- Impact
- 90
Are paid directories back? Or are they still a thing of the past?
After seeing a salesman trying to attract new customers to a gym with a “Wheel of Savings”, Lerman came up with the idea for GymTicket.com, a lead generation service that directed people to gyms in their area. Within a year, GymTicket.com had over 3,000 gyms across the country signed up.[7]
Lerman and his team expanded their business to include nine additional categories, including LocalVets.com and TVRepairman.com. As the group considered itself to be the "next Yellow Pages", they condensed this designation to create the company name, "Yext".[7]
Lerman decided to focus on this business listing model, and spun out the pay-per-call business as a separate company called Felix. He then sold Felix to IAC’s CityGrid Media for $30 million in April 2012. All proceeds from the sale were reinvested to fund Yext's new Powerlistings product,[10] now called Yext Listings.[11] Yext's Knowledge Engine now offers a suite of products, expanding the company's services beyond simply business listings.[2]
Web directories may be general in scope, or limited to particular subjects or fields. Entries may be listed for free, or by paid submission (meaning the site owner must pay to have his or her website listed).
Monetizing[edit]
Directories have various features in their listings, often depending upon the price paid for inclusion:
- Cost
- Free submission – there is no charge for the review and listing of the site
- Paid submission – a one-time or recurring fee is charged for reviewing/listing the submitted link
- No follow – there is a rel="nofollow" attribute associated with the link, meaning search engines will give no weight to the link
- Featured listing – the link is given a premium position in a category (or multiple categories) or other sections of the directory, such as the homepage. Sometimes called sponsored listing.
- Bid for position – where sites are ordered based on bids
- Affiliate links – where the directory earns commission for referred customers from the listed websites
- Reciprocity
- Reciprocal link – a link back to the directory must be added somewhere on the submitted site in order to get listed in the directory. This strategy has decreased in popularity due to changes in SEO algorithms which can make it less valuable or counterproductive.[7]
- No Reciprocal link – a web directory where you will submit your links for free and no need to add link back to your website
As in?
Done and dust.
Why do you think?
Been there.
my understanding there are some successful ways to do it
IMHO, there is a place for highly specialized niche directories that also include high quality content. Generic Web directories don't seem to thrive anymore. In fact, most are defunct or aren't updated anymore.
Thank you
Any examples of successful directories?
Do you know if any good private label templates?
If you want to have a successful directory, then it must be content based.
Paid Web Directory are quite relevant if you can fly back time using a time machine. Unfortunately for that you need to wait till future until time machine is invented.