SEO Optimization Specialist

Here is my experience building directories and watching others build them.  A bit tongue-in-cheek.  Feel free to add your “Stages”.

Stage 1 - You dream of ownership and possible fame from owning the next BIG directory.  The desire to help your fellow forum members and maybe earn some cash along the way is the driving force behind your decision to build a directory.

Stage 2 - Building your free directory, getting the free script installed and putting up a free template.  No pre-structure categories for you.  You start from scratch and add in all 300 categories manually, you will do it right, not like those lazy folks.

Stage 3 - The excitement and pride when you announce your new directory and the traffic and submissions start flowing in.  Wow if I knew I could get 100+ uniques a day this easily I would not have bothered with all those other sites and blogs.

Stage 4 - Becoming a little annoyed at folks that submit MFA sites, spam sites and wrongly submitted sites.  Surely these people could at least read my terms and conditions, after all I am offering them free backlinks.

Stage 5 - Realizing you are spending 2 hours a day on this new venture and you sure hope some of these folks decide to buy a featured link so you can at least pay for your hosting and buy a burger or something.

Stage 6 - Facing the reality that 90% of your time spent on your directory is checking out MFA sites, spam sites and fixing other folks spelling and submission errors.

Stage 7 - You consider changing over to a paid directory because you are geting frustrated with all the crappy submissions that you are spending half your day looking at.  You start to curse the folks that sell 100 MFA sites for $5 and wonder if you can report them to the FBI or your preist, may they burn-in-hell.  You take a break from approvals for a few days to collect your thoughts and figure out your future in the directory business.

Stage 8 - You log into your admin section to see 600 sites pending approval and dread the fact that 575+ of them will be MFA and spam, the decision is made.

Stage 9 - Deciding that a paid directory would solve most of your problems, with a little embarassement you announce your directory is going paid but you will keep the prices low $1 a submission to keep out the shady submitters, auto submitters and spam.  Maybe this higher class of submitters will even be literate enough to read the terms and conditions thereby making approvals a lot quicker.  Now you can start to make some money too.

Stage 10 - Your traffic drops off by 96% and you finally get a paid submission and realize that your payment proccesor took half of it.  You contemplate going out of business, but there is still hope because the page rank update is only 5 weeks away and then some of your hard work will start to pay off when you see that little green bar with a little juice in it.

Stage 11 - The page rank update comes and eventhough you spent over $9 on word cloud sites and did free directory submissions till all hours of the morning every weekend you only got a page rank of 3 and there are still quite a few free PR3 directories out there especially with all the folks buying dropped domains.  So why would someone pay a whole dollar to list on your directory when they can list for free elsewhere?

Stage 12 - You start to read the directory forums looking for an answer to your problems.  Get a custom template, buy links to raise your page rank, buy signature space and do other types of promotion to get your directories name out there.  But that costs serious cash and you are already in the hole by a few bucks and a few hundred hours.  You start to figure out that if you got part-time job at the local fast food joint you would have earned 1000 times more than you have being a directory owner.

Stage 13 - You are angry that you wasted so much time on this stupid project.  You are disillusioned because all you wanted to do was help folks out and they were thankless goons, so you come out of lurk mode on the forums and start posting topics like, “Directories Are Useless” and “Matt Cutts Gunning for Directory Owners” and “Submitters Suck” and so on…..