Did you find a link to my site in a directory listing? Or better still, did you find my site on a search engine and not in a directory listing? Then I invite you to bear the following in mind:
The details in a directory listing are not always 100% reliable,
because the construction of each directory site is – inevitably – limiting. Every directory allows an advertiser to put a different [and always limited] amount of information in a listing. 99% of advertisers don’t keep a solid administrative record of where they advertise. That results in them signing up on directories when an invitation to do so lands in their inboxes and then forgetting about their listings. Thus the listing will be visible on the directory, but the information in the listing could be years out of date. Some directories state when the advertiser was last active or logged in. That is a good measure of seeing whether the advertiser looks after her listing on that site. The statistical information that tends to be out of date most often is the advertiser’s age, physical stats, telephone number, email address, and location.
Not all information in directory listings accurately reflects what an advertiser sells
If I want to even create a directory listing, I must fill in at least some of its fields. These fields often portray me as what I’m not. Example: breast size or whether my Mount Pleasant is trimmed, shaven, or natural. How does that information matter if the person sells time, not sex? Yet if I don’t fill these details in, I won’t be able to even create it. And the point of me advertising on directories is to increase my visibility on the worldwide web. Visibility is important, because I can have the best website, concept, mission, vision, and purpose in the world, but it’s useless if no one finds it.
Pictures aren’t everything.
They’re merely the hook. The tip of the iceberg is always the advertiser’s official website. The pictures are the vehicle that connects you to the advertiser’s listing. But if you call the advertiser without reading the info on her official site, you could also be hooking on to a picture that’s years out of date – or fake – owing to what I wrote in the first paragraph. It makes common sense to visit the advertiser’s official site to see whether she’s in business. And if she is, you’ll see her hopefully current pictures and far more info there.
Directory owners often abandon the directories.
Directory sites spring up like mushrooms and are abandoned just as quickly. Webmasters often set them up in hope of getting rich quickly. And when they find out that they aren’t getting rich quickly or are even making losses, they abandon them. But a man who visits the directory doesn’t know that. And if the directory doesn’t have a feature that shows when an advertiser was last logged in, you could be looking at a listing on a directory that no one has administered for years.
Another quirk is that even if an advertiser has a solid administrative record of where she advertises, she may still not know about all the sites on which her ad ends up. This is because webmasters often create mirror and sister sites on which they duplicate ads from the directory on which the advertiser had signed up. Webmasters do this for two reasons: 1. to make signing up on the original directory more attractive to advertisers 2. to expand their potential of making money from the sites. If I don’t know that my ad has been duplicated on other sites, I can’t include those sites in my admin record of where I advertise. Hence I can’t look after those duplicate ads. So you could again be looking at an ad with years old info….
Another immense benefit of knowing where you saw my directory listing
and reading the listing is that you will come across as an informed man who is making an informed decision about the person with whom he is about to share the finer moments in life. After all, you surf directory listings to hopefully buy human connection of which you clearly don’t have enough in life. So if you show a complete stranger – in this case me – that you know what you’re doing, you’ll establish a solid connection. After all, if I called you and told you where I had seen your ad and why I liked it, wouldn’t it feel much better than if I said that I had no clue where I had seen it? Exactly the point! The connection that you are buying starts from you, because you find me.
And as far as any directory listing of mine goes…
For life I’ll have to accept the dilemma that if I advertise on these directories, men who see my listings will inevitably file me in their minds as another one of the women who sell what they do. Not as a person who doesn’t sell what others do and is far from a commodity. There’s no directory that comes even close to suiting the needs of advertisers of my caliber. But if I don’t advertise on the directories, I can have the most interesting and informative website in the world, but nobody will see it. So it won’t matter. C’est la vie….. and another reason why you should always visit an advertiser’s official site. Not all advertisers are commodities, albeit the standaparts are rare. Nonetheless it always pays for you to be informed and make informed choices, especially in today’s world.
Does this article make perfect sense? Are you grateful that you found it? Or perhaps even intrigued by why I’m not a commodity? What else can I offer you that no one else will? Have a look.
