Need traffic but can't afford the advertising costs? Here are a few different ways of getting more traffic:

1. One of the easiest and most effective is by printing car bumper stickers with your website name on them. Many people don't think about this because it's not web related, but proves itself time and time again (remember,the rear bumper!)

2. Get creative - if you have photo editing software, create some funny pictures and submit them to humour sites with your website url on them. Email them to your friends. If they're funny enough, they'll spread like wildfire.

3. Look into buying sites which already have traffic coming in. Then you can either merge your website with theirs or give yourself a prominent link on the front page. You can buy some sites for as little as $20, perhaps with 100 visitors a day.

4. Write articles. Write about what you know, it'll come easier to you. Then submit that article to as many ezine providers as possible and you have a link back to your site for every instance of your article that exists online.

5. Create a Blog. Blogger.com offers free blogs, where you can rant or rave about anything you want, and throw in a couple of links to your sites here and there. You can quickly develop a large audience if you regularly update your blog.

6. Optimise your site for the search engines. Learn how to use meta tags for keywords and content. Aim for less competitive keywords. If you own a poker site, dont optimise for the word poker, you can never compete with the big dogs, go for something more obscure like carribean poker, or home poker games.

7. Avoid link exchanges. Every link you have on your site to a lower ranked site than yours reduces your search engine ranking.

8. Write quality content. People will soon come to your site if you have something they need.

9. Submit to free directories (different to search engines) like dmoz.org. They can give your website a bit of clout with google and yahoo.

10. Keep at it. Dont give up. There's no better feeling than watching your website traffic ratings grow.

Dylan Jones has several websites, but mainly writes for http://www.learningpoker.co.uk.