I was approached by a client who suggested they wanted to import 1 Million businesses into their Sobi2 Directory. I really think importing 1,000,000 listings into a business directory will hurt your chances of success rather than help you. Not to mention it could potentially slow the speed of your Joomla website to a crawl.
When you have 1,000,000 entries to search in the database, it's going to bog the search and category pages down considerably, not to mention needing a bigger server to handle it. You would need a quality hosting platform, not the $6.00 account from Godaddy, that's for sure.
If your directory is supposed to be focused on widgets, and you have 1000 categories of widgets, with 1000 listings in each category, how in the world are visitors supposed to find any useful information?
What happens when you go to Google and search for a specific topic? You return Millions of results for your specific keyword. Now, how many of those results do you actually click on before you find what you were searching for? 1, 2 maybe 3 at most? So unless you're at the very top of page 1, how effective is it to be on page 5 of the search results for a specific search term? Let me help you there, not very effective.
I have a widget for sale. It's a green widget and I want to list it in your widgets category on widgetdirectory.com. Now I go to your site and have a quick look around and I see you have many different types of widgets listed. And there's well over 100 categories of widgets, all with hundreds or thousands of widgets listed in each.
That was enough for me. I don't need to see anymore. I don't want to be the 1001 widget listed in green widgets, a sub-category of widgets that shows 20 listings per page and I would be on page 51.
Do you think I'm going to pay a single dollar to be listed in the back of your directory, much less $20 or $50?
I would much rather see you have 1000 paid entries at 50 bucks a year, evenly spread out across 50 categories than what you would have with a huge number of listings.
Also, keep this in mind. Say you already have 1000 entries in the directory, that's 1000 people that know you and trust you. What if they all paid 50 bucks a year? That's 50 grand annually.
Get a newsletter together that talks about the upgrades you are making to your directory. Tell them they are charter members of your directory and you have a special offer just for them.
Normally the price is $50 per year for the standard directory listing, plus an additional cost of $10 per month to be featured. But if they act now, you will offer them 3 months of Featured Listings for the price of 1 month! That's a $30 value for the price of 2 coffees at Starbucks.
Hype it up about the contextual link to their website, or the Google map to their location, and you can tell them about the new Ratings and Reviews plugin you installed that's absolutely free.
The listings with the most reviews each month will be included in the monthly newsletter that has X number of subscribers. All included in their Standard Listing, just for being great members.
There's a lot you can do with a quality directory, but you need to take advantage of a specific Niche market and grow it organically. Unless all you care about is hits from Google, and I haven't seen Adsense pay very big checks lately. You really need to take an honest look at what's available for your Sobi2 Directory, and what you can do to improve it.
So what are you doing with your Sobi2 Directory to make it both easy to use for visitors and attractive to potential businesses in your Niche Market?
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