How To Make Money Running An Article Directory

Article directories are very popular websites, as they are one of the most useful and wide-reaching. They generate traffic practically automatically. Because of this popularity, they are very profitable to make money with for the long-term.

There are a lot of very different strategies for making money with an article directory website. A very common and effective one is using affiliate advertising on your site. Add advertisements around the edges of all your articles, and you are an affiliate. Affiliate advertisers get paid on a commission basis for each advertisement that is clicked. There are some very good affiliate programs that are quick and easy to use, such as Google AdSense. These programs are automated and simple, and highly efficient.

There are a lot of other ways of making money running an article directory. Some websites make users pay for an account, while others let users pay to upgrade their account to receive special benefits. Both of these are legitimate strategies and could be used. Of course, using these makes it difficult to keep traffic flowing through your site, due to the fact that most people simply won't pay for information they could get elsewhere. Making the bonuses received when a user pays more appealing could be a good way to make this strategy work.

To make money when you are actually running the article directory takes some amount of dedication to get things going. So many businesses can't manage to get past those early stages, where all the real problems present themselves. Once these initial problems are overcome, though, things become a lot easier.

The first problem to pose itself to the owner of an article directory is getting content for their site. Since the whole purpose of an article directory is to have a large amount of information on-call, this is rather a big task, and without good content, there will be no traffic, and therefore no money coming in.

To get over this hurdle, it is a worthwhile investment to hire a few paid writers to write quality content for your directory. The higher quality content, the better, and it's worth forking out a bit more money. Good quality writing will continue to get traffic, where the cheaper content will get traffic for a few days, then flop. Also consider hiring people who are able to write search engine optimized content, as this will also assist in bringing in more traffic.

You could also go a different way, and have all users able to post their content on the website and get paid for advertising on their articles. This brings up the problem of needing to moderate content for quality and accuracy, and it will be necessary to hire some moderators when doing this. Still, it does eliminate the need to hire writers.

There is any number of ways you can go about making money with an article directory site, with a little thought and creativity. And once it's up and running with an effective strategy in place, it's smooth sailing from there.

By Frank Breinling