I thought what would be interesting is to find out what were some of the most painful mistakes other directory owners or those involved in this industry might have made. And so, that was precisely what I did. I set out to ask fellow members in Digital Point if they were willing to reveal some of their past. Below are some of the interesting stories, life-lessons and painful falls from those who have gone before…..

 

“I once converted a directory from free to paid and dumped the entire free queue, some 5000 submissions, sending them each an email trying to convert them into paying customers. Big mistake! The entire community turned against me and it took me over a year to re-establish my site. Looking back, it was just a plain stupid thing to do, I should have honored the list of people who had submitted for free.”
- SilkySmooth

“Spell check and make sure it’s fine. I used to hit post right away then go back and edit, then edit again and technorati just started ignoring me. When you hit POST make it permanent.”
- Dubz

“Learned to stop buying scripts from dude who don’t prove themselves and their scripts and sales.”
- humm

“Once in the distant past, i announced $3/year listing on www.bqtm.com (when it was PR2). And then a particular submitter made 15 submissions in a go. So, I didn’t get much money. If I would have sticked to a price of $15/listing then i would have gotten much more.”
- MeetHere

“The mistake I made was to use a category dump for my first directory LinkLister, then I started adding categories and other categories would be deleted, links would move to an irrelevant category. I found a fix from someone for this known problem but couldn’t manage to implement it myself, but he installed it for me for free and no problems since.”
- syted

“The first mistake I made when starting my directory was looking for the absolute cheapest host possible. That wasn’t my biggest mistake though. My biggest mistake was not backing up my files at a different location. The server at the before mentioned host was hacked and I lost everything. Since then I have learned of the imprtance of a quality host and storing your files at a remote location.”
- LennyP

“Painful mistake? Starting a directory and expecting no effort needed and making tons of money when people starting submitting their site to my paid directory in doves!”
- solidghost

“Here is one of the most foolish things I did with blogging on my directory. I was supposed to install a blog and I duly installed WordPress. Initially, I posted few posts. But after few days one of my friend pointed out that my one of my categories in my directory was broken I checked it and found that I have indeed installed a blog with the same URL as that broken category. I also checked others and found to my horror that 2/3 of my directory categories were broken. Now I have learnt a lession”
- jhnrang

“Never copy paste the code within the file and paste it somewhere else as a backup in case you think it will be required for future use, always copy the entire file as backup! Thats what I’ve learned from my experience!”
- khushal

“I tried to do some modifications and boom my deeplinks were gone. Now besides the editors that adds sites no one can take a look anymore at my directories except some technically recognized people.”
- popotalk

“My most painful mistake is selling permanent sitewide link on my 1st directory for only $35”
- alang

“Mistake? Using the categories dump!”
- Richie_Ni

“Turned one of my Free Directories into Paid after giving away so many free listings.”
- coolweb

Well, I guess that’s all for now and as the saying goes, “the only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”

Liked this post? Help me tell others! Subscribe Here:

RSS feed | Trackback URI

4 Comments »