I have a couple questions for experienced owners of directories (at least 3+ months). First a little background about my site: It's under a month old, but it already has about 350 submissions on it, some of them are backlinks but most are free. No PR, but it gets around 100 visitors a day at the least. 1. When is it a good time to start charging for submissions to my directory? 2. How much should featured and regular links cost? I'm looking to get submissions, I don't want to stunt my sites growth.
Price ensure that if you are seeking reviews from around the world, then set your review prices at a rate that is competitive and affordable to attract reviews from all continents
When you are free most of your visits will be from automated submissions or submission services of some type or another and your chances of getting paid links are very slim. Once you convert to a paid directory expect your traffic to be reduced by 90+% - You can play around with the pricing but I would not go too cheap. Also add content to your directory to try and make it more unique so people have a reason to pay to submit to yours instead of the other 1,000,000 directories on the web.