Directory submission won't get you much. Directory links are mostly irrelevant and won't drive you any traffic. Directories aren't trusted much by the search engines, because anyone can get a link from them and they do link to anyone.
On the other hand, if you get included in a directory with quality control (such as DMOZ or paid directories), they may worth working with.
Also, if you get many links with the same anchor text (title descriptions in directory submission), those links may seem suspicious if you don't have a heavy internal linking background. So a good advice would be to use as many unique titles as you can, probably around 3-10.
There are about 500-700 directories in my opinion, though I've been told one can find about 1000 of them.
Spending months on submitting there is a useless waste of time for a business owner, so you'd rather use some directory submission service.
Some services are reliable, such as addurl.nu of Jim Westergren, and cost quite a bit ($250 here for 500), other services mostly have no reputation but cost about $100-125.
Altenatives to addurl.nu could be
this,
this or
our forum member, who submits for twice as cheap ($10 per 100 directories) and has already earned some positive reputation here.
At any rate, if you have extra marketing budget, I'd suggest
creating unique quality content for your site. This is the best linking strategy out there and it'll be for a while. (For instance, if you get a freelance article writer, you may get about 10 quality articles on your topic for $100. Just check the articles aren't a mishmash of other articles or a copy..that's another topic, I guess.)
