Forum Moderators: open
Why? Well, Google's doing a good enough job with targetting that a product was displayed in one of the adsense panels. I clicked through because it suggested a possible solution to a big problem I'm having. A quick drive by of the site, and I'm bookmarking this for more review tomorrow, and if it does what I hope, I'll be buying. It's a product I've never heard of - without the ads here I'd never have known about it.
Tomorrow the ads will likely be gone. And thats fine. But I believe WebmasterWorld has the ability to offer us members an even better service - the ability to hook us up with products we use and need.
For me, it's not about advertising - it's about content and the ability for me to get at the products I need. And where more targetted than here?
Ads aside, why can't we have a marketplace section? Even a page of 'commercial products' or similiar - where advertisers get a straight up ad, at a price. WebmasterWorld gets some revenue, but more importantly, we the unwashed masses get easy access to products and services that we need.
No more need to tiptoe around trying to find decent log analysis software for example. I'm sure we'd have 3 or 4 to choose from if there were a marketplace section here. And I'd know that at the very least the products were targetted at my needs. So while I might still have to decide what's best or even worth buying, at the very least I'd have a good list of products targetted at my needs to start selecting from.
It's not advertising, it's advertising as content. It's providing vendors the opportunity to get at potential customers. And more importantly, it's a resource for those of us in the field looking for the products and services needed to keep our business running.
Who's with me?
A forum?
A stand alone section where we take advertisments to list?
Other?
Although I would have said it differently - I think the oddster has a point.
I'd love to see just a static 'marketplace' page with directory style listings. Maybe organized into product or service types. Link and a brief description. A section for hosting, one for analytics, one for link developers, etc. If I'm looking for hosting, I hit the hosting section and check out the 3 or 4 listed.
Charge enough to keep things serious. Not like pubcon where the rates are set low enough that Canadians and other riff raff can afford to show up.
Statistics Software - I use Awstats because it produces very pretty stats
Price - Free from my website host
Pro's Con's - I cannot easily copy and paste the graphs but all data can be exported easily and new graphs created in Excel.
suggestions for directory software?
the ones that are ok need a fair bit of work to get them to someplace where they would work properly
Why don't you start with a static one page of html? Not a big need to go right into a directory tree structure at the outset. You could get a hundred or two links with brief descriptions categorized on one page with 0 work.
If you find that you're getting too many listings, raise your prices. We don't want or need to see everybody, just serious advertisers who cater directly enough to the traffic here to make it worthwhile to advertise in front of us. Does that sentence even make sense? I meant that they need to be targetted enough that they get enough business from here to justify high prices.
For example, it'd be great to see 3 or 4 registrars, those that cater to us here. Not 50 third tier resellers.
