Ok, so I didn't know the best place to post this but I have a few sites, all of them are sites that market to people looking to buy something. Those are easy to find your customers, if you have a site that sells Ipods, then your keywords are variations of IPod. But I really want to start a directory site, but I want it to be a opt-in site where we must pre-approve sites. The problem I'm having is how do you promote a directory site of this kind for lets say Web Designers. People searching for the keyword web design or web designers, are people wanting to find web designers and not the actual web designers themselves. Any ideas on how to promote a site like this. I don't know what keywords to optimize for or even if this is worth doing because if you are a web designer, what keywords would you actually be searching for? I'm trying to think outside the box, open to any suggestions.
Your best work would be trying to reach webmasters. So webmaster forums would be an excellent start for you. You could also use some offline methods.