directory

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