Website promotion is not always the easiest thing to do. I know that I have had trouble promoting websites in the past. A lot of people who are starting websites do not have a lot of money to work with, and I am the same way. After spending the money on design, coding, and hosting you don’t want to have to spend even more money on promotion. Now buying advertising to promote your website is a good way to get traffic, but if you really don’t have the money there are a lot of other alternatives. Here is a list of methods that I promote my websites at no cost.

Banners
When I start up a new site sometimes I will put a banner up on one of my already established sites to drive traffic to the site. I never replace existing advertising, but I will put a banner in rotation. If you are creating your first site you may ask a friend to put a banner on their site for a few days at no charge, or an exchange of banners.

Links
On most of my sites I have links to all of the other sites in the network. If the people reading one site like the content and see that you have other sites they are more than likely going to check out that site and see if they like it too.

News Exchange
This is how I get 60% of the traffic on ThinkComputers. If your site is in a specific niche you might want to see if there are other sites like it out there. Look on these sites and see if they have a news section with links to articles on other sites. They should list an e-mail to send news in to. Each time you post a new article send it out to these other sites and they will most likely post it.

Link Section
If you have a large network of sites you can put a link section at the top of all of your pages. Jon Waraas does this on all of his sites. At the top of each page is a random link to one of his sites and a drop down menu with all of his sites listed. This is more effective than just links somewhere on your page, because this is right at the top of the page.

Social Bookmarking Sites
These have become extremely popular and everyone tries to submit things to these sites to get on their front page and pickup a ton of traffic. These sites are like Digg, Slashdot, and Netscape. You are able to submit your articles to these sites and if enough people like your article it will make it to the front page. The big problem with this is a lot of people just submit every one of their articles. I would say the best way to get on the front page of these sites is to submit your best work.

So those are some very easy ways to promote your website. I know there are a lot of other methods, but there are the ones that I have used and have been successful with.