…over any other blog cat­a­logue. These guys offer very good value for very lit­tle money, con­sid­er­ing the pop­u­lar­ity of the site. Some of my blogs have been listed for quite a while now, and I like the looks and usabil­ity of my blog cat­a­logue pro­file page. Instead of try­ing to spam as many irrel­e­vant direc­to­ries as pos­si­ble, blog­gers are much bet­ter off con­cen­trat­ing on a hand­ful of impor­tant dirs, and bc is def­i­nitely one of them.

Today I became a “sup­porter”: for 6$ a month bc offers a pretty impres­sive range of feats: sup­ports receive a spe­cial pro­file icon, geta beta access to all new fea­tures and surf a com­pletely ad-free site. Any free­ware adblocker can do that as well, but not if you’re on a pub­lic computer.

I can almost hear your thoughts — nice, but why should I pay for this? Okay, here’s the two killer fea­tures: first of all, donors are able to inte­grate their other social media pro­files and lever­age their cat­a­logue pres­ence by doing so. Cur­rently only twit­ter is sup­ported, but Digg, Deli­cious, last.fm and oth­ers com­mu­ni­ties will fol­low in the near future. And finally, here’s the juicy part: bc offers increased vis­i­bil­ity, or in their words:

As a pre­mium mem­ber your blog will be promi­nently dis­played on our home­page, help­ing you get the expo­sure your blog deserves!

There’s also a weekly snap­shot update (a recur­ring task that bc should do for every users any­ways, as it’s in their own inter­est) or you might wanna spend some more money: an addi­tional busi­ness model enables users to rent spon­sored cat­e­gory links, the prices vary depend­ing on the demand, but start as low as 8$ per month. Recently, Jeremy did an inter­view with one of the bc founders on these list­ings and on their newly launched social search. The rea­son why the made their prices so cheap is that they hope to make a lot of peo­ple use the pre­mium ser­vices — at least in my case that worked quite well. I think this longtail-business-model is a lot smarter than high-prize pre­mium place­ments and it shows that a good long­tail site (con­tain­ing no pr0n) *can* indeed be monetized.

If donat­ing some money for enhanced expo­sure in the bigges US blog cat­a­logue (we’re talk­ing pager­ank 7 here) sound like a good deal to you, sim­ple login and chose “donate” in the account-menu. No sub­scrip­tion fees, just chose the time span (start­ing form one month), pay via Pay­pal and you’re all set.