How To Smoke A Cigar in DMOZ!

It's not Saturday but I'm smoking a cigar. It' a celebration of sorts. I was looking at the stats of my websites this evening, and I noticed a spike in the number of visitors dropping by "How To Smoke A Cigar." Curious where you guys are coming from, I opened the folder and one visitor that galvanized my attention right away was this guy: editor.dmoz.org.

My mind was racing, trying to focus on the significance of this visit. I saw the date of the visit was June 2, Monday afternoon. It can't be ... a review of How To Smoke A Cigar by the foremost open directory in the internet took place, and I've learned of it two days later! It's not like I can do anything to influence the editor or anything. But a visit from DMOZ and I wasn't here?

Let me give you a brief introduction to DMOZ, so you can see why I'm making all this fuss. You see, DMOZ, as I mentioned above is the godfather of all directories in the web today, or one of the two godfathers. The other one is the Yahoo Directory. Getting listed in DMOZ grants a web site a mantle of authority and prestige in the eyes of the foremost search engine today - Google, which means (potentially) a higher page rank and more traffic. Thus, every webmaster strives hard to have his or her site listed with DMOZ. But not every site that applies for inclusion gets listed. It's a long wait to get reviewed (I submitted How To Smoke A Cigar back in March, and the site only got reviewed in June) and the outcome is not always favorable. I was in this forum the other day, and the other website owners there were all complaining about how hard it is to get listed in DMOZ. So you see now, why that visit was such a big deal to me? But I'm boring you with the tedious details of search engine optimization and internet marketing.

Back to the story. Hoping against hope (a shudder went through my spine after I typed that), I scrolled upwards in the stats page and surprise(!) - visitors coming from the actual How To Smoke A Cigar listing in DMOZ. My site got listed with this description:

• How To Smoke A Cigar - "Primer for the beginning smoker on how to choose and smoke cigars, as well as etiquette" (the listing is in the Recreation - Tobacco - Cigars section of DMOZ).

This is a landmark achievement for the site and I guess I should be keeping up with my updates here, which admittedly, I have somewhat neglected in the past few weeks. Some of you may be wondering why I've stopped writing in How To Smoke A Cigar for quite a while now. Well, as they say, one has to keep body and soul together, so I had to prioritize paid projects over this hobby site which is not generating any revenue yet.

But things are looking up, it's a double cigar celebration, actually. I just got a call from Miami from a referral client and we closed a deal on a new project, which will enable me to have a bit of time each week to write for How To Smoke A Cigar, as well as get into Stompernet, that exclusive enclave of the most successful internet marketers in the planet today, that I was hoping to enter someday. But let's leave that story for another time.

Return to How To Smoke A Cigar home page