory will have unique content.

jmo

 

The last numbers I heard about our directory are:
about 1.000.000 visitors a month and over 4.000.000 search queries.

Hugo
Staff Member of JoeAnt.com

 

@Hbird64: JoeAnt.com is obviously very successful. What factors do you think contributed the most to its success?

 

Joe ant surely gets those nos. I am sure. we are clocking it at 350 - 400 per day. I wonder what will be the figures for gimpsy ..

 

@nohaber: I agree that niche directories is a good business to be in. 1) You will actually see users searching for resources within the industry using the directory and 2) You are likely to get industry advertisers giving you business

 

My directory (www.TheSEOKing.com) was getting around 50 visitors per day, but over the last 5 days that has jumped to over 200 per day.

It's still not making much revenue, though. :-(

 

The content of a directory is the most important thing.

Keep the directory clean of spam and other trash. Vistors use directories to do a more specific search then in a real search engine, and if they also find 100's of the same affiliated hotel sites in the directory they won't use it anymore.

Keep concentrating on that, the rest will come (visitors etc) later.

And also make sure you offer some unique content.

Don't start a advertising campaign after just started a directory. When a directory exists for a few year visitors and submitters start to trust you.

I also think we were in advantage of being one of the first new directories after DMOZ, Yahoo and Go.com. That made our name well known in the industry. Now there are too many.

Hugo

 

hmm,
keep getting links and links and links
and make more categories.
to promote new categories, fill them with some links from dmoz and soon ppl will start posting theirs.