What's the best? I.e. I realize Manual is free, although veerry tedious & time consuming. But is it safer? Safer in the sense you're not throwing money away on some unscrupulous "service" that shotguns your URL's to every tom / dick & harry directory? And what if you have some affiliate ads on pages where the rules don't allow those kinds of pages to be submitted? There seem to be so many variable? Any thoughts?
It's safer to carefully hand select, full stop and you've pretty much answered your question yourself.
Best way you can do it is manually, and doing it yourself, theres nothing thats ever going to beat that for knowing if it was done properly, and theres only so much you can do in a day, even with the help of something like InFormEnter, or if your using a tool thats faster does it still allow for flexibility? i dont know. But by hand and constantly mixing things up will be better, long term. Remember that tips that people give you about blasting your site out there into the promotional universe are often for people running short term websites, they want to promote quick, earn quick then sell off the site quickly. If you think long term then you should match your promo methods with that. Still by hand you should put no limit on submissions, because you will only get so much completed in one day, the suggestion that most free directories are useless is utter nonsense too, im a paid directory owner so i have nothing to protect about free directories but i know that they work, i know that they help me. Regarding affiliate ads, it varies so much from directory to directory, you would need to investigate each one to see how they feel about it.
Go for automatic submission if you do not know anything about directories and do not have time to do it.Otherwise Manual submission is good. Read the guidlines before submitting to directory,there are few directories who do not approve websites running ads on it.
Much thanks! I tend to lean toward MANUALLY doing it. In essence, I put up 17 sites and saved a single short description for each one in NOTEPAD. That way, when I browse a directory list and they mention being open for submissions, I can simply open Notepad, save it on my toolbar and while I have the submission page open to any great directory I find here, I can nav to their rules, digest and understand and drop down and choose all the specific categories for each site I have, which I want to enter in those categories, add the URL, name of site and go to notepad and right-click/copy the descrip for site I submit and do so, accordingly. So far, since last February 1st or thereabouts, I have done this with almost 200 different single directories and as Pipes mentioned, there are alot of great free places to submit to. Hope there are many more . . . .
no don't use notepad. just use Informenter. it is a million times better then using notepad. http://informenter.mozdev.org/