ICANN Approves Broad Expansion of Top Level Domains (TLDs)
My thoughts on the new expanded top level domain policy. Continue to read more…
Google News: Why No Crawl?
Gabe Rivera from TechMeme makes an interesting comment (via TechCrunch): “One thing that bugs me: they’re now hosting original news content, yet they prohibit other aggregators from crawling it (per robots.txt restrictions and TOS). Of course Google News relies on the openness of other organizations with original news content.”That could be considered reasonably evil. The interesting thing Continue to read more…
Social Media For Firefox 3 is Near Complete
We are getting close on have a Firefox 3 compatible version of Social Media for Firefox. We are sorry it wasn’t ready with the FF 3 launch but it is coming and it is going to be sick. We have taken the opportunity to add some upgrades. Here are some quick features we are working […]
We are getting close on have a Firefox 3 compatible version of Social Media for Firefox. We are sorry it wasn’t ready with the FF 3 launch but it is coming and it is going to be sick. We have taken the opportunity to add some upgrades. Here are some quick features we are working on if you happen to have any additions you think would make it be an even better tool we are all about it and please add in the comments.
We are looking into
> Showing Thumb Up, Down and Review Counts for StumbleUpon and let you choose which combo to display
> Adding Mixx and Sphinn
> Letting You Choose Which Sites to Have Displayed in the Bar
> Adding some really cool social news hubs to be able to scan the content but I don’t want to release the sites yet as we are testing and I don’t want to get people hopes up.
> We are thinking about Taking out Del.icio.us they have made some upgrades so we are testing but if we release right away it will be out as it never works and their API is not supported very well. We can always add back in.
Again any other ideas please send them over the tool has had near 100,000 downloads and we plan on making it even better.
How much you need to Invest to create a Quality Web Directory
Starting a Web Directory is still a good money maker even if many webmaster think that the directory business is not profitable anymore. Basically they think this way because they created a directory and did not succeed in making it unique and popular. At the beginning, running a directory could be frustrating because you won’t […]
Starting a Web Directory is still a good money maker even if many webmaster think that the directory business is not profitable anymore. Basically they think this way because they created a directory and did not succeed in making it unique and popular. At the beginning, running a directory could be frustrating because you won’t sell any links even if you spend a lot of money in it’s promotion. On the other hand, once your directory is popular, it could become the big earner in your website portfolio.
Let’s skip to the main question of this article (the earnings of a web directory, will be discussed in another post): how much money do I need to invest to create a quality web directory?
Many people create a directory network instead of creating one single web directory. The benefit of a directory network is that you can create a lot of directories that look the same, and offer a submission to all these for a cheap price. Also in this case, you will need to promote only one of them and than link all your directories from the promoted one. A directory network can bring quite good money, but it will never beat the earnings of one single professional quality directory.
In my opinion it’s always better to focus on one single directory and try to make it as unique and popular as possible. Here is a list of what I’ve spent to create the Linkrain Web Directory:
- 10$ for a domain name at Godaddy
- 75$ for a directory script ( PHP Link Directory) with full rights
- 100$ for a Deeplink Mod (a modification which allows users to submit also inner pages of their site and not only the main page). This mod can also be installed on your own if you are a good PHP coder or if you have already some experience with the “php link directory” script.
- 400$ for a custom template (which is not online yet) and a logo. Also this can be done by yourself if you already have some experience with “php link directory” templates and if you are good in designing with Photoshop.
- 1.000$ in promotion. I don’t really know how much I’ve spend in promotion yet, but with 1.000$ you can get some really good results. At the beginning you should not spend them in Adwords but only in permanent links, blog posts and some cheap monthly links. Once you have an established directory, you could also start to sponsor Wordpress themes (or other kind of templates) and to spend some money in a Pay Per Click advertising service such as Google Adwords.
TOTAL: 1.585$
If you think that this is a lot of money to start only a web directory, wait to see how much you can earn with a 6 months old and well promoted one (article that I’m going to write soon). If you are to lazy to come back, subscribe to the full RSS Feed.
Google Updating
Just thought I’d give all our readers a head’s up that Google is showing VERY mixed and ever-changing results at the moment. This is expected on Fridays and over the weekends but here we have it on a Monday. This first came to my attention when a client of ours was seeing their site on the first page of Google and I saw them on page 2. I then logged into our server in California and saw a Continue to read more…
Business.com & Yahoo! Rankings
Back on February 13th we reported here that a paid listing on Business.om had killed the Yahoo! results for a client of ours. We had the listing removed from Business.com and I spoke with them and asked that any feeds sent to Yahoo! not include our client. One of the indicators of the issue was that the page was caching at 89k on Yahoo! and was actually redirecting through Business.com when Continue to read more…