Best advice would be to look at your prices and offering and focus on your SEO...people might not find the site otherwise.
If you're just starting out, I think you should give your users a free option like link exchange. You can still charge for premium links and meanwhile you'll get extra traffic from the linkers
First you search some high pr sites and than you make a banner for advertisement and put this site top page than your site visitor come fast day by day
Your traffic might be coming from directory submitters turned off by your review fee and web surfers looking form info - so you need to find other source of traffic: Paying customer traffic. Laser targeting traffic and promoting to places where people are actually buy.
But if the directory is new, nobody would pay for backlinks from it. Even if you are ready to spend the coin, you'll rather spend it somewhere else
They are probably more turned off by the fake PR. Assuming you are referring to the Ali site in this case.
I offer a free Directory and still only have a limited number. Either people are lazy, don't rate Directories, or never found you. Suggest you start free and when numbers are up then offer extras for a paid for version.
My directory receives around 150 submits daily and most of them happen during night time and from India. My directory is free, so why someone will pay to you if you have free directories around. And don't say that yours is quality directory and others are not. As I see it, submission to web directories is being outsourced and mostly done from India, just because it cheaper and webmasters prefer to pay $10-$20 and their website will be submitted to 100 directories, instead of spending few days and doing that themselves. It means whoever actually submits the websites, are not the owners, and will not pay.