You could look for volunteers, DMOZ is a huge directory and yet don't pay any of their administrators.

Failing that simply advertise in local job pages.

Work out how much you want to pay by the hour and how much time should they take to research and key in the link information. I have found an average of 10 minutes per link to be fair. Some worthy directories make you fill out longer forms and most need email validation, which adds to the time required. Include a penalty clause for invalid entries such as broken links and off-topic/low-quality links. I'd be more interested in link relevancy than PR of the site's home page.

You could also take the profit and split it 50/50 since there are only two involved. If more are involved, take that number and do a 50/25/25 or 50/10/10/10/10/10, etc. There is a lot of value in human evaluation at this level. Take care of your editors and they will take care of you. Share in the wealth.

I'm a DMOZ meta and these random thoughts might be of interest.

- If you pay by the listing, how does that incentivise discarding the crap?

- A lot of my editing effort is spent moving listing suggestions to the correct category for further evaluation there, not in actually listing them. The reason why I don't complete the process in one hit is that I don't usually know the deep category structure at the destination and it would slow me down a lot to find out then and there.

- When I was on dialup, I could process around 12 websites an hour. On slowish ADSL, it's about 24 per hour. (Durned Flash and unoptimised graphics). I'm a practiced editor; newbies would be a lot slower to begin with.

- Don't get sucked into piecework rates based upon newbie work rates.

HTH :)

What about hiring a part time staff employee . Say 4 hrs a day , 5 days a week. If you can train any one what you want him to do for a week , he/she will become good helping hand for you.

[edited by: Webwork at 1:32 am (utc) on Mar. 7, 2009]
[edit reason] No suggested search phrases please [/edit]

I have worked for several directories, and do so now.

Some of them pay by the hour. In order to do this, you have to be confident in both the editor's expertise at the job and the editor's integrity. You don't want to end up paying for someone's extended learning curve, undoing and redoing errors, or time spent playing online games.

Others have paid us for production. The one in this category that I like best paid a per-action amount based on how many one already had done.

Once you make the offer and get editors, you need to be sure to ride herd or have someone you trust ride herd, as the real flaws in ontology don't show themselves until you get more than 3 people in there adding sites and descriptions.

There is really no need to advertise. The community of professional directory builders is a pretty tight one, and a few well-placed inquiries should start the word spreading like wildfire.

[edited by: Laisha at 3:35 pm (utc) on Mar. 22, 2009]