Jul 21st, 2007 by admin 3,596 Views
After writing about the amount of money I’ve spent to create the Linkrain Web Directory, let’s now talk about the earnings you can make with a only-6-months-old Web Directory. Before I’m going to tell you how much I earn only with the Directory, you should consider some very important keyfacts:
- Even if you have a great website, you won’t earn much if you don’t work hard on it.
- Linkrain has got a few sponsors, don’t expect that they will come to you and ask if they can become one of your sponsors. You have to promote your advertising space and at the same time find sponsors that have a website related to yours.
- The less you work on your websites, the less money you will make
- Before you are going to start a Web Directory, consider that the Directory Business is a really hard one (there are thousands of Web Directories out there) and making your Directory “better” than the others is not one of the easiest things to do.
- Too many webmasters are interested in PageRank. To make money you will need a good homepage PageRank (at least 5) and also innerpage PageRank
After the first 3 months, I did not make any money with Linkrain because traffic was really low and I had no PageRank yet. After the PageRank update in May, Linkrain jumped from 0 up to 5. Also many categories got a PageRank with the first update, which was the reason my first customers decided to add a link.
Ok, thats enough introduction to the Directory Business for now. Let’s talk about the earnings
- 600-700$/month from people that add a link to directory (17-18 regular listings and 2-3 featured listings each month)
- 300$/month from my main page sponsors (other web directories and related sites displayed on the main page of Linkrain)
Total: 900-1000$ each month
These are only the earnings of the Web Directory (blog earnings are not included). To get to this point I spent nearly 2.000$ which I got back within 2 months. Of course I could now stop to invest time, work and money into Linkrain, and earn nearly 1.000$ each month by doing nothing. Earnings would go down each month but I would surely make 5.000-6.000$ within the end of the year. But this is not my objective. Having a blog and a website which is becoming more popular evey day is a lot of fun, the major reason why I started and I’m still running this website.
Regarding the future earnings, I have a very positive prospective:
- The directory is not publishing any kind of advertisements yet. Only by displaying one Google Adsense Block in a good position, I could easily average 100$/month. I’m not going to do this anyway (or maybe not yet) because this could reduce the value of the directory and reduce the number of customers.
- By getting PageRank 6 with the next update or with a future Google PR update, customers would increase a lot and also my sponsors would pay more to list their service on the main page.
- The directory is still using a free template. Once the custom template is up, customers will surely increase.
In my opinion, it is easily possible to create a one-year-old Web Directory which is generating 2.000$ of revenue each month. I will write a new post in 6 months to let you know if I reached this goal 
Everytime you post something on PlugIM it goes directly to the front page
Must be a rewarding feeling. But I can see why! This is a cool and motivating post!
I think an article needs 4 or 5 plugs to get on the front page of Plugim. Considering that I have 600 blog readers each day and that people don’t need to register to Plugim to plug articles, it’s quite easy to get there. I don’t even have to submit my articles manually because my feed got approved by Plugim
I have a web directory, it’s really not easy to earn money through web directory, it’s really take money to make money here. I”m not sure how much you pay to maintain the high page rank, but some directory are paying 500 to earn 600 a month, this is risky. But you are smart, you have a blog, so maybe you will attract quality back link without spending a dim:)
Yes, the Directory business is really hard. I don’t have any “monthly-fee” links for Linkrain. Of course I’m promoting it, but only to reach PR6 with a future PageRank update and to increase traffic. The only fixed costs I have are:
Domain name
Hosting
Statcounter
All together it’s less than 400$/year (and I could even get a free statistics service instead of using Statcounter).
Regarding the blog, you are perfectly right. It brings a lot of quality backlinks in and in fact I expect it to be PR5 with the next update
Wow, you don’t have any “monthly” fee, you are good! Definitely need to learn from you about how to make money through web directory:)
Hey Andreas;
Would you say that the time and effort that you are putting into the directory are worth the $2000/month, or could your time and effort make more money elsewhere?
Do you plan on making more that $2K/month? If so, other than the obvious increase in advertisers and submissions, do you have other monetization plans?
What do you think your earnings ceiling could be with the directory?
It does indeed require a lot of hardwork to make money out of a directory. The fact is that people are saturating this area starting directories with any site that they own.
But one needs to stand out to make an impact and you certainly have done that, congrats to you.
Great post, maybe i’ll attempt a directory in the future.
thanks for the post, its always good to see what other peopls incomes look like and the avenue they choose. Thanks!
i have seen changes in my PR and its is true to say that the google system is now updating, at http://www.googlebugs.com there are results and stats that show this has happened.
thanks
aks
It is a nice earning for an web directory. Not that special because of there are so many directories that if you make one it is more difficult to get a better earning.
Is this possible without PR ?