Many website owners start a website and find they only have a limited budget, if any, to spend on advertising. This is not necessarily a problem, however, because there are several ways of promoting your site for free.
The most obvious way is to submit your site to sites offering free classified ads. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of these sites on the internet. Start with some of the more popular ones and begin experimenting with different ad copies to see which ads attract the most readers, and stick with them when posting on other free classified sites.
You can also sign up to various traffic exchanges, and promote your site to other users. This is a great way of getting guaranteed hits to your site, although it is untargeted traffic. I recommend manual exchanges over automatic because this way people have to physically click on ads themselves, so more people will actually see your site. For optimum results you should join 8-10 of the largest traffic exchanges, and download a browser such as crazybrowser, which will allow you to have upto 10 windows open in the same page. Therefore you can surf them all at the same time, and quickly amass hundreds of hits to your site.
Submitting your site to directories is also a good way of getting free traffic to your site. Plus not only will you get a small steady stream of traffic, but it will also benefit you in terms of search engine rankings. You want to target high pagerank (from the downloadable Google toolbar) directories, and those where your site will be listed on a high pagerank page. This will boost your own pagerank, and help you achieve higher rankings in the future, allowing you to get subsequent free traffic from the search engines.
Similarly getting links from other related sites, either one-way or more commonly reciprocal links, will also improve your pagerank, and search engine rankings. If you are able to get links from popular sites, or get prominent links, for example from a home page of a popular site, then you can get a lot of free traffic from these sites.
Safelists are a traditional form of free advertising, and although not as effective as they once were, they can still deliver reasonable results, particularly if you are building a list of subscribers. A safelist is essentially just of list of opt-in email subscribers, who are free to send and receive emails to and from each other. You should make sure you use a free email address as your inbox will be filled with hundreds of emails.
Posting on popular forums that allow sig files (external links at the bottom of each post) can be a very effective way of receiving free traffic to your site. You should create a compelling link in your sig file, and the link should use anchor text which contains your main keyword(s) for SEO purposes. You should then make helpful and useful posts to these forums, which will build your reputation and get your link seen of course. Just make sure you don't post worthless posts, just so you can promote your sig file.
A truly viral way of getting lots of free traffic to your site is by writing and creating your own free report or ebook, based on the subject of your site. This should include links to your site embedded within it. You can then contact popular related sites, free ebook sites, ezine owners or people with large lists, etc, and offer your free ebook to them, and tell them that they have permission to freely distribute it on their site or to their subscribers.
Finally, another great viral advertising method which can also result in a large increase in traffic over time is by writing articles. Simply write informative articles related to your site and submit them to as many article directories as possible. Each article should contain a resource box which tells the reader about yourself and also includes that crucial link (using keyword rich anchor text if possible) to your site. For even greater results you can track down ezine owners with large lists who accept article submissions, and submit your articles directly to them, offering you immediate access, if accepted, to potentially thousands of readers.
As you can see you don't necessarily need to pay out lots of money to promote your website successfully. There are some equally effective free methods that can deliver excellent results, particularly those last two methods that I mentioned, writing free reports and articles.
Whatever methods of advertising you choose to persue, you should make sure that you use some kind of ad tracking software to track your results. This will tell you which methods of promotion are delivering results, and are worth continuing, and which ones are simply not worth wasting your time over.
James Woolley is a successful marketer who has several money-making sites in various niches. His latest site is a free internet marketing resource guide, which also includes a newsletter filled with free tips and bonuses:
http://www.jimsmarketing.com