Restaurant Directory Theme

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Since the release of eDirectory v11.1 our customers are able to select from 4 beautifully re designed templates, one of them is the the Restaurant Directory Theme.

The Restaurant Directory Theme

The Restaurant or Dining Guide allows site managers to prominently display featured listings for optimal exposure.

Of course you can use this theme for ANY business or industry and customize to meet your needs. All of the image sizes are consistent between themes so you may choose to switch themes at any time and will not lose the integrity or compromise the design of your directory website.

Interested on having this Restaurant Directory Theme? If you are new on eDirectory, signup today! Already a customer and ready for v11.1? Request your upgrade!

3 Tips on Getting Your First 25 Paying Members

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Paying Members are a great way to generate recurring revenue to your online business. Every journey begins with a first step…and every business starts with its first clients.  The most important thing you can do when getting started is to focus on growth in the most cost-effective manner.

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Apply a little growth hacking and know that every hour counts in a start up and your directory site is no different.  Directory sites are unique in that you only need a small number of paying monthly or annual members to achieve profitability.  As your community grows so will your brand.  Use these proven tactics to focus on what is most important early on which is growth and proof of concept.  Forget the minutiae for now and focus your efforts with a bulls-eye.

The eDirectory platform offers plenty of value right out-of-the box to handle your day-to-day operations while you focus on doing what you’re good at – adding value where needed most.  Here are the 3 best tips you can use to get your first 25 paying members:

Start with your personal and professional network

  • Offer free premium listings to your network for 3 months with no strings attached
  • Create special offers with promo codes (free banner ads, social media mentions, and free leads)
  • Post on your social media to invite people to join and contribute to your community

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Make your first members your greatest priority and learn everything you can from them

  • Treat each new lead as your most important client and offer assistance with set up from the start, show them how easy it is to claim their listing and get started on adding valuable content to your community
  • Reach out to them regularly to learn about any other opportunities that may exist like partnerships, sponsorship opportunities, and cross promotions. You may be surprised!
  • Be flexible with the feedback you receive. Learn what you can and adapt as needed. What you originally thought was important may not be the case once you begin to gain traction. Use the data to make informed decisions that will grow your original concept into what works for the most important stakeholders – your first clients!

Define your brand characteristics, value proposition, and organize yourself for success

  • Get started on creating valuable content for your site. Members love to see directory owners active and contributing to the growth of their community. Share knowledge, provide valuable insight, and respond regularly. You will set the foundation for trust and credibility.
  • Create social media profiles on the platforms that compliment your brand best. Don’t try to be everything to be everybody, instead, focus on a niche and learn as you grow. Master your local market and make your mistakes while you’re small so you can get organized and poised for growth.
  • Visualize how you see your site adding value to its members. Understand that you are offering an additional opportunity to advertise, be a part of a growing/curated community, and that the members on your site have been vetted and approved by you…. That you are available to weigh in on important matters to your community and that their interests

5 ways to Monetize your Online Directory Website

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Photo credit: free pictures of money via Visualhunt / CC BY

Creating an online directory brings an amazing opportunity to generate a recurring revenue stream. From using the built-in payment tools that eDirectory provides, to offering links to 3rd party affiliate products and services – when it comes to monetizing your website, opportunity abounds!

Here are a few ideas of how to get started making money with your website:

Paid Listings on Your Directory

Directory owners can easily create their own plans and pricing for listings across their directory. Use eDirectory’s powerful built-in tools to create up to 4 different listing levels. From simple text listings that can be offered inexpensively, to offering showcase listings which are premium listings designed to be an SEO-friendly micro-site featuring details of the business, image gallery, video, lead capture forms and more. These showcase listing can be priced at a premium based on the size of your audience, niche market and location.

Offer fully-managed or self-service advertising and make it easy for interested advertisers to sign up on your website. eDirectory’s platform tools make this easy to set up and display on your website.

See Pricing Listings, Banners and More for a Directory Site

paid listing directory website

Paid Banner Advertising and Sponsorship

Banner ad space on a popular website can be sold as prime real estate at a premium rate.  eDirectory’s full-featured banner system allows site managers to easily offer self-service banner ad sales as well as fully managed accounts. Display banners on a home page are of high value or select categories, modules (events, articles…) or locations. Enhance your banner advertising functionality with the Geo-Targeted Banner Ad modification tool from the Mod Store and which will add even more value and put location-specific advertisements in front of your site visitors

directory website advertising

Sell Leads

What’s more valuable that a hot lead? Selling leads may take a bit more work but the pay-off is worth it especially for high-traffic, niche directory websites. By creating general lead capture forms on your website as well as lead capture forms on premium listings, interested visitors can request more information or request a quote.  In turn, the site manager can then offer to sell per lead or offer a subscription to a lead generation pool.

Monetize with Google Adsense

You want to monetize your website with Google Adsense to increase the bottom line for your directory website.  Google Adsense uses search technology to place ads on websites based on keywords and content of the website.  This can be a great way to produce extra income as the ads displayed will be very relevant to your visitors and Google will be sure to display the highest paying ads.

Google makes the process quite simple – once you sign up for a free Google Adsense account, you will complete the forms and be supplied with some HTML code to add to their websites.

directory website revenue

Affiliate Offers

Marketing with affiliate offers is a very effective way to monetize your website traffic. It allows you to present your visitors with relevant offers for products or services that they are likely to be interested in. For instance, if you have a niche directory website about skiing, find an affiliate offer that would be of interest to your visitors, such as air travel (think Expedia…) hotels and lodging, skis and snowboards or skiwear.

How this works – you would place a supplied banner or text link on your website that contained your affiliate link and directed the visitor to the offer. If they sign up for the offer, you’d earn an affiliate referral payment or commission.

Check with your current preferred vendors or partners to see if they offer an affiliate program. To research additional options, please see the large affiliate providers such as Share-a-sale.com, CJ.com (Commission Junction), Rakuten LinkShare, AvantLink or Amazon Associates.

Social Media Mentions

If you have worked hard to build a huge following on social media – why not capitalize on that and offer your advertisers a way to ride your coattails.  You can price out what you would charge your advertisers and sponsors to post messages promoting their products, services or specials at a premium price!

Content is still king.  To add value to your website and to increase your monetization options, be sure to create great quality content that will drive traffic and lead visitors to your website… and keep them coming back!

Create amazing images for Directories [Free Tool]

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Create amazing images for Online Directories! Here is our favorite free tool to create awesome visual content for your website and social media posts: Canva.

How to create awesome visual content with Canva

We’ve all heard ‘a picture’s worth a thousand words’ – professional Online Directory branding and consistent, quality images across your website, social media, email and online speak volumes about your business. But let’s face it, not all of us have the design chops and Photoshop know-how or time to learn complicated software to pull this off.

Whether you have mad design skills or are new to branding and graphic design, Canva, a free online graphic design platform, makes branding and visual content design a breeze! It offers free access to a wide assortment of design tools and options, as well as premium options for paying customers.

Canva’s intuitive dashboard, drag-and-drop functionality and hundreds of pre-designed templates allow you to quickly create everything from simple website images to branded social media posts and ads.

Upload your own images or use one of hundreds of free (or cheap), searchable images Canva offers. Built-in image editing tools, filters and cropping options are powerful yet easy to use. Choose from a great selection of layouts, fonts, backgrounds, shapes, icons and more to further enhance your images.

If you are working with a team, Canva makes it easy to collaborate on designs with built-in sharing tools. Advanced team functionality is available in the premium versions of the software.

Create Images for directories websites

How to create awesome visual content with Canva

Use Canva’s custom dimensions’ option to create amazing images for your directory website sliders, default images, category images, blog headers and more. By adding branded visual content with your own color scheme, your website not only appears more professional, but adds a level of credibility and trust.

Design Banner Images

How to create awesome visual content with Canva

Monetize your directory website by offering to design and post banner ads for your advertisers across your website. If you are advertising your business or directory on other websites or using Google Adwords or Facebook Ads, create branded, professional ads with Canva’s templates which are IAB compliant banner ad sizes such as leaderboard, skyscraper and rectangle ads.

Create Mobile App Images

Brand and customize your directory mobile app by using the custom dimensions tool to easily create mobile app icons and app loading pages. Add custom pages to your app and create custom images to enhance those pages.

Design Social Media Covers, Posts & Ads

How to create awesome visual content with Canva

Visual content is more than 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content and it’s been reported that tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without images.

With Canva, creating beautiful, branded social media posts has never been easier! Instead of posting a simple photo, create a template with your own style and color scheme, add your website address and logo and put your own touch on it to make it your own.

Design Email Marketing Headers

Continue the branding across your email marketing as well. Create email marketing headers and footers to be used in your directory promotions from the website or if you are using a 3rd party email provider such as MailChimp.

Saving & Sharing Images

How to create awesome visual content with Canva

Save your images for web or in high resolution or save as PDF for further distribution. For printed materials, download in high resolution with crop marks to send to your printer.

Premium Features – Canva for Work

Upgrade to Canva for Work and gain access to advanced features and amazing branding tools and templates. The branding kit allows you to set your color scheme, fonts and logo to quickly and easily apply to all of your marketing materials.

And that’s not all – the magic resizing tool is just that – magic! Once you create an image just the way you want it, choose the magic resizing option and instantly create an exact replica perfectly sized for all social media, email, documents, marketing materials and more.

To get stared creating your own visual content, we highly recommend using Canva and Canva for Work to create professional quality visual content.

How to create awesome visual content with Canva

For more information or to get started, visit canva.com and be sure to share your websites to show off your amazing new graphic skills!

NEW GOOGLE UPDATE ON MOBILE SEARCH RESULTS BENEFITS RESPONSIVE WEBSITES

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NEW GOOGLE UPDATE ON MOBILE SEARCH RESULTS BENEFITS RESPONSIVE WEBSITES

On April 2015 Google announced their plans to boost the ranking of responsive websites on mobile search results by using mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. Today there is no turning back, go mobile or go home. If your directory website isn´t mobile-friendly, don´t panic. We are here to help you.

Directories, searches and internet usage

One report from comScore put Google Search as the 4th most used Mobile App, with over 81 million unique visitors. A Google report shows that 48% of mobile purchases started on Search Engines and 26% on Branded Apps. Are you still in doubt about going mobile?

People are always searching for goods and services and the amount of time spent on mobile searches will keep growing. Is your online directory ready to appear on all first page´s search results?

Mobile App or Responsive Design: what is the best choice?

The actual scenario moves pretty fast. Users behaviors too. Some of your next customers are web-browsing fans, some are app-addicted. Both methods are essential for brand awareness over the internet. The main goal here is to be where your audience is.

How can eDirectory.com can help me on this journey?

Our software is always aligned with internet´s best practices, whether it’s our SEO center or our Design Templates. We also offer an app builder and app publishing service for you to have a complete platform ready to please any user and member.

10 of Our Favorite SEO Tools

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Keeping track of your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) can be difficult enough without having to spend so much time compiling the data for your links, page/domain ranks, indexing status and more. Luckily there is an abundance of tools online to make sure your data is accurate and organized while saving you an abundance of time.

These tools are critical to your organic search strategy because they allow you to focus on the elements of your site that Google and other search engines deem important.

Here are 10 of our favorite SEO tools:

1) Google Webmaster Tools

Cost: Free

A no-brainer, right? Google’s Webmaster Tools is probably the best way to understand the way Google sees your site and get insight into how your site will rank. The Tools include beginner-friendly resources and data that help to explain the fundamentals of Google search and give you a good base to start your SEO research.

Use the Tools to check on your number of pages indexed or use Google’s Fetch as Google tool that allows you to see a particular URL as Google sees it, which is critical when troubleshooting for poor SEO performance. Use the information it provides to modify any pages in question to improve results.

Another great feature of Google Webmaster Tools is PageSpeed Insights. This tool measures the speed of both your desktop and mobile site, which is valued by Google. The PageSpeed scores range from 0 to 100 and the higher the score the better.

2) Moz Pro Tools

Cost: Free 30-day trial, then plans from $99/mo – $599/mo

Moz Pro is an advanced all-in-one SEO tool that will help you track and improve your site’s rankings. Moz has a great set of research tools that enable subscribers to identify SEO opportunities, track links, examine social reach, identify errors, compare against competitors and optimize your overall efforts.

The Moz Pro dashboard will provide you with data on your search visibility, domain authority, site visits over time, keyword rankings, external links and more. There is also a Crawl Test tool that employ’s Moz’s own web crawler, nicknamed RogerBot, to analyze up to 3,000 links on a URL of your choice. Once completed, you will then receive an email report that details the data for each page the site links to. This is very useful to identify crawlability factors such as duplicate content and redirects that could be influencing your SEO performance.

3) Woorank

Cost: Free 14-day trial, then $49/mo for a Pro Plan or $149/mo for a Premium Plan

Woorank’s provides in-depth site analysis to help site owner find opportunities for improvement. This analysis is easy to understand and divided into eight sections: Marketing Checklist, SEO, Mobile, Usability,Technologies, Social, Local, and Visitors.

Such a wide range of information and insight makes it easy to always find new opportunities and discover areas for improvement with your site.

4) Check My Links

Cost: Free

Check My Links is a browser plugin that allows you to check if the links on your webpage are functional and working properly.

While checking for broken link it easy for anyone controlling a site to make corrections or double check before a page goes live. The tool will highlight all the good links in a green color, and those that are broken in a red color, which makes it easy to spot the ones that don’t work or are no longer active and need to be updated or removed.

5) SEO Report Card

Cost: Free

With SEO Report Card you can analyze your site to determine how well it stacks up against some chosen competitors.

The SEO Report Card will supply you the following:

  • Rank Analysis: A snapshot of how your website ranks on Google, Yahoo, and Bing! based on the keywords you provide.
  • Link Building: The number of websites that link back to your site.
  • On-Site Analysis: Tracks how well you have incorporated your main keyword throughout your site.
  • Website Accessibility: Data on your site’s speed and ease of accessibility for crawlers.
  • Trust Metrics: Information on your domain’s level of trust and authority.
  • Current Indexing: Data for how many of your site pages have been indexed.

6) HubSpot’s Website Grader

Cost: Free

HubSpot, the pioneers of inbound marketing, created the Website Grader. It is an online tool that creates personalized reports based on these areas:

  • Performance: Tracking your site’s page size, requests, speed, and more.
  • Mobile Readiness: A check to see if your website is mobile-friendly in terms of responsiveness and viewport settings.
  • SEO. Tracks data like page titles and meta descriptions to see how easily your site can be found on search engines.
  • Security. This checks on the SSL certificate as well as the overall trustworthiness and security of your domain.

Your website URL and an email address is all that you need to get started and they will then provide you with a score (1-100) as well as a detailed report.

7) Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Cost: The Screaming Frog SEO Spider LITE version is free and the paid plan is $160/year

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a program that crawls the URLs of the domains you enter for common SEO issues. It saves a ton of time by compiling the data and examining all of the URLs for you.

The Java program is fairly intuitive, with easy-to-navigate tabs. Plus, you can export any or all of the data into Excel for further analysis.

8) Found’s SEO Audit Tool

Cost: Free

The SEO Audit Tool is a tool for site owners looking to identify and fix any SEO errors that may be on their website.

Simply enter your URL and receive an SEO audit with information for three main areas:

  • Technical issues: This looks for errors with things like domain canonicalization and XML sitemaps.
  • Content issues: This focuses on keywords and meta data for your site.
  • External link analysis: This evaluates the quantity and quality of your external links.

9) Varvy’s SEO Overview Tool

Cost: Free

This SEO auditing tool provides users with analysis for your domain strength, links, image SEO, social counts, page/technical SEO, page speed, and more.

The complete report dives fairly deep into different aspects of your website’s performance and provides colored indicators to help you identify any issues.

One of our favorite features is the detailed image overview. This section focuses on the images on your website by analyzing the alt text. It checks to see if you are using too many words, missing alt text, or if the alt text appears weak, the tool will notify you so that you can make any necessary changes.

10) Remove’em

Cost: $249 per domain or a subscription option starting at $99/mo

Artificial or unnatural links (such as purchased links and spammy content) can seriously damage your SEO and do harm to your search rankings. Remove’em is a tool to help you clean up any of these damaging links.

Remove’em will scan your backlink profile and create a list of contact information for the links and domains that you should reach out to have removed. Plus, you can also use the tool to export the list of links to have Google disavow them using this tool. (With this tool you can ask Google not to take them into account when assessing your site.)

How to Run Effective Social Media Campaigns in Under 30 Minutes a Day

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social media campaigns

I know what you’re thinking, “I can waste 30 minutes to an hour on Facebook and Twitter without even thinking about it so how could I possibly run successful social media campaigns in less time than that?“

The answer is simple if you focus on 3 key areas that will greatly reduce your time commitment and also bring results to your campaigns:

  1. Keyword Monitoring
  2. Scheduling Posts
  3. Create Twitter Lists

Keyword Monitoring

It’s important to keep track of two main areas when monitoring posts on social media:

  • Mentions of your brand
  • Posts including relevant keywords and phrases to your product or industry

To track the mentions of your brand you can set up e-mail notifications to help make sure you aware of any of these posts. Pair this with manual checks for each social platform individually to ensure you don’t miss anything and be sure to respond to these mentions accordingly. Interacting with your followers and being an open source of communication will always be beneficial.

For overall keyword monitoring, I would recommend using tools such as Mention or Hootsuite to track posts for the keywords you are interested in. This will help to organize your monitoring and save you the time of having to perform several individual searches manually. Try to be as targeted as possible with your keywords and set notifications for the ones that are most relevant to your site and the type of audience you are looking to reach. You can refine these keywords as you go and even target them geographically. After you have set up the initial search criteria, you will only need to do some minor tweaks from time to time. Be sure to share the posts that you find the most interesting and take note of interesting industry trends that may lead to new content for you in the future. Follow as many top influencers as you can and try to engage them in post sharing whenever possible.

Scheduling Posts

The next task that can save you a lot of time is to schedule your posts ahead of time. Hootsuite along with Buffer are great tools for doing this. At the beginning of a week or month you can set a schedule to be sent out at optimal days and times. It is a good practice to take some of your better performing post you have sent previously and resend them out with a mix of new ones. You should also make sure to not be sending too many self-promoting posts, your followers won’t appreciate this. Send out interesting articles and links to other sites to ensure you are a good user to follow and not just a link spammer.

By setting a schedule at the beginning of week or month you ensure that you will have a steady flow of content going out on a regular basis and you can check back in with your social accounts when needed or if you have some extra time here or there.

Create Twitter Lists

A great way to better organize your social media accounts and save you some time is to create Twitter lists that separate the most influential users in your industry, or the accounts that share the best content. Use these lists to ensure you only see posts from the top accounts that you follow, maybe the top 50 instead of all 500 of the users you follow.

If you can narrow these lists down to small enough groups of essential sources, you’ll be able to scan through each list very quickly and locate the most relevant content from each list. You can now retweet, share and mention these top users in a shorter amount of time and get more effective results.

Conclusion

After implementing these 3 items you can now check your mentions and top keywords, have a consistent stream of daily content going out and quickly browse your top users and most relevant content in 30 minutes or less or day.

Always keep in mind that it’s important to stay SOCIAL on your social media accounts, meaning you should always be communicating, sharing and engaging with people online. Have fun with it and use it to your advantage 🙂

How to Price Listings, Banners and More for a Directory Site

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We received an interesting question inquiring as to what was the best way to price listings, banners and more for a directory site.

First, there is no one correct way to price your listings and there’s no one standard or uniform equation to pricing out your listings.

In our experience, having dealt with hundreds of clients and also having experience in the publishing industry, your pricing model should be competitive to your market specifically. The price of a diamond level listing on a biotech or pharmaceutical directory where sponsors include multi billion dollar companies like Amgen or Genentech is going to be drastically different than a diamond level listing on a local search site in Billings, Montana (no offense Montana).

Look at the advertisers you’re looking to attract and find out where they are advertising.

These are likely your direct or somewhat direct competitors. They’ve set a market rate for these businesses and established a standard upon which they’re used to paying. This is your best guide to determining the right pricing model for your site.

One thing to keep in mind are the differences in print and online competitors. A 1/2 page ad in a print publication that boasts a circulation of 15,000 is drastically different than a 728×89 leaderboard with 15,000 impressions.

One thing we encourage all of our clients to do is to focus on maintaining the value of your sponsorships. Here’s an example:

Let’s say you’re working on bringing in a new client and quote them $100 a month for a featured (diamond) listing. At that time, maybe you’re getting 10,000 page views a month on your site. $10 CPM isn’t that bad. Now let’s say 6 months down the road he comes back to you to purchase the advertising — or perhaps even renew his existing contract with you. The price he last saw was $100 a month for 10,000 page views.

Now your site has reached 30,000 page views and you’re charging $200. You’ve tripled the traffic to your site and only doubled the cost of your sponsorship and your CPM is down to $6.66. At the end of the day, you’ve created a more cost effective advertising vehicle for your sponsor, but him justifying a 2x increase in ad spend from what it was last time can be very difficult, despite the substantial increase in audience size. So what to do in these situations?

Price your ad units at competitive or slightly above competitive lines out of the gate. If you had come in at a $200 price point with 10,000 pageviews ($20CPM), it may be a little steep, but you can ALWAYS have value ads in the deal with your advertiser, such as buy 4 months and get a 5th free to make the cost sting a little less. This way, your sponsorships (listings, banners, etc) maintain their value ($200 a month) and you don’t have to worry about constantly increasing your costs to reflect the growth in your site traffic.

Many marketers can understand and justify the price increase above, but in many cases, when you’re running a local search site, you’re not dealing with savvy marketers, you’re dealing with small business owners who are trying to keep their operational costs to a minimum. Some things to remind them of when trying to reinforce the value of your site’s sponsorships:

  • Guaranteed impressions – In their print publication, they’re sold a circulation number, but this by no means reflects how many people actually read the publication or saw your ad for that matter.
  • Relevance – Use Analytics information (search terms, time on site) to SHOW your advertiser that people come to your site to FIND businesses like theirs.
  • Reporting – Provide your advertiser with a detailed report on how many page views their ad got, how long the average visitor stayed on the site, what they were searching for when they came to the site, how many people clicked on their listing, redeemed a deal, etc.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Leave them in the comments section or email marketing@edirectory.com

The Importance of Great Web Design

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People are going to make snap judgments. Within the first few seconds of viewing a new site, visitors will make up their mind as to whether they are going to stay and look around or head elsewhere.

This is why it is so important to get to your design right for your website. Paired with great content and engaging copy, a good-looking site with a clean design will draw new visitors in and keep them interested in what you have to say.

Your Website Defines You

How a site looks and feels will define how the visitor perceives your business and the brand as a whole. A visitor will make assumptions about the amount of success, level of expertise and overall personality of the brand based on how the site looks to them visually.

If your web site looks modern, sharp and professional, your potential clients will think you run a modern, well-organized and professional business. On the other hand, if potential clients visit your site and think it looks outdated and cheap, then that’s exactly how they’ll perceive your business as well.

This is an opportunity to cultivate a brand identity that commands respect and trust amongst potential new clients. Perception is everything, so make sure you have a clear idea of what you want your brand to stand for and make sure your site portrays that.

Navigation

The navigation of a website is a key element of its design, this is especially true for websites packed with many pages (such as online directories!). Website navigation typically includes a navigation bar and the various other page links that differentiate the sections of the website.

Good navigation should be simple, clean and inviting. It should be very intuitive and require little thought for someone to understand how to make their way around the site and find what they are looking for. This is typically achieved their proper spacing, great-looking graphics and clean, concise copy throughout the design.

High Resolution

Speaking of great-looking photos, advancements in digital photography and the screen resolution of computers, laptops and mobile devices provides website owners with a great opportunity to display some stunning images. Many of the most popular trends in current web design themes include the use of prominent, high-resolution photos or graphics that help to provide an impressive accent.

A single image can be used to define your site and your brand. The proper image can portray ambition, excellence, beauty, excitement or stature in ways that are difficult for the written word to achieve.

Content

Your content is the backbone of your site, especially for directory sites. How this content is presented can be equally as important. Good-looking design that invokes thoughts of expertise and knowledge will help your site and your brand achieve a high level of respect and trust.

This is how a site with a great visual design can command attention and provide confidence to its visitors that this is the content they have been looking for.

Looking for great web design on your directory site? Give us a call at 1-703-914-0770 or email sales@edirectory.com

9 Ways to Drive Directory App Downloads

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9 Ways to Drive Directory App DownloadsBusiness_Listings_with_eDirectory

So you have a great looking directory app for your business with a ton of powerful features. The issue now is that you need to get users to actually download and install your app so you can start taking advantage of its capabilities.

Here are 9 ways to help drive downloads and get more people using your mobile app:

  1. Offer Something for Free

People always love getting something for free and you can use this to help drive downloads of your app. Offer something for free from your store or business that is inexpensive and doesn’t put you out too much, such as a small fountain drink, a bag of golf tees, a small cookie or similar. Offer it to customers who show you they have downloaded and installed your app. Continue with this strategy until you have an adequate amount of app users.

  1. Screenshots, Descriptions and Icons

Quality screenshots and icons are essential to the promotion of your app. It is the best way to showcase your app and make it appealing to potential users. Make sure to start with a solid library of high-resolution images and icons that you can use for marketing materials and advertising your app to potential users.

  1. Promote it on Your Website

One of the simplest ways to get user’s to notice your mobile app is to use the medium that you already control, your website. Use this space to create and display some visually appealing graphics that promote and describe your mobile app and the benefits that will be available to your users. You can use write some promotional copy such as “Receive exclusive offers through our new mobile app!” or “Be the first to hear about upcoming events from our mobile app.”

Be sure to provide links to download the app from the app stores to make it as quick and easy as possible for people to view the details of your app and download it to their accounts.

  1. Handing Out Cards for Your App

Another easy strategy is to create some simple cards, notes, buttons or fliers that include instructions on how to download your app. Keep them in your business and hand them out to anyone who stops in or walks by. Include the name of the app and tell them the best search term to enter into the app store to easily find and download the app.

  1. Social Media

Work to build a following and build up some momentum on all the relevant social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. Follow media members who carry influence in your specific industry or would be followed by potential customers for you business. Send out posts, links and images for you app to build up some interest and further share the app features that your users will benefit from.

  1. App Store Optimization

App Store optimization is a method of finding good keywords that people might search for and making sure to put them either in your app title, description or keywords for your app listing. If you already have users downloading your app, reach out to them and ask how they discovered your app, and if that was on the app store, which keywords they searched. Be sure to include all relevant keywords and phrases associated with this feedback and further build on them.

  1. Localize your Description and Keywords

Take #6 even a little bit further and look for ways to localize your description and keywords. If you app or business mainly serves a local or regional area then be sure to include keywords and phrases that call out this specific location. Example: “san jose shoe store” or “morris county delivery service”. This will help to increase the amount of relevant app users who can take advantage of a localized app.

  1. Trade a Download for a Service 

If your business does not have items it can give away for free (#1), then maybe you can trade a download for a service. Such as a salon offering a 15-minute massage in exchange for a download, or a cleaning service offering 10% off your next appointment after you download the app. Use what resources you have available to offer some value in exchange for an app download. 

  1. Mobile-Only Discounts

A key strategy to promoting your app to potential users is to be able to communicate the value they receive if they have the app. One of the best ways to detail this is to offer mobile-only promotions through coupons, deals or loyalty cards that can only be received and used through your mobile app. Post these promotions online or in your business for customers to see and add a tagline such as “Available to Mobile App Users Only” or something similar so they know to download your app right away to gain access to these deals.

Looking to a build an online directory with a mobile app or in need of adding one to your current directory? Send an email to: sales@edirectory.com

Interested in creating mobile apps for all kinds of business types? Looking for features that drive business, like mobile coupons, custom loyalty cards and more? Check out the new www.lumeapps.com or call 1-703-914-0770 to learn how you can start building mobile apps that people will love.

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