Linkmoz-Blog

So you are thinking about starting a directory and you are new to this business.
I will try to name and add some words about some steps someone should consider before and during his job as a directory owner.

- Determine your budget.
This is a very important step and should be determined before you start anything. Setting up and maintaining a directory will need some money. So you have to know from the beginning what, the amount of money you are going to use, will be. This is going to be used for promotion mainly, but also domain name, hosting and server costs.

- Pick up a domain name.
You have to choose a domain name for your directory. This has to be relevant and as easy to keep in mind as possible, so that your visitors can remember it and keep coming back. Avoid picking dropped domains with high PR as most of the times these names are totally irrelevant to your site. Of course if you are lucky enough as to find something that fits you then this is OK as you can jump start your business.

- Choose the script you are going to work with.
Today you can save a lot of time by using a script that is ready, instead of programming your site your self. PHPLD is the best script today and it comes in both free and paid editions. Paid edition gives you more features, but free is also good and you can certainly work on it at least as a beginner. The choice will depend on your budget.

- Get a template for your directory.
There are many templates to work with. A template is actually the face of your site. It’s what your visitors see when they visit. So it’s good to have a unique one. There are many free templates, and many paid ones. The paid ones are better because they are customized and it’s more difficult to find the same custom template to more than one directory (but not impossible). Of course if you are familiar with php programming you can customize your free template and get a nice result. Again the choice depends on your budget.

- Start promoting.
So you managed to set up your directory. Until now things were easy. Now you are out on the global market and you have to convince everyone that your directory can stand out. This is the step that will consume the best part of your budget. There are some steps to take here.
o Divide time into periods.
First of all you need to set up promoting periods. I use 3 months periods as this is the time between two PR updates. Determine your goals and take steps within each period to achieve them. Decide what kind of links you want and start searching for some offers.
o Buy links
When you know what kind of links you need start looking for them. Be careful as this is a very important step. This is the step where you can spend all your money and achieve the least of results. So find some sites that are relevant to yours ask their webmaster about placing your links and when you have some answers compare them. You have a lot of factors to consider (PR, PS, Traffic Rank, Backlinks, Asking Price). When you finish your research buy the best links your money can buy.
o Promote on forums
Use forums with relevant topics to make your directory known to other webmasters. DP is a good place to do this, as except for promotion, you can ask for advice and talk about relevant subjects. Announce your offers and make some deals with other users. You will learn a lot about how this market works.

- Run your directory.
So if everything goes well, you will start having your first submissions. You have to accept submissions and also keep existing ones in good shape.
o Accepting submissions.
After all these, you should start having your first visitors and submissions. This is also a point you have to be careful with. You may think that your directory would look better if it’s full. WRONG. You have to accept only quality web-sites, examine them one by one and if they are decent then you can add them into your directory. After all I would prefer to submit my site to a directory, with fewer but of good quality sites, where my link would be displayed on the first page of a category, than submitting to one with many broken links, and bad quality sites with mine at the last page. So keep up to a good standard.
o Maintaining your directory.
After some time your directory will need maintenance. You will have to check your links, to ensure that they all work properly and remove the ones that are broken. Try to add some content to your directory from time to time. You may want to add some tools also, so that you can keep your visitors coming back.
- Monetizing options.
After all these steps you probably want to make some money from your investment. If your promotion goes well, your directory’s ranking will be enough to make some money. Keep in mind that this is going to take about 6 months (about two PR updates), so that your directory will have a nice homepage PR and a decent inner pages PR. Now you can start monetizing on it. First of all you can charge for your services (ie sell paid submissions), sell links and banners, and use an advertising system like adsense on your site. Notice that adsense doesn’t pay as much as on other kind of sites, so it may be more profitable to sell that space to someone to place a banner. Don’t even think about pop ups as most visitors you will have is webmasters and pop ups are very irritating.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2007 at 8:45 am and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.