How to get your site into About.com
Advice on how to get your site listed in the About.com directory
Sponsored listings on About.com come from Google Ad Words. They also sell banner advertising and are allowing more and more of it to interrupt content or pop out at you annoyingly. This will probably affect About.com badly in the long run as a respected resource for information.
About.com is a part of the Yahoo! search network, and signing up with Yahoo! Search marketing (pay-per-click) will get you into About.com's search results now, below the guide's personal picks. Paying to be in the Yahoo! Search network results also costs 15 or 30 cents per click, so if you can't afford that and want to be listed in About.com, you still need to contact a guide to ask them to include your site.
As of 2005, the only times we've successfully gotten a guide to enter someone was when someone here chatted with the Guide about it first, and they realized that our person was not a spammer. Real two way communication, and getting a guide who's OK with the idea of adding your site, seems to be the only way to get the guide to put you in nowadays.
To use that approach, it is necessary to burrow into About.com's categories to find the exact category in which you want to be listed. They do not have "submit a site" buttons, but they do have a way to contact the "About.com Guide" for the category in which you want your site to be listed. There will be a picture of the guide at the top-left of the page, and a "contact the guide" button. That will take you to a page where you can locate the Guide's email address. Send the guide an email and ASK for a review of the site you want to add.
Alternatively - go to this URL: About Guides - A-Z List. That takes you to a page where all the guides and categories are displayed alphabetically. Scan through that until you are sure you have found the most likely category for your service or product, then contact that guide.
These About guides are busy, so keep your contact simple and direct. It pays to be polite. Here's what one of their guides wrote me some time ago:
"Thanks for submitting your URL. As time permits, I will take a look at your site.
Since we are not a search engine, site listings are based on an evaluation. Generally only very good to excellent sites get listed, unless there is information on a lower quality site that I feel merits a listing. Please note that this is purely subjective, and there is no guarantee of a listing. I am charged with maintaining a listing of 'the best sites on the web', and evaluation is primarily based on the site quality, although other factors are also taken into account."
---- Bob
From my experience, about 30% of sites that logically belong in a category are accepted by the About guides. It is totally up to the whim of the About guide. Sometimes you get lucky and the guide will get back to you immediately to let you know your site is included in their subject area at About.com.
Here's some more info from one of the other guides at About.com, Betsy Malloy:
From: Betsy Malloy [gocalifornia.guide@about.com]
As an About.com guide, I can offer a few suggestions for submitting successfully:
1. Like any other directory, take the time to find the category that is the best fit for your submission. Do not submit too high in the taxonomy.
2. Do not try to submit to a guide's original content (page names beginning with aa, bl or n). If the page URL does not include /cs/ in the path, it isn't an appropriate place to submit.
3. Do not submit to menu pages that contain only links to other About pages....
Betsy Malloy
About Guide to California/Southwest for Visitors
http://gocalifornia.about.com
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