International Flower Shop question.

This is going to be the first time that i am going to submit my site so I want to do it right since I ve heard a lot of things regarding misplacing your site in the wrong category. If I have an international flower shop which delivers world wide, which should be a proper category to do it.

Thanks very much for your help,

Best Regards,

Fred

Unfortunately only you can decide which is the best category to suggest your site to. An editor will look at it and will move it if it is in the wrong place.

In this case you need to start at the Shopping category, read the description and FAQ to make sure you qualify. Next look at the Florists sub-cat and do the same. Then from that you need to find the best sub-category. Look for it's description and any sub-cats under it to decide the nxt sub-cat. Continue until you have found what you think is the ideal place.

The only 'penalty' for getting it wrong is a potential delay which cannot be predicted - if you are more or less right, then the editor may have the priviliges to publish it in the right one, otherwise they will send it on and it will wait for another editor to review it.

The wait in Shopping can be long, and, I believe, even longer in florists due to spam, so suggest and forget.

regards

PS if you have n actual flower shop that people can visit and buy flowers, you may also suggest the site to the location of the shop in Regional. Note this is where the shop is not it's delivery area.

If not, check the Shopping FAQ carefully especially section 3 Affiliate, Mirror and Redirect, MLM and Distributor, Dropshippers, and Template Shopping Sites.

regards

If your international florist is based in Trumpton and uses international flower delivery services such as Interflora, it would be listed in Trumpton.

If it actually has the flowers in stock, packs them and mails them out itself, it can go within Shopping.

Thanks Jim, actually our business is a network of brick and mortar florist in over 160 countries. But the transaction must be placed online in our site. For that reason is that we don't have a specific location.

That's why I am a little bit confused placing our site. I want to make sure that my submission its within your guidelines. Thanks for your suggestions I appreciate it.

Best Regards,

Fred

Make sure, SURE SURE SURE, that enough information about those specific people in those specific countries is specified so that the reviewer can tell for CERTAIN this isn't just another Interflora affiliate-spam doorway.

And, because there are so many IAFD's online, you'll also HAVE to make DOUBLE sure that the visitor to the site can IMMEDIATELY see that it's intending to give that information.

It's not fair to the world's unique sites to waste more than, say, 30 seconds of potentially-productive volunteer-editor time on each and every IAFD website. Make sure that first 30 seconds indicates that there is more to the website than that.

Now, I can't guarantee that the editor won't spend more time in the initial cull stage of the site review. But it is unreasonable to expect more than that in such a high-spam-rate category as that.

When you know the crowd is bottom-feeding blood-sucking plagiarising affiliate marketroids, it's deadly to your reputation not to stand WELL out from among them. Be anything, ANYTHING else: toxic cyanobacterium, rabid weasel on crack cocaine, paid shill for Bernie Madoff to the social-security widows in the local retirement home, New Labour politician. But stand out from that crowd!

Thanks Hutchenson I definitely see your point I can assure you that we are not an affiliate site. Our business is legit and we have been online for more than 8 years. However, as it first was on the web, we never felt that marketing will be needed until now.

I appreciate your kid comments and help regarding our listing and i will make sure to put a compelling submission that doesn't look spammy.

Thanks very much for your help.

Best Regards,

Fred

Note: it's not the submittal that needs to not look spammy. It's the WEBSITE.

The submittals are all going to look pretty much the same: because the kind of information on the websites is pretty much the same. And, at the end of the day, what's on the submittal really doesn't matter that much. It's just a hint about where some information may be found online -- and editors don't really even need a _hint_ (we can find sites without even that).

Given the hint, we go look. If the hint is promising but not quite right, we sniff around (not much different than we'd be doing without a hint). And if we find a website--however we originally found it--all that matters is what's actually on the website. The hint, at most, suggests certain kinds of information that we might want to watch for, so we don't accidentally overlook some important aspect of the website.

So the website has to stand out from among the affiliate doorways. Quickly.

The submittal is a completely different problem. By nature it's going to look spammy because it's surrounded by ten thousand other submittals, all spammy, and all trying to look non-spammy (that is, all trying to look exactly like that one non-spam suggestion.)

Someone will look at each suggestion, eventually, sure. But ... people look at suggestions because they're trying to find good sites. So a spammy-looking suggestion isn't likely to be a high priority.

I don't know of a solution to that. Kill all the spammers, maybe. But spamming works by obtruding the spammer between potential customers and genuine businesses. The whole technique is to make it hard for customers to find real businesses. And, hey, the technique works--the customer and the real business are both hurt--even when the spammer doesn't make a dime. Economically understood, spammers are negative-sum actors: like crackheads who'll do thousands of dollars damage to a house or car, to steal something that they can pawn for ten or twenty dollars, they cause orders of magnitude more damage than their profit.

And the real businesses are hurt. You're seeing it. Surfers are hurt (and with them, the editors who try to find good sites to surf.)

One editors' reaction is to rely more on non-spammable sources for business URLs. It's hard for a spammer to get away with painting his URL for "find-a-florist-now-now-now.com" on the delivery trucks owned by "Alice's Flowers ("serving Oak Grove, Knob Knoll, and nearby farms since 1973".) So a notepad in the car is likely to yield a trickle of 99%-good URLs -- unlike the website submittal process.

And one appropriate BUSINESS reaction is to GET YOUR URL ON YOUR FOLKS' DELIVERY VANS. Because THAT'S a GUARANTEED NON-SPAMMY-LOOKING URL suggestion.

But that's just one suggestion: just think outside the (submittal dialog) box, be where the spammers aren't, leave footprints around delivery of goods and services in the real world. And the real-world shadow that is the web will be affected.