By Louis Crisci, Owner of Canny Link
With more than 100,000 Web directories online, very few operate at a profit. Many directory owners struggle to get their site to rank for some keyword phrase, or try to gain PageRank thinking that this will lead to revenue. Their efforts often are in vein because they are not focused on what is of vital importance- developing a customer base, and creating a directory that someone would want to submit a listing to. The first task in any marketing effort to know who your target audience is, what they want, and were you can find them.
Knowing who our target audience is may sound obvious and elementary, but unless you think about specifically who they are, you are less likely to know what they want and how to find them. Target audience consists of single site owners, Webmasters, SEO Firms, and Interactive Ad Agencies. SEO Firms and Interactive Ad Agencies represent repeat business and repeat business is a vital factor with regards to directory profitability.
One way to find out where prospective customers go to find Web directories may be found in the DigitalPoint Forums. You don't need to post the question, it has been asked hundreds of times. "Where can I find a list of quality web directories to submit to?" Just. look at the replies. Those lists and web sites are places where you want your directory advertised. Don't evaluate an ad opportunity based on PageRank, dofollow, etc.. Base it on the likelihood of attracting a prospective customer to your site.
Many great places to advertise your directory offer 125 x 125 banner ads. Make sure that you have a 125 banner ready to promote your site. If you don't, one place to get one made is Fiverr.com. Even if you have to try two or three vendors at Fiverr for $5 each in order to get a satisfactory banner, it is still cost effective.
If you were to evaluate a web directory from another directory owner to submit one of your sites, what would you look for? Would having AdSense ads or sitewide footer link ads make you more or less likely to submit? If the answer is less likely, then why include them on your own directory? What your prospects want in a directory is an eye appealing, simple to navigate and submit to site. Get rid of the clutter, affiliate programs, and anything else that will not be perceived as adding value by your customers and site visitors.
Test your site on a regular basis by adding a listing via the submit form. Was the process seamless and hassle free or are there factors that can be improved and simplified? Check the email template replies. Make sure that your email templates are working properly and are reflect your business in an appropriate manner. Take advantage of email templates as a way to reach out to your customers with your contact information and other directories available.
How you price a submission review will have a significant impact on the long term profitability of your directory. Since every directory owner values their review time and listing differently, there are no hard and fast rules for pricing levels. There are some principals to keep in mind when pricing your directory.
First of all, since we realize the importance of repeat customer business, it is advisable to keep prices constant long-term. Once some repeat customers are established, a price increase, for what every reason, can alienate them. It is safe to assume that repeat customers have a list of favorite directories including cost so they will know if price increases.
Next, keep pricing options limited. Having four or five options including deep links, permanent featured, yearly featured, etc. will cause confusion and lead to prospects bailing from the submit page. Best strategy is simply to offer a standard listing and a featured listing option.
Last point on pricing is the relationship between price level and submission volume. In general, the higher the price, the lower the submission volume. One interesting human behavioral factors is that by pricing your ad space cheap, it may be perceived as have less value that if you priced it higher.
Create repeat business by offering customer service above and beyond what is expected. Let me offer one example of the type of outstanding customer service that can develop a repeat customer. Let's say that you missed a paid submission, and an irate customer contacts you regarding their listing one week after payment. Standard customer service response would be to admit your error, apologize, and take care of the listing. Outstanding customer service might include offering a refund in addition to completing the listing. Forgoing the review fee is a small price to pay for your error, and you would be surprised at how often acts like this result in additional orders.
You may have noticed that nowhere in this post is "SEO'ing" your directory to any particular rank discussed. Sadly, that is exactly what many directory owners spend their time chasing. Running a profitable web directory is all about basic marketing skills backed with a small advertising budget. Once your directory makes the private list of repeat buyers, you will turn losses into profits.
The Link Cleaner is surely our most important product release in years because it accomplishes many goals that help you to have a more solid site, expand your business, and help make the web a safer place. It is a Windows app. Early adopters of this product will have some massive opportunities.
What does it do?
First, the Link Cleaner spiders an entire website (any website), with the main constraint being time. It will spider 100s of thousands of pages in our tests so far. You have to pace it so it does not get rejected by the webserts. During this process you will be able to find 404 pages and other problems.
Second, and where the real power of the Link Cleaner is demonstrated is the spidering of External Links. In the first stage it spidered the internal links, but discovered all the external links. In the second stage you are able to run a second spider that searches the external links for the following:
1. Phishing Sites - checks against the phishtank.org database
2. Malware Sites - checks against the Google Malware database
3. Spam Words - checks against a text file (that you can edit) for specific words contained on the page that are adult in nature or commonly used in spam sites (ex. pharmaceutical, gambling), or just sites you might not want to be linking to
4. Parked Domains - Let’s face it. Some sites come and go, but the links to them can remain there for years, and a normal spider fails to identify them because they return a 404. The Link Cleaner checks against an ever expanding database of parked domain signatures and identifies these sites.
Making Money with the Link Cleaner and Improving Rankings
Ranking on Google has never been more complex, and too often people are left confused why their site that has been online for years is no longer getting traffic. Surely, linking to Malware, Parked Domains, and spammy sites plays a role in rankings, and too often site owners are unaware which of their links have gone bad and have no way to find the answer until now!
A great starting point would be to let your customers know that you are offering a new service to them that will help them with their rankings and make their site safer. You might even run the spider for a short time and find a couple of bad links first. In our tests, most sites fail in some way. Then simply charge a fee for your time running the spider or even helping to clean the links that are bad.
Getting new customers can be another point of focus. For example, sometimes when we have a customer that asks us what we can do to improve a website, one of the first we do is run the W3 Validator. This is another situation where most sites fail in some way. Add the Link Cleaner to this, and you have another reason people could benefit from your services. Some might even want to go so far as advertising the new service on your website, or using the Link Cleaner as a tool to approach new prospects.
Conclusion
This is an exciting product and we will very much be looking for your feedback (ex. new forum for that) so we can continue to improve it. We’ll also be creating tutorials and helping information to make the product easier to understand and use. If you need help after purchase, as always we have people who can help via the support ticket system. And finally, we look forward to seeing people making money and ranking sites, while helping to make the web a better place.
So great news! phpLD 4.2 is now available for download for licensed users. Here is some information about the release.... Features:(While this is a mostly complete list, we will be expanding the documentation on these new features).1. Task Manager - probably the biggest new feature, this is similar to a windows task manager, and allows you to schedule tasks to be run. Examples of such tasks include optimizing the database, checking expired or reciprocal links, and rebuilding the category cache. We've developed this section so there will be plenty of room to add new tasks moving forward, just as we have added many widgets since we introduced them in 4.0. There are countless possibilities for tasks that can be added and I'm sure you will hear a lot about new tasks that have been added to our product in the coming months.
Video: Task Manager
2. Media Manager - this works with the article feature and allows for uploading of images that can be embedded in articles easily. Each user can access their own images, and the admin can access all images.
Video: Media Manager
3. Video Submit Item - the hosting must have ffmpeg installed to use this feature.
4. Gallery Submit Item - add multiple images when submitting a link.
5. Cache Creation Fix - this was a long standing issue where excess files were created even with the cache turned off. This is solved, and will make for a major improvement in reliability of phpLD.
6. New Math Captcha - a new option where the user does a math problem before completing their submission of new content.
7. Assign Link Types to Categories - Another cool feature where you can assign link types to categories. For example, you could have a video category that only allows video submissions, an article category, just for articles, and a links category for links.
8. Speed Improvement to Submit Page - a fix that speeds up the submit page when ajax category selection is turned on.
9. New Validators - when creating or editing submit items you will have more choices on the validators you can select. 10. In Line Widgets - another feature for articles that allows widgets to be embedded inside an article (ex. google adsense)
11. Category as a Link - You can now make a category become a link (external or internal) instead of acting as a normal category.
12. Botscout Integration - adds a second level of security to contact form and submit article. Checks botscout.com for email and IP address, and blocks them if they are listed as a spammer. This can be turned on and off in Admin > Settings > Security
Templates:
The good news is the front end template changes are very simple, and in most cases will take less than 10 minutes. The template changes are in the docs folder of 4.2. There are already several phpLD 4.2 templates available, and we should have many more upgraded shortly.
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