You've worked hard to design and develop a website that will promote your products and services to the world. You've spent hundreds, maybe thousands, of dollars to get your site online. But where are the visitors? I mean, you've always heard, "If you build it, they will come."

That's the largest problem faced by small businesses attempting to do business on the internet. Larger companies have the resources to pay for traffic. They can advertise on the busiest sites on the Internet to attract potential customers. They can promote their sites through multiple channels including radio, television, and event sponsorships.

The best way to drive traffic to your new website is through the use of search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. Traffic from search engines will usually yield higher conversion rates due to its targeted nature. Individuals performing a search for a particular product or service have already demonstrated their motivation to obtain what you have to sell. You just want to be sure you're optimizing for the correct search terms and that you're following all the rules.Use your keywords or phrase in following ways.

a) Use your selected keyword or phrase near the top of the page.
b) Use your keyword or phrase in a headline tag (H1, H2 HTML tags).
c) Repeat your keyword or phrase within the content of your site.
d) Use your keyword or phrase in hyperlinks.

What are the different ways you can advertise free?

The answer to that is of course blogging, banner ads, link exchanges, signature lines ( normally when you belong to certain groups, you are allowed to add a signature at the bottom of all the messages you send to others. Email signature tags, Offline advertising like newspapers, magazines, email marketing. And so many other places.

1) Link exchange: link exchange is best way to increase your website traffic and visibility on Internet. You should know the rule of link exchange. Only relative links help to get targeted traffics.

2) Forum posting and blogging : Many web masters use web forum in order to help community.They provide support on these forums. You can get links on these forums under signature lines ( normally when you belong to certain groups, you are allowed to add a signature at the bottom of all the messages you send to others.

3) One way Linking: Best way to get free traffic is one way linking. There are thousands of free web directories and search engines on Internet, which allow free submissions for websites.It helps to get free traffic as well as improve search engine rankings.

4) Copy Writing : You can get links for your website by writing contents for other websites or article directories.

5) By signing guestbooks and classifieds sites you can get free traffic for your website.

While that may be all well and good, a website can get a 1 million hits per month does that mean you will get a million visits to your site for advertising on theirs, the answer is NO!! Now you may get a good amount of traffic to your site, but if its not your target market you probably won't get a sale. So before you see if a site or newspaper gets a lot of people that visits them, find out if what they offer on their site or in their newspaper targets your market, that will bring you more results then a site that might get a million hits.

If you can think of another way to advertise that I may have forgotten, add your comments.

I think that maybe submission articles

I was under the impression that link exchanges were bad and google has started to count them against you. is this true?

That works really well, actually. I write reviews on forums for people and they see how good the reviews are, they check out the site. I'd suggest hanging around the forum you know the most about and helping members who ask questions.

Yes - we have found this to be quite useful! As long as you know a lot about something!