Do you submit to paid directories and don’t pay for submission?

Initially I started my directory as FREE directory. But after getting PR3 and quite a few pages indexed with Google, I decided to make it paid directory to offset some of my cost and to make some money.

Before making it paid directory I was getting 40/50 submissions a day. Now I am getting 20/25 a day (so far I got about 200 submissions after made it pay directory).

But the funny thing is till today I have not got a single penny from anyone. Are those people forgetting to pay or this is a normal practice in SEO world? I just don’t get it. How come you submit to paid directory and don’t pay.

I am using phpLinkDirectory script and I don’t see a good way to send notification to everyone or any other way to keep track of this. I hope to get some good advice form people who are successfully running paid directory.

Another interesting thing – SEO people don’t click Ad. I have 1500 + submissions and yet to get a single click. This is good learning.

 

How can you get a paid submission and not get paid?

 

The way his setup works is that you submit the data first and then make payment. He's getting the submissions, but not the payment afterwards.

I tested it for you, and it seems to be working fine. Don't know why people are not following through with payments...

I have the same problem on one of my directories. It seems to be because it was free in the past (like yours) when it was owned by someone else. My others do not have this problem.

 

I get a couple submissions everyday it seems that fail to follow through the whole submission process to pay. Kind of strange since you know from the beginning that (1) it is a paid directory, (2) you know the price up front, and (3) there is no way in hell I'm going to accidentally approve your submission without a payment.

By the way. I usually wait a couple days before deleting any submissions that failed to pay, just in case.

 

People like free stuff. I don't charge a penny for my directory .. yet. It got lots of PR4 pages, but I offer for free.

I think your directory grows faster if you don't take money. I rather want a high PR actually. It's probably better to switch to a paid directory once you get PR6 or 7. That's how I see.

 

My directory used to be free too...but when you have around 200 submissions and no payment...it is kind of odd.
My guess is...some people do directory submission for others, probably they don't care whether it is free or paid and getting accepted or not. They just submit number of directory and get paid...

 

Since it used to be a free directory, it's probably still in the lists of free directories around, and some people submit to all those in the list without even bothering to notice the change to paid status.

 

i get the same guy submitting a featured link and not paying
which gives him a free hour or two of homepage feature until i can take care of it.

 

I get unpaid featured submissions too, but they don't appear on the directory until their status is active (paid).

 

Use directory submitters, and if your directory was once free, it could still be in the list as free.

I used to get bombed this way when I changed one directory to paid, but now it has settled down quite a bit since the submitters took that site off their list.

 

just got another one from same guy...
http://www.(NOFREEBACKLINKFORYOU!)ringtones-dir.com/
desc has <a href="yahoo.com code and <a href="submitted site
repeated about five times....

 

I do get the occasional person submitting and not paying at one directory.
Sometimes that same person may submit up to 20 sites (just a few days ago, someone with 20 different travel sites did this).
I figure, whatever time I spend clicking delete, that person spent 5 minutes inputting everything.
So the joke really is on them, not me.

Of course, my rejection email explains that they have to pay, how much and where to go to submit and pay.

 

Yeah I hate when submitters do that. On my directory (currently down) I had a free and paid option, and ocassonally submitters would choose the paid option and not pay anything...they must be really desperate...

 

I get at least 300 no pays per week. We use a system that auto removes non payment submissions and bans the IP of multiple non payment submissions. It’s not a big expense to rewrite the submission system to take care of the non payment submissions for you. It saves a lot of work and frustration and is well worth the initial investment.

 

On this note, I'm curious if other directory owners here delete the non-paying links, or just review them as regular links? I have received some non-paying featured submissions as well, and I'm not sure whether they were intentionally done or just mistakes.

 

Hopefully everybody who gets non-payment links especially when a free submission option is available will just delete them and not encourage others to do it. I had free submission open Friday through Sunday and still had over 30 non-payment submissions.

 

In this guys case 200 is alot. Check your paypal e-mail on the settings and make sure it's right first. I get a lot but not 200.

 

You may also look into getting image verification. Some of it may come from automated scripts. Once we put the image verification in place it cut the non-paid submission by 60%. We still get tons of submissions without payment and we used to e-mail the people submitting but it has gotten to be so work intensive that we just delete the non-paid ones now.

 

I'd put my money on a directory submitting "service" making all those submissions.
They submit links so fast they dont care/bother to read the terms.

.

 

As someone who has submitted to many directories I can safely say that previous posts had touched on each of the issues for causes of non-paid directory submissions:

1) Since it was once free, it is probably on many individuals and companies free directory lists which will take a long time to get off... if this is on some crappy spam style of SEO companies list then it could stay on forever. One solution here is to restrict the number of submissions from a particular IP address

2) People using automated submission scripts... I do all of my submissions manualy and read the details to avoid this... A security code will deffinately help reduce these automated submissions.

3) Your site does not make it clear enough that it is a paid directory. I can't tell you how many times, even though I have read as much as can be expected, I submit only to find out that I must send payment... solution here is to avoid the 6 paragraph long rules page and simplify it so people will read (people won't read novels for a directory submission

4) People are just hoping you will let it slip bye... nothing you can do except ban their IP address

5) People don't read... again ban their IP address