I am greatly considering creating my own directory, I was just wondering what is best in terms of pricing. Should I charge a monthly rate or should I charge a nonrefundable one time Directory Submit service or should I just make it free to join and just put adsense on the page? I'm thinking a one time fee would make the most sense but I was just wondering what you guys thought since you have a lot more experience than I do. Thank you
Let me ask you something Do you have 2 - 4 hours every day to maintain directory? If the answer is no, then "greatly consider" to drop that idea If the answer is yes... well, you have too much time on your hands and day job will fix this situation fastreplies
Totally depends on your directory traffic, But free listing is a good choice for starting a business with 100K competitors!
Most people will prefer one-time fee and others will be OK with yearly. Monthly is really not that good.
Buddy -- although I like to keep silent - I just found ................................ My answer to it!!!!! I can give 12 hrs a day for my directories if they think my directories r worth it )
First off...I hope you have a real good budget to invest in creating a good directory. It's not easy to give submitters the "desire" to submit to your directory specially if it's new...If you know and have been following the ups and downs of this business, you should know why you should not go monthly.
This is hard to answer, depend on type of revenue you wanted - One time or Recurring. I would prefer one-time personally but I will consider to paid yearly listing if the directory has quality enough, based on my own preferences anyway.
Maybe start with a yearly fee and see if you even keep the directory for a year, because many dont. NON-REFUNDABLE = keeping other peoples money for no reason, sometimes called theft too. You will regret making it free or putting adsense on it.
Standard practice seems to be offering listings for a one-time fee. Some directories offer featured listings for a yearly rate as well.
You must consider what your time is worth as a starting point. Then you must consider how a monthly or yearly renewal fee will impact your time. If you can automate renewals, with the exception of a re-review, you can save a lot of time. But if you must contact each person individually, you will be bogged down in a lot of work. Keep in mind that there is a lot of uncompensated time in running a directory. Checking existing listings, adding categories, improvements, etc. Use a pricing structure that gives your submitters both value while allowing you some revenue to pay the bills.
Come on guys, be realistic. Who is going to pay him a penny before his directory become established and move to level where people will feel comfortable to pay for link that won't disappear next domain renewal. Any directory owner who are expecting to make any money from new directory are dreaming. So, START FREE and stay free until you start getting quality submissions and then start offering paid featured exposure to those who want to be placed above the rest. fastreplies
its depends how much traffic you have and pr.. first get huge traffic and high pr and then open it to public if you want to charge,.
I disagree, an example could be this: A directory is launched with a decent promotional budget and spends 5k+ on promoting it just to get things moving, has a decent look to it and clearly is not about to dump it after investing in promoting it, in a case like this there is no reason to accept free submissions. Im just showing an alternative, that not all directories are started with a budget below $100. No it doesn't, a web directory will never have huge "real" traffic, high pr is necessary for what again? A web directory should always be public, why would it not be?
I'll admit a directory can be a fair bit of work, I've been running my own for just over 4 months now, but it's been an enjoyable process for me. I mean i've manually approved over 11,000 links so far, and I check links maybe 2-3 times a day. So far i've been running mine free, with adsense to support it, but also offering a featuring link at the price of $0.99 for 3 months, but I'm planning on changing this to make it $5 for a lifetime featured link. Just be wary. Are you willing to deal with sifting through spam links? I've had to sort out several nuicenses that have spammed over 300 links in just a few hours (PHPmyadmin works wonders for faster removal of the nuisance links), and I've had to edit bits of source code to modify my directory to how I want it to run, and I've still got bits to sort out, along with realigning adsense to get a better yield from it. You're better off starting free in order to get recognition, and then charge, or follow a path similar to mine.
You might regret offering lifetime featured listings, its debatable whether a directory is better off starting free, it can become harder to charge and actually get paid submissions later on if you let in a lot of sites free rather quickly. Im going to make a bold statement and say that you will regret how you're running it now, unless you dont plan on keeping it.
Well, then I have news for you. 99.999% of directories started in a past 3 years by people with $10.00 domain and free web hosting. Most of them are using free and only some of them ever bother to buy script and even then they never bother to change default template because they have no idea how to deal with scripting language and surely have no slightest ideas about web-mastering. Now, how many K's it will cost new directory owner to pay for maintenance in addition to promotion? And what about editing? Yah, I hear you're saying nothing, he'll do it himself. Ah, but that is time consuming. Best he can do is 12 - 15 edits per hour but he is getting 500 of them every day. So, here we go, he'll need editors and that my friend cost money and if not, then his directory will be just another cesspool of garbage no one will be willing to pay him a penny. Which bring us to what he is going to buy for $5K in promos. Here is living example. AMRAY Web Directory online since year 2000, has PR 4, Alexa 18,000 and yet half of so called "directories lists" are missing it as if one of the oldest directories doesn't exists in spite of the fact that we are promoting AMRAY since the beginning. What does it says to you? Did I mentioned that AMRAY is Free Directory? fastreplies
It says to me that you have the privilege of owning a web directory that has been around before the surge of directories appeared, yours speaks for itself.