Claiming a Listing

[netclick]

We are adding a lot of businesses to our directory.

The idea is that we want people to come and pay to upgrade their free listing by "claiming" the listing that we have added. They can then add more of their details (URL, Description)

What is the best way to get people to claim and upgrade their listing?

The way that the system works, it looks as if their email already has to be entered. Is this correct? If so is there a work around/mod that is available that will do what we want to achieve?

thanks in advance!

[Bruceper]

All that is required to claim a listing is the listing ID and the password.

The email address is only required if you want to email the users login info. Of course there's no way to email them their info if the email address doesn't exist so they'd never know what their password is.

The email address is also used to recover their password if they lost/forgot it.

[netclick]

I want to add listings of local businesses manually in the hope that they will want to pay to upgrade and therefor move higher up the listings.

So that means to add listings to get it started, we have to have their email address in the first place? so then they can be notified and have aa user name and password.

If we dont' add their email address, then they cannot retrieve it.

I am interested in how others approach this (from a business perspective)

Do we just add a default email (one of ours) when we add a listing so at least we can see who is trying to retrieve their listingsuser name and password and then contact them back?

VERY interested in the best way to do this.

[Bruceper]

There is no best way to do it. You could add one of your email addresses as that might help somewhat.

Another way to go about it is to visit the individual sites and search for a contact email. Oo you can try using a default email for each domain such as admin@ support@ webmaster@ etc

And of course one more way to do it would be to contact each site and ask for their information.

[FSGDAG]

You could also try to pull the e-mail address from WhoIs. But your not positive that your getting an e-mail address that its intended for. And it also wont help you with those that have a private ID.