The single most important problem in having a web site is getting people to visit your site. There are millions of sites on the internet that generate less than 20 visitors a day. Why do these sites have no traffic? Plain and simple, no one knows them and most probably the sites do not have anything worth viewing. In an effort to not be one of these millions of baron sites, you must get the word out about your site. There are right ways to advertise your site and there are wrong ways. The best way to advertise your site is to avoid these useless advertising methods.
Pay for Traffic!
This stupid service promises to send you traffic. Think about this lame option for a moment. If the concept worked well, wouldn't the firms offering it just keep the traffic to themselves?
Picture this scenario. You enter your local Wal-Mart store and the friendly greeter instructs you to get back in your car and go to Target. Absurd, isn't it? This is why "pay-for-traffic" is an impossible business model. It makes no sense that a firm would turn away traffic without attempting to sell anything at their own store first. What you really get is worthless traffic generated from free porno galleries, exit consoles, pop up windows, or all those intrusive tricks so many sites pull on visitors.
"Pay-for-traffic" should really be renamed, Creatively Redirecting All People. This way we can simply call it what it really is: CRAP.
Pay a Company to Handle Your Affairs!
Be it bulk email, guaranteed hits, or URL submissions. No on-line site will sit back and make you successful for a few hundred bucks. Most of this information is available for free. Besides free services on-line, there are several programs available that will assist you in URL submissions. Two bits of advice here. URL Submissions are important but an overwhelming majority of all searches are performed on four sites Yahoo, Netscape, Google and Microsoft.net. Guaranteed hits is a ridiculous notion. This idea is very similar to the current state of e-mail. When I turn on my computer in the morning, I have 120 e-mail messages. You might think "Wow, you surely are popular." In fact, 110 of the messages are spam and like guaranteed hits, the data are simply ignored.
Paid URL Submission
Paying anyone to use submission software for you is foolish. Not only will you learn nothing about what is needed to build a high search engine ranking, but you'll always need to pay again each time you submit another URL or wish to update your position. Even paying for inclusion within a search engine directly (like Yahoo Express) is not idiotic. Yahoo charges a non-refundable $299.00 to review your submission. If they do not like your site, you lose. The chance they reject your site is fairly decent if submitted with errors or in an inappropriate category. There is a variety of software available that can help you submit your URL. It is a much wiser investment and it is reusable. Additionally, many hosting companies have free submission of your site to search engines.
Banner Ads
Banners can score but are mainly for large budgets that can absorb weeks of continually poor responses before they break even. In other words, they're most effective to brand a product for lasting public recognition over time - not for high conversion rates. One caveat on banner ads - low-cost banner ads are not that bad of an investment. Shop around and find the sites that would most likely generate traffic to your site.
Link Exchanges
To increase your site popularity, it's vital that you have your site linked on other sites that are relevant and more popular than your own. If you remember only two words from the previous sentence, let them be "relevant" and "popular". If you have a woodworking site, link to hobby and woodworking sites. Don't bother exchanging with sites that have nothing in common with your site. This simply muddles the concept of your site. However, it should be evident that you should not bother with a site selling the exact same stuff you do.
Why is popular important? Consider this, you exchange links with another site with no traffic. Nobody is going to the site you exchanged with, therefore, they don't have any traffic they can send you. What have you gained? An extra link on your site that no one will ever see.
Link Exchanges can work if you do it correctly. The best method is to browse around and contact other webmasters to propose a mutually agreed upon link exchange. Companies exist to facilitate these exchanges but don't bother buying into any of them. Exchange programs often have deceptive tricks like 20:1 ratios. In other words, for every 20 times you display their link - yours is shown once. Or, they use artificial means to inflate traffic counts by purposely creating circle jerk pop up windows or top lists that never seem to end or close. These sites, you may have wondered, do make money with annoying tricks. The money is paid for in traffic generated from "forced" clicks by unknowing surfers. Then these artificial counts are exchanged with participating sites for even greater traffic.