What to Learn from Directory Dump to Make Your Directory More Successful

First off, let me start by saying that I was not paid by Directory Dump owner to review his directory.

I am going to talk about his directory with the aim of highlighting some important tips that I see in Directory Dump, which should be helpful and understood by a successful directory owner. Furthermore, I am going to talk about good design concepts, directory’s usability and directory promotion techniques, which are clearly illustrated in the Directory Dump, and that might help directory owners in the process of building and promoting their directories.

Let me introduce you to Directory Dump now,

“Directory Dump - Human-Edited and maintained premium paid web directory providing the highest level of integrity for family safe, spam free indexed resources available for search. Directory Dump offers deep link featured listings and regular inclusions.”

General Tips:

• Build a reference portal not a link market site. You can clearly see that the owner of Directory Dump tries to build a reference portal which is really helpful to users. Furthermore, building a reference portal will insure that your visitors come again.

• Accept only quality sites. As you can see in the Directory Dump most of the sites are useful to users and serve as a helpful resource rather than an advertisement.

• Enjoy what you are doing. As you can see Directory Dump has a LOT of features that normal directories don’t have since the owner enjoys what he or she is doing. Those features contribute to user’s friendly experience of viewing the directory and increase the rate of returned users. If you will enjoy creating a directory than it will be easier for you to create a successful directory.

• Create a directory that’s ALIVE. No body wants to use directory that looks the same as it did one year ago. You can make your directory alive by adding rss news feeds, statistics or other dynamic mods.

• Use a number of pricing options. Everybody likes to have a choice, why not to offer it when people submit site to your directory? By creating a number of pricing options you make sure that it suits user’s needs and resources.

• Show an example how listing will look like. Everybody wants to see how their listing will look like after submissions so offer them that choice before they actually submit a site to your directory.

• Use submission guidelines. Submission guidelines will not only drive away spammers but will also help you to solve problems when you reject a link.

Design Tips:

• Use mods to make your directory more user friendly. A lot of mods can be found on Directory Dump since directories are build for humans to browse not for robots. So make your users experience more enjoyable by adding helpful mods. By adding the mods you will insure that users come again. And always remember that the more your directory looks unique the more submissions you will receive.

• Use images to indicate categories. In fact, when users browse your directory they first see images not text. So why not to use images and make sure that users actually enter some categories?

• Use directory design that’s readable, not too complicated and user friendly. If you don’t know what I mean then take a look at Directory Dump, Aviva Directory and GII.

Promotion Tips:

• Spend money to earn money. Directory Dump clearly spends a lot of money for promotion and gets it back. For example, Directory Dump has bought the top spot at BigWebLinks for $1000. I am not saying you should spend thousands of dollars to promote your directory, all I am saying is that spend money if you want earn some money from your directory.

• Promote specific categories of your directory. I have seen that directory dump was promoting certain category of its directory but don’t remember where. Promoting specific directories will insure that inner pages get a good pagerank value.

• Promote you directory in your directory network. Do not forget to promote your directory on other directories that you might have since that’s free.
  

• Submit to dmoz. Try to submit to dmoz every six months. By submitting to dmoz you directory would be more prestige to submit sites to.

• Donate money. By donating money you will show your users that you are generous and good in general, which means that it will be easy for them to have business with you.