One of the ways to promote your site and drive traffic to your site is to have competitions and giveaways. If you give a good prize away, it will bring people to your website. I've run tons of online contests. I've given away everything from DVDs to action figures to comic books to gift certificates. And it always get traffic to my website.

There's two basic different ways to run a giveaway. The first is to require nothing, or almost nothing, from those who enter. The alternative is to require some level of participation in your site before they can be entered into the contest.

With the first, you may require something as simple as their email address. Perhaps you require that they sign up for your email newsletter. Either way, there's minimal effort for the entrant. The advantage to this method is that a lot of people will probably enter. The disadvantage is that you have no guarantee that they will provide anything but a momentary spike in your traffic. You need to work hard to have great content up at the same time so that they are more likely to stick around.

Remember, even if you just collect their email address, that's a good time to offer them a subscription to your email newsletter that you should already be using to promote your site.

With the second method, there's a variety of ways to go. It really depends on the nature of your site. You can require that the entrants write a certain number of posts in your forum. Maybe they need to submit an article or review to your site. Perhaps they can go to your site, get a secret word, then come into your store and tell you that word to be entered.

I have preferred the second method in the past. The site I generally ran these contests on had articles and reviews. So promoting the submission of additional articles and reviews made sense. I also sometimes ran giveaways just for people who placed membership. That helped to drive up my level of membership. The downside of that method is that often those members will not have any level of participation in the site.

Whichever way you go, make sure you set a time limit of some sort on your contest. It will start whenever you announce it to the world, or you can set an official time and date to start. But you will definitely need to have a time and date to end it. And you will probably need to clarify time zone as well.

Next, you'll need to promote it. If you have a blog, make sure you blog about it. If you have friends with blogs, get them to mention it. The blogosphere can do a lot to promote your contest.

Also, you can list the promotion on sites like www.online-sweepstakes.com. This can drive a lot of traffic to your site. Note that if your contest has any part that requires visiting your physical location, this will not help as much. But if it is completely online, it will help greatly.

Once your cut-off date comes, be fairly strict about the time. If your winner is randomly picked, you can use sites like www.random.org to produce a random number. If there is some sort of judging involved, make sure the process is fairly speedy.

Once you have your winner or winners, make sure you let everyone who entered know who won. Also put a short site promotion in that email as well. After all, if they did not sign up for your newsletter, this is one last chance (for awhile) to directly promote your website.

One mistake I made early on was waiting too long to send the winner the prize. They tended to get a little irritated. Remember, at the least, you're trying to make the prize winner a huge fan of your site.

On my sites, I gave away prizes as often as once a month. You'll learn from any mistakes made the first few times. So if everything doesn't go completely smoothly the first time, don't fret. I had plenty of kinks when I first started. They worked themselves out over time.

Well, what are you waiting for? Start giving stuff away!

Tim is the owner and senior web designer at T&S Web Design. His company has developed and maintained website for dozens of small businesses and organizations. Tim also maintains a blog with free website advice for small business owners, GetASiteOnline.com.