Everyone keeps looking for new ways to make money online… although directories are hardly new, I haven’t seen too many bloggers making money with them. It’s time to start! I’ve personally run a couple directories before and sold him for a few hundred… nothing major, I know; but they took less than an hour on my part to setup (especially as it was outsourced) and maybe another hour to promote. Not a bad amount for a few hours work now, is it? 
There are two ways you can make money with online directories… the first involves providing a directory submission service, which only works if you can automate it (using scripts and the like)… the second however, can be done by anyone and that’s what I’ll be talking about today – namely, setting up your own directory.
The first thing you need to do is get a domain… now, whereas you can start with a fresh domain, it’s better you get one that is aged with Pagerank (as that is what make directories valuable, along with traffic and revenue of course). You can generally find a PR3 domain on the various forums like Digital Point or Sitepoint for $20 or less, heck – if you find a neglected directory for sale, you could buy it too. You’ll find many people with directories that they started with good intentions, but then stopped promoting for whatever reason; pick one up and half your work is done.
If you start from scratch, once you have the domain you will need to get a directory script – a good one is PHP Link Directory. Although it costs money ($25 with a footer link) it is well worth it as it is easy to setup and after you have it setup all you need to do is promote.
Onto the promotion part…
You need two things to have a successful directory; revenue (which means paid links) and traffic. The former is fairly easy to get.
What you do is offer a ‘discounted price’ at the various forums for a featured listing while limiting the amount. This takes two aspects of selling into account – scarcity and human natural cheapness (okay, I made up the latter attribute ). As your directory is new, it will not fetch a great deal for links… however you should be able to sell around twenty links for $5 each over the course of a month without a problem.
A great place to find out about and promote your directory is Digital Point’s directory section, specifically the Solicitations and Annoucements section. You can also try their link sales section to sell more links. You should allow as many inner free links as possible but try to make it a requisite that a backlink is required. For this you are making sure of two things – you’re building links for your website and you are also gaining traffic.
As for further building traffic, you can do link exchanges with other directories of a similar standing (make sure you both swap links in good positions of equal value) and also addon a blog, which makes it possible for you to quickly SEO your directory for long tail related keywords that get traffic.
With just $100 in revenue (which is not difficult to attain, especially if you manage to snag a good domain) you can easily sell your online directory at the various webmaster forums… and once you’ve done it first time successfully, just rinse and repeat over and over again.
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