Hello, Recently I set up my first directory, Link Boss. I did my research but I cannot find anyway to make at least the money I spent each month. What should I do now? Should I make it into a premium directory? How should I promote it? Thanks,
As a minimum you could turn your regular into a cheap paid listing and knock up the price on your featured a few $. Edit: Are you getting backlinks to it? through directory submissions? Another EDit: Now i realise most wont know your directory exists, submit it to directorycritic.com, also announce it at vilesilencer forum, also announce it at solicitations and announcements section here at dp, maybe get a sig link from someone with a fair amount of posts, put it in your sig in any other webmaster forums your on, or have avatar made with its name in.
You're off to a great start with that template. Very nice... I pulled your site in yahoo site explorer - You have two inbound links listed there and they are both from posts in DP.... You need to build lnks to your directory if you want submissions. Add some unique articles to your directory. It will take some time. There are some articles and blog posts at the directory in my sig you can read that will help you if you want to do a little browsing there.
Thanks guys, so do you suggest I make it into a free directory for a while with links coming back or a paid one?
That is a personal choice. I myself would make it free for a week or two to try and get it populated. Be very selective of the sites you accept. You can get a couple hundred submissions a day with a post in a few forums under solicitations. After that opening period go paid - your submissions will drop to next to nothing and they will stay that way for awhile until you build up some links to your site and some quality content in it. you should also manually add some quality sites to fill out your categories.
If you're going to make it a free directory you'll be very busy deleting all the spam. Only accept quality sites. people will not submit to your directory that is full of crap. Keep adding content, such as articles. Build backlinks and if you are getting good traffic perhaps add a payment option where they can pay $5 to get reviewed quicker. Continue to allow free submissions. domaining.in is a good exmaple of this.
Get some content in it before you even think of wasting money promoting it as a paid directory, people are simply not going to want to pay you to develop your directory you have to this yourself and then look for the rewards.