How many directories to submit to a week, and what to track
You have a submission pace you can hold for months and a record that still means something in March.
The run is not hard, it is long. What kills it is either sprinting for a weekend and stopping, or keeping a record that cannot answer a single question afterwards.
Set the pace by the slowest queue, not by your energy
Approval times across the directory run from instant to several months. A batch you send on Monday will come back over the following twelve weeks, so a run is a season, not a weekend. Ten to fifteen a week is a pace most people hold; forty in one sitting is a pace almost nobody repeats.
Send the slow ones first
A directory with a three-month queue submitted in week one is live before a same-day directory submitted in week ten. Order by how long the wait is, not by how much you want the listing, and the whole run finishes earlier for no extra work.
Mix the queues so you see something happen
A run that is only slow queues looks dead for a month and gets abandoned. Put a few instant approvals in every batch. They are worth less individually and they are what keeps the run alive.
Record the listing URL, not the form URL
This is the one that decides whether the record is worth keeping. A sheet full of submission-form links cannot tell you what was accepted, so three months later the only way to find out is to search every directory by hand. Write down the URL of your own listing the moment it appears.
Record what it cost to get in
Whether you had to host a badge, make an account, verify an email, pass a captcha, or pay. This is what tells you, later, which listings you can afford to lose and which ones are quietly holding a link on your homepage.
Re-check at ninety days, once
Some approvals never arrive and nobody tells you. One pass at the ninety-day mark, opening each listing and reading the link's rel attribute, turns a list of attempts into a list of results. Doing it more often than that is not worth the hours.
- "Pending" on a sheet usually means "submitted and forgotten". Give a row a date as well as a status, or it stops meaning anything within a month.
- A directory that requires a badge can unpublish you when the badge comes down, so the badge is a standing obligation, not a one-off step. Track which listings hold one.
- Submitting the same product twice to the same directory is a faster way to get banned than to get listed.
- If you cannot say which of your listings pass a followed link, the run has produced a number rather than a result.