Why Small Businesses Should Take Advantage of These Business Directory Discounts – and Bloggers Should, Too.

Many small businesses and bloggers are worried about building links without first taking the basic step of getting themselves listed in free directories and the most relevant (to them) of the paid directories.

In spite of the widespread belief that “directories are bad” that is NOT what Google said and if you still believe that I encourage you to watch the video further down in this post of Matt Cutts explaining why quality, paid directories are still beneficial for SEO.

How Bloggers Can Benefit

Bloggers, you can benefit from getting these local listings, too. You do have to have a physical address and phone number to publish. (There is a business opportunity more need to be offering: business addresses and phone services.)

I strongly encourage bloggers to add getting directory listings to their skill set so they can assist their favorite small businesses, generate extra income, or even make a living offering directory listing services.

Many small business owners do NOT have the time or
desire to learn how to do directory listings themselves.

As inflation bites into disposable incomes and more are underemployed and unemployed, even traditional businesses that think they have plenty of customers need to find new ones.

Directory listings should be their first priority –
and you providing them can be yours –
because you will be supporting your
community and earning a nice income, too.

Even if you don’t want to do this yourself,
you can recommend directories and UBL
to make affiliate income from multiple programs.

Universal Business Listings (UBL)

First start with all the free listings you can get in major directories. If you have no money at all you can do this manually, but that is a serious waste of your time when you can pay UBL as little as $75 to get you in hundreds of directories.

You can not manually do what they do for you because you can’t find all the sites that are using the databases they feed. They have come a long way from where they started when I first started recommending them years ago.

Now they provide feedback on where your listings appear and make it easy to ping all the directories annually or more often. This IS important and I highly recommend it because that tells the search engines you’re still in business and moves your listings up!

Even the smallest business can afford the $75
minimum cost of UBL if they make
it a priority – and they should!

If manually claiming your listings in the most important business directories is a headache you’d rather let someone else deal with you can use one of their premium options and let UBL do it for you – or offer this as a service to generate more income for you.

UBL has an affiliate program, so even if you don’t want to offer services I encourage you to do those reading your blog a favor and write about and recommend directory listings and UBL.

I know many are going to say, “Just focus on your Google Plus Local listing” (formerly Google Places and before that Google Local) bccause of Google’s monopoly on traffic

For your sake and the sake of any business you advise,
please do not rely only on Google because relying
on any one entity puts your business at risk!

What happens if you get all your traffic from
Google and they stop sending it?

See my UBL case study showing that just using UBL and doing no other link building, this Texas Gazebo builder went from getting to 96% of their traffic from Google to receiving 75 visitors from other sources for every 100 visitors they got from Google.

When Google’s Panda or Penguin bites, that could mean the difference between staying in business and closing your doors! I will be doing additional UBL case studies this year so if you’re not convinced yet you will be.

QUALITY PAID DIRECTORIES

Listing your business in the best paid directories is STILL a good idea, and once again I am going to share this video of Matt Cutts explaining Google’s position on them:

Because keeping small businesses IN business is so important to economies and creating a better world, I have spent dozens of hours contacting the Top 50 Paid Directories hand selected from the SEOMoz list plus some recommended by others.

I contacted all of them and asked for discounts to share with small businesses. Here are the listing deals I was able to obtain for not only my readers, but for the readers of any blogger who wishes to take my research and use it in their own writing.

Not only did I get the discounts – I also found the pricing whenever possible AND I am adding the affiliate programs all into one spreadsheet you can request from me – or download immediately by subscribing to the DIRJournal.com Business Journal blog. I will add the links for that later today.

BUSINESS DIRECTORY DEALS

• Directory Journal – 20% off all directory types – Discount Code DJ20GM
• Alive Directory – 20% off all directory types – Discount Code ADC2013
• Web-Designers-Directory.org – 25% off – Discount Code AVOFF25
• ArgusVision.net – 25% off – Discount Code AVOFF25 (same owner so same code)
• OnTopList – Use their contact form to send an email with the title “discount coupon”
• Abilogic – 15% off – Discount Code ABIKey13
• BusyBits – 30% off – Discount Code 2013
• HotvsNot – 20% off – Discount Code GM20HVN
• Gii.in – 20% off
• City Star – 30% off – Use this custom page to get the 30% discount
• Jasmine Directories – 30% off – Discount Code JD2013
• Aviva Directory – $20 off annual or permanent listings – Discount Code growmap
• RackCha and Kahuki are part of the owner’s bulk submission discount site.
• Wow Directory and Skaffe – WoW Directory and Skaffe Directory have free submission reviews on weekends and we feel that free submission is the best possible discount. Free submissions are normally processed within couple of weeks if accepted.

I will add expiration dates and details about these directories in another post and link to that so that I only have one to keep updated. Any additional offers I receive will be added.

If you have any questions about these discounts, ask them in the comments or contact me.

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Gail Gardner

Small Business Marketing Strategist at GrowMap

Gail Gardner is the founder of GrowMap.com. She is a Small Business Marketing Strategist who mentors small businesses, bloggers, and freelancers. After 23 years in the field with IBM and 5.5 years managing AdWords accounts, her focus shifted to small business marketing strategy. GrowMap.com is listed by Cision as a Top 100 Site for Marketers and has received three Small Business Influencer Awards from Small Business Trends. Named by D&B a Top 50 SMB Influencer on Twitter, you can follow Gail @GrowMap and on LinkedIn.

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