The following methods are ways you can promote and drive traffic to your site with no cost except time.
Other Free Methods:
Forums are places where groups of people with the same general interest gather to discuss information with others. Forums can generate huge amounts of traffic and have high rankings with the search engines. Again, as with other methods discussed, the trick to advertising on forums lies in subtetly.
First of all, forums have rules, they do not want people posting and promoting products blatantly. You will get banned quickly. So the way you market on forums is by actually contributing.
Here is the basic concept. You find a thread on a popular forum that has a lot of activity, meaning a lot of conversation or posts. Create an account and start replying to threads, with the mask of giving your opinion, not selling something. Your advertising comes in the form of your "bio" box, or the area at the bottom of your post where you are allowed to post a link and text. If someone is reading the thread and they find your reply intriguing, you have a good chance of them glancing at your bio box and hopefully clicking on the link.
This method can require some work, but it can produce sales as well as long-term potential as many threads on popular forums receive traffic for years.
You can create a blog for free at Blogger.com. Blogging works well because the content gets sent to various directories when new stuff is posted. The key is to putting up relevant, valuable posts relating to what you are promoting. This is a good opportunity to use some of your article content to take some of the workload off.
At least one to two posts per week should get your blog bringing in decent montly traffic.
Social networking sites are sites like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and other like-minded sites where the ultimate goal is to create a way for people to communicate common interests with others. Youtube also falls in this realm.
Social network marketing can pay off very well, but it does require a decent amount of time and work and a lot of creative thinking. I would call this strategy more advanced and possibly not good for a beginner.
If you would like to use these techniques, I would recommend doing some searches in Google and reading. I am more than happy to answer any questions you have, but there is really no "right" answer for how to market on social networking sites, as many techniques can work and new ones are created all the time.
You may already, or in the future as your business income grows, want to consider paid advertising to generate traffic. If done right, you can yield a great ROI and use money rather than time to achieve results.
Newspapers, magazines, local publications, trade publications, basically anywhere you feel you could reach a targeted number of people are all good candidates for classified ads.
Perhaps you are promoting bad credit car loans. Why not take out an ad in the auto section of a newspaper? Many of these offers pay well, so you do not need a high number of conversions to be profitable. If only 2 or 3 people fill out an application, you have made 6 or 7 times your investment.
In all reality, this section could go on forever. The basic principle is no different than an offline business doing offline advertising! If you get your message in front of enough of your target market, you will do well. The key is to be creative, do not be afraid to try something new, even if it has not been done.
The same applies to online methods as to offline...get your message in front of enough of your target audience! There are also many avenues you can take with online advertising, I will discuss the two most widely used and common ones.
The first thing you need to do is find a site with good traffic and that does not compete directly with what you are advertising. For example, for a product offering help to those who suffer from panic and anxiety, perhaps a forum where people go to get and give advice would be a good candidate.
There is no standard way banner ads are sold. Each site will be different. Some will allow you to just pay for an ad and do everything without human interaction, other sites will have you call and speak to them first. Ads are usually sold on either a per impression basis, per click basis, or time period. Per click is $xxxx per xxxx clicks. Per impression is $xxxx for 1,000 or 10,000 impressions, NOT ACTUAL CLICKS. And time period means your banner will be rotated randomly for a certain amount of time.
PPC stands for pay per click. Most people know this in terms of Google Adwords. When you do a search in Google, you see ads displayed on the side of the results. You will also see these sites on many websites. Your ads are run based on what keywords you purchase and you are charged per click. So you do not pay if you get no clicks, but if you get clicks that do not convert you can quickly find yourself on the losing end.
Depending on what niche you are in and how competitive keywords are for that niche, you will pay anwhere from $.25 to $1.00+ per click. Now, if you are promoting a product that pays you $40 per sale and you are bidding on a keyword that costs $.45 a click and you have a conversion rate of 5%, you would theoretically make $40 and spend $20 for every sale. Now, if this was guaranteed, I would do this all day long, you are doubling your money. And there are many marketers out there who use this model and make very, very, very good money. But you also run the risk of getting one of many variables wrong and losing more money than you make. Many successful users of this method had to go through a painful trial and error to get their formula that worked for them down to a science.