Breathe a sigh of relief - after much effort and work, your website has just gone live to the world. Now all you need is people to view it! Many companies think that the work ends when their website is launched, but this should be just the start of a prolonged campaign to make your site work for your visitors, and get visitors to your site.

Here are some ideas on how you can market your site and drive traffic to your site, without spending large sums of money:

Search Engine Submission

The place to start is by submitting your website to all the major search engines - this can be done for free, and quickly and easily. There will be an 'add site' link where you just type in the URL of your site and it will be added to the list of sites for that spider to crawl.

You need to be patient as it can take a long time to get listed and so traffic may be slow at first. You can help harbour traffic during this period using the following methods.

Link Exchange

If you can find similar sites then suggest swapping sites with them - this way you build a network of links to your site and back to other relevant sites, which means visitors to those other sites have a chance of finding yours, too.

Article Repositories

There are many article repositories out there on the internet, and if you have something to say you can write an article and then link it back to your site; and list the article on many article repositories. If the audience of those sites like what they see, then of course they may well come through to your site as a warm lead.

Word of Mouth

Many people forget about word of mouth advertising, but this can be excellent for the smaller business - tell friends, family and customers about your site and they may well pass on the information to their friends and family, and so on. Don't forget it!

Company Stationery and Emails

Ensure that when you launch your site all company stationery is updated to include the web address. Ensure that business cards also list the website and of course that your emails contain a link back to your website in their footer. This is free marketing so you should ensure that you don't miss out on this important opportunity to advertise!

Competitions

Another great way to get traffic is to use the age old trick of a competition or survey where there is a prize to be won for answering some questions. Use this as a great way to get many people familiar with your site by asking a question related to some aspect of your site. Those that enter the competition will at least be aware of your site, and may well come back in the future to place orders for your merchandise!

Dan Moore is Director of Clarity Media Limited, a web design company and puzzle supplier of such smash hit puzzles as sudoku, kakuro, hanjie and codewords