When publicising any website, there’s nothing quite as dull as finding a couple thousand directories to fire your URL off to.

While useful and sometimes necessary, submitting your site to directories is horribly time-consuming, repetitive, frustrating and with no short-term payoff.

For most of these directories, the reward is zilch altogether. On the off chance that they do accept your suggestion, how much traffic do you think a link 6 layers down on a PR2 website will send your way?

There’s a whole plethora of directories out there. If you have a few days to kill, you can go down the monotonous route by checking out these directories of directories:

http://www.web-directories.ws/

http://www.seocompany.ca/directory/web-directories.html

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/list-of-web-directories-pagestrength-5-and-above/3905/

http://www.directorycritic.com/

http://www.google.com/search?q=list+of+web+directories

Or, if you want to be efficient and savvy about how you spend your time marketing your app, it’s time for a more focused approach.

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve released the hounds on our marketing effort, and one of our branches includes directory submitting. As you can imagine, opening colaab up to public meant even less time for our busy crew, so we knew that we had to work smart, not just hard.

We formed a list of 20 or so app and sector related directories, and within 1 week, 70% of these sites had written an entry on colaab.

Not only is this great Google juice, but the people who visit these sites will be looking for a quality web application to service their needs. Your application. Quality of traffic is much more important than quantity of traffic.

In case you’re curious (which you probably are), here’s where colaab has been covered in the online directory hemisphere:

Mashable – Hugely popular blog about the latest in web 2.0 apps

KillerStartups – Users rank apps by voting for their favourite

Launchfeed – Details the latest in web app launches

Simplespark - Discover, share and enjoy web apps for your life online

Listio – Community directory of web 2.0 apps, tools and services

Feedmyapp – A daily dose of web 2.0 apps

Webdev2.0 – Tag and rating driven app directory

Ziipa – Visual based application directory

Tradevibes – Where other businesses search for internet startups

Crunchbase - Free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Bizspark – Microsoft programme for helping internet startups

European Startups – Pretty much what it says on the tin

Silverlight Cream – One man blog detailing the latest and greatest in Silverlight use

“If you build links, they will come.” That’s what Kevin Costner heard, no?