Hey everyone, New paid directories, do you think it's better to open up free submissions for a limited amount of time to build of links, or do you think it's better to add links yourself? I've heard both and thought it would be worth starting a conversation about, especially since I'm debating between the two myself. Any comments would be much appreciated. Thanks!
I think free for a while to get traffic, then once you have a good base and have created your SEO Campaign, possibly convert to paid. Starting paid can be a slow growing process unless you have really good PR, just my thoughts
100% add them yourself. ALso run something here but have strict guidelines and be true to your guidelines deleting whatever free submissions don't work. Or instead of free make it like 5$ but that's for review; these are the guidelines. If someone fails a review no refund that' is there problem for not following the clearly written criteria. Free submissions will get you a tone of listings from people who aren't passionate about their sites just making a $. They will submit and work on SEO before they even have 1/10th the "projected" content. Only submit sites that are established and running and provide value, or a new one that shows exceptional potential. If your directory only had sites that were true to the category and of great caliber people would start using dir's more than search engines because you can't optimize crap to get through a human review from a person with integrity but people do find ways to get to the top of search engines regardless if their site merit's it or not.
Dubz has some good ideas. Really the best thing to do (although it can be painful to watch a site with no traffic) is set some fairly low but substantial prices like $4 for regular and $10 for featured and build links, content and PR. The problem with offering free submissions for x period of time is that you will get tons of low quality submissions which you will have to waste your time denying and you will fill up a lot of the front page of popular categories, so when you go paid those categories will be less appealing. The real challenge with a paid directory (unless you have $$BIG$$ Money to invest) is that you will have to wait for inner PR before getting a steady stream of submissions and that takes minimum 2 and sometimes 3 or more updates (6-10 months time). That is why most successful paid directories are quite expensive to get listed in because it is not that easy to get to the point where your directory offers a good listing value. You can always offer x number of free submissions every week as promotion to help build up some brand recognition for your directory while it grows.
Free submissions for a limited time is useful! Suppose if you have 700 pages on a directory ,only those pages which are out of supplemental will have PR i.e those pages where are there are some links in it would have PR! If suppose you have got a empty page like this http://www.jeffbrowninc.com/business_and_economy/affiliate_schemes/ The above page would be in supplemental and would not have PR Suppose if you approve some links in that category ,The page would be out of supplemental and you would have PR!
i believe that supplemental results has nothing to do with Page rank. one page can be in the supplemental results and still get its normal page rank based on Backlinks. also A page may be in the supplemental results for "keyword A" and not be in the supplemental results for "keyword B", so supplemental results are not a critera for PR
I would suggest a minimal charge, after u feel u have enough links.... i recently opened i directory, and was inundated with submissions, some of them useless spam,... still have a long pending queue here a minimal charge will get u good submissions, I suppose its difficult in the begining,.... coz here u have to do SEO, editing, and ur own marketing/ submitting,.... and in case ur a coder, .... ull be coding too! im investing more than half my free time into this, I hope it would be worth it. M.
It depends on whether you want to spend your time (or pay someone else to spend their time) on finding websites and writing descriptions, or on writing effective code for spam filters. Because most free submissions will be unusable, and it's only when you have some great spam filters that your free submission form will produce anything worth listing without having to wade through acres of slush. For most people, I think the former is the way to go.
Thanks for the insight everyone. I think I'm just going to spend the time finding quality sights, and adding them myself. That way I'll know I'm starting off with a base of quality sites and my descriptions will be 100% unique since I'll be writing them themselves. Sure it will take forever but I'm in no rush anyways. Thanks again.
Open a thread here on DP, say first 100 quality websites will be added with no charge. Add them yourself. Must have some restrictions while choosing the websites of course. After that you can make it paid. If you start it as free, you will get lots of spam and crap submissions. That will be really bothering while starting a new project.