Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

From personal experience starting our local, 100% free, full-featured (2 video, 2 audio, 10 documents, 40+ fields of info, map, 3 press releases, 2 surveys, 2 URL links, etc) listing site for the Phoenix AZ area as you have described (www.adsvalue.com) from scratch, I could fill your head with a thousand facts about your quest. Our site is also a portal for our ad agency offering many traditional and "specialty" ad services to help attract businesses to use the directory.

First - your directory should be created with a specific niche market purpose in mind. If not - your shiny new general local directory will be overshadowed by "hundreds" of free directory sites and a few larger full-featured sites probably already serving your market (making an selfish assumption you're located in the US).

第二个——除非你包装的目录worthless "phone book" listings to show something in your directory just starting out, people can't / won't use it because there's nothing even remotely useful in the directory. You could pay dearly for a company to call local businesses to populate listings but until you have a good cross section of listings on a category - you may be wasting time (hence why a niche market is more effective)

Third - I haven't figured it out exactly but 1) either EVERYONE is too busy to fill out their listing, or 2) people are too lazy to fill out a listing beyond name and address, or 3) they feel that having another way for someone to find their business (search engine link and exposure) is not worth the trouble.

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Twenty-Sixth - forums and article writing are great if you have a loyal following and/or search engine relevance. It takes time and lots of efforts unless you have a niche market and offer something others are not already offering

Twenty-Seventh - as time goes on, paying for a listing is generally worthless since there are a few major free listings that populate big and small directories. This gets you some exposure and a hyperlink for inbound link purposes (which may become less effective as Google modifies their page rank algorithms). Also Google doesn't like the "same" information in 200 directory sites populated by automatic systems. Someone paying $35 - 150/month for a listing for top positioning promotions can be useful in a very competitive market but if your site has 3 plumbers listed - would you pay $50/moth for the top spot?

Contact me offline (see profile) if you wish to bat around your ideas.

Bob

The key is to give people a reason to visit. Your content needs to be something they can only get at your site. This is tough to do in this day and age. I do not know how well directories work as most things can just be Googled now a days. The directories that seem to work well are things like city search where they are entwined with something else like reviews

If you have a forum you will have to get is jump started somehow. You may have to personally invite some contributors and get the topics flowing. People will not register and participate in a forum that is not already going. This is they tricky part. You really need to actively invite people and perhaps even bribe a few people to particiapte often. Once it gets going it can take on a life of its own. I think the point system that they have here is a really cool idea that gets people participating more. It taps into a competitive spirit that most people have.

Mike