In the last few months I read about hundreds of webmasters that complain that there directories aren’t making any money. They may say they make a few dollars a month from featured submissions but from their advertisements they seem to make none.

I did a few tests with some of my directories and encountered some problems with making money from Ad’s. First off making money from pay per click Ad’s on a directory is very hard. The average click rate is horrible compared to a normal site.

This is because most of the people coming to your site, go strait to the submission page. One way to avoid this from happening is to make sure that your user must actually go to the category they are submitting to.

The most important reason you want the person to stay on the site and actually be there is because directory submission software’s such as SubmitEaze allows a submitter to submit without even going to the page. Most of the time it happens to sites that are using the script phplinkdirectory or otherwise known as PHPLD. SubmitEaze strips the submit page from a directory and the only thing the user is shown is the submit field boxes. If you are using PHPLD I highly recommend you choose a different script or else you could possibly insert ads within the submission form.

A good directory script to avoid all these problems is eSyndicat

I hope this helps some of you that have a directory that isn’t making money.