The main advantage of having directory within your blog or site – it provides additional relevant content and gives your visitors more reasons to stay on the website longer. Properly structured and well maintained directory may also bring extra traffic that otherwise you probably would not get… Another plus of having directory – it can generate additional and very significant revenues.

About a year ago whole business with directories was taken to the extreme when people were starting low quality obvious link farms by thousands. To prevent manipulation of search results Google has changed theirs approach to indexing and evaluating pages. Large part of those made-on-the-fly directories was removed from Google index and left to die…

For directory to succeed – it has to provide QUALITY content to it’s visitors. And by “visitors” I mean people who came to your site looking for resources, not webmasters who want to submit websites to your directory. For example I was checking traffic sources for my World Web Directory and saw that many search terms which brought visitors were related to individual pages that I have optimized for every listing. I described in more details how to improve quality of directory on my Directory Resources blog.

How do you make money with directory? If you can maintain high quality, free of junk directory, especially if it’s highly targeted narrow niche – people will gladly to pay for inclusion. Higher the traffic and more competitive niche – higher the price you may charge for submissions.

The biggest mistake many directory owners make – they concentrate on the webmasters who submit their sites and accept many low quality resources as long as people are ready to pay. I repeat one more time – your goal is to provide high quality content to your visitors, even if you have to refuse some money. In the long run it will pay of handsomely…

As I mentioned before, there are many pre-made scripts available to power up directory but from my own experiense I would highly recommend eSyndicat Directory Software. It’s a powerful, highly customizable script which can be used as a stand-alone directory or you can build whole portal with it. There is a free version with less features available to try it out but you should definitely go for the Pro version (only $75 with unlimited life time upgrades).

So… here it is – another potential revenue stream for you – Web Directory.