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The new rage among webmasters is to design and market free wordpress themes. Most Wordpress themes, released under the Creative Commons License, have one to three links that must be kept intact by webmasters before they can use the theme. This way, the theme developer gets backlinks to his own site.

Over the last couple of months, this mode of backlink building has gained tremendous momentum. Read the rest of this entry »

On this blog we have always emphasised the importance of using offline marketing in conjunction with online marketing techniques for promoting websites. You can find such stories here and here. In this story we look at some of the most simple and effective offline promotion methods.

Business Cards

Business cards are a great resource to use to market your website. Just like you use your signature to promote your website in forums, visiting cards are a great way to aproach targetted leads. The best part of this is that you do not need to go out of your way to identify these leads. Also cards are something that are usually not discarded by users like brochures and pamphlets. And if you can make the cards more attractive by graphics or may be just make it colored business cards, you will be surprised at the results.  Read the rest of this entry »

The last year and a half should be known as the ‘ipod for a signup’ generation due to the large number of sites that offered free ipods for signing up to offers. These offers were usually credit card offers, music sharng websites, internet and broadband connection websites and other similar sites. Since most of these were trial offers and required credit cards to pay for the trial period, the companies allowed incentives to be given for marketing. So you had offers where you sign up to an ‘offer’ and then refer a few of your friends to the same offers and viola, you win a iPOD! Read the rest of this entry »

Whether you are selling a product directly or promoting a product (as an affiliate or a publisher), the quality of the traffic you get is vital. This is why ‘buying’ traffic does not work most of the times. This traffic usually is very untargetted, meaning people browsing a technical site are shown your sports site. Clearly, this kind of traffic is currently not interested in what you have to offer. Hence, if you are looking to buy traffic ensure ensure that it consists of targetted visitors.   Read the rest of this entry »

Today, on myContentWebsite.com, we look at a directory and see how well the webmaster has implemented the points we discussed in our ‘Secrets of a successful directory’ series of articles.

The directory that we are going to analyse is legal-help-directory. As the name implies, this directory lists different types of legal resources from lawyer information to legal forms. Read the rest of this entry »

In this series of articles, we have looked at how to build and monetize a directory site effectively. In this short write up, we look at some of the ways to promote your directory.

Firstly, it is extremely important to find out what seperates your directory from the other ones on the internet. If you are running a general directory, how is it different from the thousands of other ones in the market? What extra benefit does the webmaster get when he submits to yours? List out these points. These will be the USP of your site. Whenever you promote your directory, ensure that your USP is given prominence. Read the rest of this entry »

Now that we have seen how best to design web directories, we look at ways we can monetize them. Note that in order to monetize directories, they need to have good quality sites listed and thereby get quality traffic.

The most common ways to monetize directories has been through the use of contextual pay per click advertisements like Adsense or YPN but these usually are not very good performers when it comes to directories. For directories, the best way to monetize them is to sell paid directory listings. The paid directory listings could be in the form of featured listings, sponsored listings or one of their variations including but not limited to banner advertisements etc. Read the rest of this entry »

A directory is a website business that needs to get the basics right just like any other business. And customer service is among the most important. Sites which make the user’s life easier will do better without a doubt.

When a webmaster visits a directory to submit his site for inclusion, it is very important that all required information including the terms and consitions are prominently visible and are easily understandable. For example, most directories do not allow deep links to your website. Then it is important that this be mentioned in the submit page. But there are other directories like DeepLink.us directory that allow the same. So when you visit the submit page, you find this information prominently displayed in no uncertain terms. Read the rest of this entry »

We discussed earlier about directory niches and how they determine if a directory is successful or not. In this short article, we look at the ‘look and feel’ angle to any directory.

Since we have agreed that a directory is a success only when real humans use it, it becomes extremely important that the directory is user friendly and pleasing to the eyes. That is why it is pathetic to see half baked directories with no thought for the end user springing up all around.

Take a look at Link-exchange-network.com Directory. This directory, even though is not a niche directory has a very simple and soothing user interface. Read the rest of this entry »

There are thousands of directories and only some of them are successful. The mark of success is not necessarily having thousands of listings but on how many ‘humans’ use the directory to find what they are looking for. Obviously when people use the website and benefit from it the webmaster also profits from it. And we have a successful directory website.

This brings us to the question what type of directory can be useful to ‘real humans’. It has to be ones that have information and links to sites that are what the people are looking for.  General directories usually do not fit the bill because they are too vast to be really targetted. Exceptions though are the real pioneers of the directory segment. But for new entrants to this business, it is important to build a niche directory. A niche directory will necessarily have better targetted sites listed and will be more useful to ‘real humans’. Read the rest of this entry »