There are many ways to market your websites, and ultimately, your business.

The conventional ways include newspaper ads, magazine ads, billboards, yellow pages, flyers, brochures, and other physical ads placement – all is good. But problems arise if your business has no brick-and-mortar presence – web retail stores, blogs, and e-commerce sites.

Yes, it is common to list your website URLs in a magazine ad space for a direct incoming traffic to your sites, but it’s less effective considering a simple proposition – Most people visiting your web stores are people surfing the Net.

Consider this – for a fraction of your conventional marketing budget – even for free – you can attract MOST of your visitors through the Internet.

Types of Internet marketing

There are plenty of Internet marketing services on the Net:

• Professional Internet marketing services – For a fee, you can get your website PR-ed and promoted throughout the Internet medium
• Web directory listings – free, bid for position, and paid directories are the typical directories used to market your websites.
• Affiliate programs – you can include your product-selling sites to affiliate network company as an advertisers, like CommisionJunction and LinkShare
• Paid blogging services – you can have your sites blogged and PR-ed by professional bloggers, usually through a paid blogging network, such as Pay-per-Post and Smorty

Out of those outlined methods, I want to highlight one Internet marketing method – Web directory listing.

Types of web directory listings

There are basically three types of web directory listings:

• Free directory listings – a free listing is always a good starting point. Free directories are usually funded by on-site ads.
• Paid directory listings – in exchange for a fee, you can get your site listed. The fee can be recurring – usually monthly – or one-time fee.
• Bidding web directory listings – it’s a paid directory listing with a twist – you can bid for higher, or even highest, position in the list, usually a top 10 list. The fee is usually one-time, and links are usually permanent.

Why I prefer – and currently use and own – Paid directory listing

There are thousands of free directory listing – why would I bother submitting my websites and blogs to paid directories?

Paid directories – both bidding and non-bidding, are more desirable for a reason:

1. They charge a listing fee for a reason – they are legitimate and promote themselves heavily – and promotion doesn’t come cheap.
2. They don’t rely on organic traffic (visitors through search engines) alone – they promote themselves to other directories and popular related websites to get more traffic and business – ultimately to get listed sites more exposure on the Net.
3. Paid directories, by ‘natural selection’, scan out low quality sites and blogs – the premise, good sites and blogs realise the listing fee and bidding fee as a reasonable investment, low quality ones don’t. Therefore, the directories’ quality is preserved, and this is carried-through to the directories’ listed sites.

My bidding web directory, EnglishFair.com, is promoted continuously to both free and paid directories to ensure search engine visibility and the directory’s quality.

I also uses social bookmarking services, blog and forum postings, and feed burning services – nothing out of the original, just build my directory quality and strength continuously. Perhaps there’s better ways, but what I do is, in my opinion, the most effective ways.

Paid directory listings – love them, don’t hate them :)

Ivan Widjaya
Bidding web directory crazy

Update: EnglishFair.com has been acquired by a web directory investor.

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