Google AdWords - Advertise on Google and throughout the worldwide web and appear next to (or even above) popular sites that your site is related to.
Search Engine Optimization - Make your site visible in the search engines. Let them breathe on your website. More indexed pages = more search terms you will appear for.
Submit to Directories - Even though alot of directories are just pawns for webmasters seo ranking desires, sometimes you’ll get the occasional interested user browsing through and, besides, it goes towards your Page Rank!
Word of Mouth - Yes, this is most powerful in some cases. Tell your friends, interest them by telling them how THEY’D be interested in it individually.
Toplists - Toplists (or topsites) are lists where websites compete for top positions through votes. If you have found a legitimate toplist that has no vote spammers, these sites can be goldmines.
Link Exchanges - Link exchanges are sometimes effective, especially if they are calculated on a unique visitor basis. I believe theres quite a few link exchange systems out there.
Social Bookmarking - Believe it or not, there are quite a few people using sites like Digg. Add social bookmarking icons to your site to enable your visitors to bookmark your site. ‘Digg’ your own pages on social bookmark sites just to get it started off and you may find other people will ‘digg’ you from the social bookmarking site and will start driving traffic to your site.
Social Networks - Make a MySpace or Facebook for your site. Advertise through the bulletin system, PM’s, and comments, but don’t go OTT and lose your account. Let your sites visitors add you and also promote you. At the end of the day, people browsing through the social network site may come across your sites profile and take interest!
Participate in Forums - Just by using forums, they can be very powerful promotional tools as well. Link to your sites in your signature. If you make 200 posts, that’s 200 pages linking to your site. Write relevant articles or be helpful in your field of expertise and the topic of your site and you may find interested readers click your link.
Proxy Sites - When I Say this, no I don’t mean the proxies you use at work/school to bypass the firewall.
Buy domains that are keyworded to the topic of your site and put some relevant and UNIQUE content on it and it will draw visitors from Google. Make sure you put your links in keywords on these ’sub sites’ because that’s another purpose for them, SEO ranking, but the main purpose is to catch visitors by broadening the arms of your main site.
AdBoards - There are two types of AdBoards:
1) Small boards you can post your ad on (like a classifieds list) and stuff in some keywords.
2) Forum AdBoards where you can post your link. Basically a SPAM-ALLOWED forum that some person has setup. There’s actually quite a few.
Steal your competitors visitors - So your website is cooler and simply better than your competitor and you’re positive that your site would be the most popular choice of the two if interested visitors were given the choice. Well, simply hit your competitor where it hurts. Find out where they advertise and shoot your advert right next to them. Do they have a PM system? PM them and tell their visitors what a “cool site” you’ve found (the cool site being your own) [wow, I'm quite dirty aren't I]
