I have been in the paid directory business for more than six years now and I never remember business being this slow. Is it just me or is the economy effecting you as well?
Traditionally the slowest months are October, November, and December. Many advertising budgets run low or out near the end of the year, and then the holidays.
Honestly, no one uses paid directories if free ones are available with much more power (Dmoz, yahoo). I understand running the directories make you guys money but you have to realize how many people just can't afford that anymore. Directories aren't as powerful as they used to be too. People go where the money is at, if you guys can't help them get that money, they won't give you any. I'm not saying that your directories are bad, I just think people have found better ways to promote their sites aka Social media
"Traditionally the slowest months are October, November, and December" Yes I see that to some extent. I find that the summer is the slow time and things pick up a bit after kids go back to school. I am as slow now as I was mid-summer. Still getting paid submissions every day and I review/add listings super fast. I always treat customers well but now they are gold! "I understand running the directories make you guys money but you have to realize how many people just can't afford that anymore." The trend of paid directories may be down but I hear that other forms of paid promotion and down as well. If business was boomimg in general, I think that directory sales would be just fine.
except a few , I didn't see many choices for quality free directories. the directory business is going down in general as Google penalty for a portion of directories and the bad economy.
Hello... Im rather surprised as this month has been pretty busy compared to the last 3 summer months. Weve picked up a few new SEO accounts which are keeping us going in submissions. Learning to invest and diversify the portfolio so as not having to rely solely on directories or submissions for income so that when we have these slow months it doesnt affect us... thx malcolm
People have found that they can now get backlinks from other blogs, blog networks, social media, social bookmark sites, etc. The use case for a real human being to use a directory to look up something is of diminishing value. That is, if you want to look up something do you go to a search engine or a directory of links? You would go to a search engine.
I know this has been beat to death but I really think the penalty only affects the pr. Directories still bring SERP results however. If a directory has a good category structure and uses seo'd urls, it adds a relevant link. I havent seen many free directories that can keep up with the spam and submissions. Paid directories volume is low enough to allow the editors to edit the description and properly categorize the link Just my 2 cents
"That is, if you want to look up something do you go to a search engine or a directory of links? You would go to a search engine." That has been true for many years now. It is funny but in the late 90's, folks actually used cannylink.com to find sites. That was years before I owned it. I know that it was used for search because sites that I had listed in it had regular visitor referrals in my log files. In those days there were 20 different SE's, none of them any good.