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Welcome aboard manny, and good question (moved you over to our marketing section).

There are many directories out there, Us, Qype as you mentioned, and the likes of the UKSBD, Freeindex etc, and most businesses will sign up with multiple directories. This is a pretty standard approach and a good part of your marketing strategy.

Some will have free listings, some will have paid, normally paid will give you more functionality, clean links to your website, chance to add content, reviews etc. Some paid will want an annual re-subscription, others will give you a lifetime listing. Some free ones will allow you to add content and links, but the links tend to be non friendly, masked by a tracking ID, or any SEO benefit is actually passed back to the directory, not the business owner.

So on each directory, you need to make a decision of any perceived value, and if you are going for a paid or free option.

Biggest mistake people make, is either copy and pasting all the content from their home page onto their directory listing, or copying over the same description across every directory they sign up with.

If you are going to go to the time and trouble to sign up with directories, then spend a few minutes and put a little thought in to it, make the content unique and readable for each directory. Whatever functionality is available, use it, get the most out of your listing.

Plus keep a record of who you are signed up with! If you change your phone number or details, then revisit all these directories and change your details. On MyLocalServices we send an annual email asking you to reconfirm or update your details, but don't wait for the directory to chase you.

If you think you are getting nothing from having a directory listing with a certain directory, then have a look, check your analytics. Are you in the right category? Have you changed your description?

Most common question we ask is what category do you want, or what do people type into google to find your services? It's amazing the number of people who don't know

Hope that helps, or food for thought

Do you reckon this is still the case with other Social Media sites now it has Google Plus? My guess it will be simply use it's own social network rather than rely on what are now direct competitors.

Not bothered by increasing the number to the homepage, personally I think it's better to promote individual listing pages, and likewise seeing plenty of activity and search impact, but just full of curiosity over this bizarre characteristics tab.

Spoken to other large site owners on other forums, and no one seems to have triggered it, although most are coy about revealing their numbers

670 is pretty good, beating us! So if you get to a 1000 before us, let me know if you trigger it! Otherwise first one to 10,000...

Maybe its just duff WMT functionality!

Blimey, valued at $25 billion, but losing hundreds of millions...

"Mason founded Groupon in November 2008, and by last October the firm had 35 million registered users. But it has also burned through mountains of cash even as sales soared, losing $180m last year and a further $102.7m in the second quarter of this year alone."

It seemed, in theory to be a pretty good business model, skimming off other peoples sales. So wonder where it's gone wrong, massive marketing spend? To many staff?

Google model sounds interesting, one to keep an eye on.

Well, a month later and we have now 501 unique +1's, but still no characteristics

So whats the next guess, 1000??? Anyone else seeing any? This smells of a marketing trick, I bet there is no characteristics report

erm, he runs a company formation service

oh ah, was going to post a link but forgot

lol, normally spammers are more obvious, and those that get through are simply deleted straight away. But in this case, gave her the benefit of the doubt, but some of Ayen's posts were just plain bizarre!

I see she's on other forums, so we'll see how she gets on with them

I give up, have been very patient, obviously a language barrier, but the random posting winds people I'm afraid Ayen

So unfortunately your banned..

37

Just general marketing I suppose. Dunno if you saw this, but it's an interesting read: Jesus Had 12 Followers, How Many Do You Need

I'm still more of a fan for likes actually on your website rather than FB pages, at least then your site gets the direct exposure on peoples walls, rather than trying to get them to hop again from your FB page to your site.

Just my 5 pence worth