This post was on John Chows Blog. It was geared towards bloggers but I reckon all 7 reasons apply to directories too. http://www.johnchow.com/7-reasons-why-i-forgot-about-your-website/ Thoughts?
I had one reason not to drop by his website, that god damned awful advertising thing that kept following me down the page. Most of the other points were okay though.
lot's of grammatical errors! and the rest is basics! thanks for sharing, though, the writing style is good,
Yes Uttoran, they are basics. But design, content, domain etc are vital things for a directory yet people still do them wrong.
Yes, but it holds absolutely correct about blogs, as blogs has more repeat visitors than any other kind of website, except forums! For niche and free directories, repeat visitors is possible, but for general directories it's hard to create repeat visitors! The main reason for repeat visitors is the discussion. I guess the writer missed this point! Bloggers try to create repeat visitors, but replying to the comments that the visitors posts. This way the visitors gets a good reason to come back and see if his question or comment has been replied. With directories that's not possible. I just can't come up with ideas that can make a directory visitor get involved in the directory somehow! the only idea for making the directory visitor involved is to keep a blog where the visitor will keep sharing his views! Yes the design is important, not necessarily custom design but unique design! Choosing the domain is important too, but people can't help when they have chosen a not so good domian and got a blog or directory established on it. And about the title, how is this for a title, "John Chow" and when people actually search for John chow in google they reach John cow!! I just liked the stand out stuff! that's what makes you different, you got to come up with new ideas to become big!
He could have done with expanding on this with some examples, that's always fun. I suppose that applies to directories in terms of how well the descriptions are written. "Absolutely horrible" would be those that are in a variety of different languages, jumbles of keywords, very badly categorised, and full of unclear marketing-speak. For directories, you could probably change that to, not enough verification. I came across a directory the other day that hadn't had its links checked since 1997. That's no use.
5 Reasons Why I Won't Read Your Blog Again: 1) Too many annoying, blinking ads distract from the article you are trying to write. 2) Grammatical errors from someone who probably claims to be a writer. Re-read your article before posting. Please! 3) Unoriginal bullet points on why my web site is worse than yours. 4) Yet another blog. Geez I'm sick and tired of blogs from people who think they have something important to say. 5) I'm cranky!