What a nice suprise...

Hard work really pays of with google. 2 year old domain ,with less than one month of working on back-links I ended up 2nd with a search term "facebook image hosting" on google ! Out of 9,960,000 results! That is really impressive.

See kids! Everything is possible just a little determination and you guys will get there.

I've spend around $300 on PPC ads and $50 for links and directories . Rest of it was manual labor.

You paid for directories?!
Wow, what a bold move.

I've heard on the other forums that paying for directories are just a scam..I'm not really sure about this..If this is true, How will we know? Thanks

Scam? No... See, I paid 30 bucks for one link and I did not get a single click since I added it 3 weeks ago BUT you get good back link. Most paid directories have very few websites in their categories and they are PG6 and up. I also paid 30 bucks for directory submission (200 directories) They give you report once they added to all of them. Very handy if you don't feel like spending the rest of your life searching for dir. and adding your url.

I see very little help from directories.
Not really worth it.

Not sure where you got 9,960,000 results (possibly without the quotes). When doing a search for that exact phrase, I only see 6,190 results...for that exact phrase.

Agreed...I only like submitting to a few general ones, and then industry specific ones.

Botw.org
Yahoo Directory
Dmoz
JoeAnt
GoGuides

Some directories are almost like link farms.
So yeah, submit to general ones.

The majority of directories working online might be of little or even no value at all except for the bigger ones.

I like the ones having PR5 and above and have been running online for more than five years.

Hard work really plays a big role on SEO because its a continuous process..