Noble Directory Owners Interviews

As i have started taking the interviews of the great successful directory owners, here’s the 1st first interview. It is with Marlin of Index It Directory. He is a cool person, and here is his profile in Digitalpoint Forums - Banless

And here goes the Interview -

Q. Some Personal Insight Of Yours?
A. First I would like to say thanks for this interview and I am happy to answer your questions. Some may only know me by forums names, but my real name is Marlin. Outside of owning a directory my main job is doing search engine marketing for other web sites. Online Marketing Advisors is the parent company to all of my sites and I have been doing seo for quite some time now. Starting a directory was more of an seo test at first but then things started to pick up so I thought why not get into this market and see what I can do. Some might remember index-it finishing 6th in the directory contest, we also made a good showing in the carcasherdotcom Seocontest as well and finished 13th. Not the best results but they sure brought in some good seo clients. Other then that it mostly work and play alittle here and there.

Q. How long have you been working on your directories?
A. Index-it.net was launched in May of 2006 with webbieo coming about 3 or 4 months after that.

Q. How many directories do you own, and can you please share them?
A. Currently I only own index-it.net and webbieo.com. I will be releasing a new one fairly soon once everything has been set up correctly. Let me point out that index-it.net is my bread & butter, webbieo.com could be a very strong directory if I put more into it, but that is why the price is so low. There are plans to make webbieo a much better directory in the future but right now it is on the back burner, the directory does get sales though even without any advertising.

Q. How do you rate your own directories now?
A. To be honest, I think index-it.net is very powerful directory and is more then worth the review fee. But there are some problems with the directory that need to be addressed, such as more categories and better display in other browsers. If I ran across this directory with out me owning it I would still rate it fairly high, at least in the top 20, I think the directory has deserved at least that much over the past year. But like I said there are few things that need to be addressed before I can start accepting gold ribbons for it.

Q. What kind of promotions you have done for the directories?
A. Alot of money has gone into promoting index-it.net. In the beginning I was taking links anywhere I could find them, but now I am taking a much more different approach in order to raise sales, it is more important for me to get the directory out where people can see it, advertising in places such as high traffic blogs and forums is a good way to capture submitters. I understand that alot of people do not want to advertise on sites that use a “no follow” but I am starting to look into this a little more in terms of bringing good traffic to the site which in turn, and I hope, will lead to more sales. At the same time I always keep pushing for that high pr mark.

Q. Do you think your directories will rank well in thousands of these?
A. As long I keep pushing the directory then I do not see a problem with it ranking well on the search engines. It already has some pretty good rankings now with some even better ones coming up soon. In either case I am happy with the current rankings but will keep working to make them better.

Q. What are your ways of earning in the directory? Only links or Sitewides etc.?
A. Good question. To me any link that points to your directory has a chance of bringing sales. I think sitewides are great in terms of helping a site rank higher on the search engines, now whether or not they bring sales is kind of hard to say. But I do know that 56% of my traffic comes from referring sites, with 26% coming from the search engines. But to be honest I don’t care where the sales come from as long as keep coming, the sites have to be clean of course because I do not just accept anything that comes my way.

Q. Do you have future plans on building the directory more?
A. Yes, there are alot of things that need to be done on index-it but time has been a big factor lately. I plan to add more categories soon and maybe offer a few more feature listings then what is currently available.

Q. Which directory script do you think is the best and why?
A. Well I have never really used a directory script before so I really can’t say. Index-it.net was built by hand with pure html code. I am however playing around with both phpld and indexu scripts just to get a feel of what they can do. Both have some good features and both have some bad ones as well. My next directory will in fact feature one of these scripts, which one I plan on going with has not been decided yet.

Q. What do you think would be the future of directories, when seeing these many all around?
A. The directory market still has a bright future ahead of it, nowadays we are seeing more and more real business people stepping into this market, in other words people who take business seriously are starting to look at the directory market and now want a piece of the action. I think this is a good move for the directory market, the more directory owners we have that are dedicated to the business the better it will be for all of us. It is sad to see all of the cookie cutter directories out there but as time goes on only those with 100% dedication will last.

Q. What are your suggestions to the upcoming and new directory owners, who might get inspired from you?
A. My advice is that anyone who plans to join this market that they do some really good research first and get a good understanding of what submitters are looking for. It is not always about how high your page rank is, although that does seem to be the big money maker for most directories. Focus on making a well structured directory and put some good advertisement behind it, if you do that then the submitters will come and so will the pr.

Q. Lastly, which is your favorite directory?
A. This is a really hard one to answer because there are so many good ones out there. So If I may I’ll point out a few that stand out the most to me. We already know the power of Alive & Aviva, but I really like what the owners of romow.com and ewebpages.org are doing with their directories, both are very well built and have a good presence on the internet, the prices are fair also. I also like what dirsensei.com is doing as well and although this directory is pretty new I think it has a nice future ahead of it. But to answer the question my over all favorite is still botw.org, mainly because of the level of consistency that the directory offers.

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