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If you build it, they will come...
... No they will not. On the web, building a website is not enough. If there are no links to the site anywhere, no one will visit it. The site won't even show up in any of the search engines without some inbound links. To get traffic, you will need to do some promotion.
Web Directories
The basic part of any promotional campaign, web directories, while they may not generate a lot of traffic, will help in ranking your site in search engines. You can find a good list of free, non-reciprocal, search engine friendly directories at http://info.vilesilencer.com.
pay per click advertising
These are advertising such as PPC search engines, such as Yahoo!'s Overture, and contextual advertising, such as Google's AdWords. Be careful, it is very easy to spend a substantial amount of unrewarded money using these services if you are not careful. AdWords (among others) allows you to choose a maximum budget per day, but while $5 may not sound like much, $5 per day is more than $150 per month. It's best to make sure your keywords are correctly identified, and preferably don't have a lot of competition, and that your sales copy is good enough before doing this.
Quality traffic, not just traffic
It is what everyone is looking for, more traffic to their website. However, traffic is easy to come by. Autobrowsers, manual visitor exchanges, and purchased traffic will send visitors to your website. However, this traffic is just visitors, many of whom will simply burn your bandwidth for no reward. Unless you're getting decent money for pay-per-impression advertising like banners and pop-ups, this traffic can be totally useless.
repeat traffic
Unless you only require visitors to visit your site once, because you're selling a unique product and your sales copy is fantastic enough to get them hooked on buying on the first visit (and if you do it regularly, write a book email explaining how and selling it), you'll want to keep visitors coming back. If there is nothing of value on your site, visitors may come once, but they won't come back of their own free will. Typically, it is estimated that a potential customer will be exposed seven times to a product, etc. before you buy it.
reciprocal link
While frowned upon and generally thought not to be as valuable as one-way linking (see below) for search engine optimization, a relevant reciprocal linking campaign can be an important traffic generation tool. exchange links with sites in a business related to, but not in competition with, yours. It's really not a good idea to link to competitors; Although visitors will be interested in your product, there is a good chance that you will lose them to your competitor, especially if your website or product is better or looks better than yours. It is not a desirable result. For example, a web hosting site might link to a site that sells scripts and programs; visitors to one will likely use the other, but the sites are not in direct competition. You can also exchange links with web directories that require a reciprocal link.
one way link
Considered the best link form for SEO purposes, it can also be a good source of traffic. There are several ways to get one-way links. The easiest is submission to free web directories (see above). Another good source is to write articles relevant to your site or industry, place a resource box at the bottom, and then post the article to directories like GoArticles, or submit them to ezines. Webmasters and ezine publishers are always in need of fresh content and will publish your article for free. The hardest way to get one-way inbound links is to get websites to willingly link to you. The only way to do that is by providing a valuable tool, service or resource that other webmasters will want to direct their visitors to.
