Website Marketing

A More Effective Directory Submission Strategy

A lot of you probably do directory submissions manually to build up your backlinks. That takes a lot of time. Maybe so much time that it isn’t worth it to do yourself. If outsourcing isn’t in your budget then here’s something that might help make it worth your while.

Old Crappy Strategy

When I first started doing this I found one of those huge lists of free directories. You’ve probably seen those “List Of 500 Free Directories” threads. I basically just went through one of these lists, figured out which directories were really free, and submitted sites.

That didn’t work very well. It took forever for the directory owners to get to us and the sites were often rejected. Overall, the success rate was probably about 10%. I was slowly building up a list of directories for the next time around but, at this point, the return on my time looked terrible.

New Better Strategy

I knew there had to be a better way. An article Jim Karter wrote about making $500 a month online appeared to have it. He wrote about lurking in the forums to find people soliciting submissions to their directories.

So far that’s worked really well for me. Overall, the success rate is probably about 80%. These people (often owners of new directories) turn around submissions very quickly (sometimes in less than a day) and they’re a little more tolerant of newer sites without tons of content. This makes sense since everyone will hate you if you say “hey, I’m cool, come play over here” and then tell them to go away when they do. Test this out yourself and let us know what happens.

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