Please note however that those four methods presented here are just the ones that have returned the best results for me and my own websites at the least possible cost (which means, no cost at all). Of course there are many more promotion techniques around and their success does depend greatly on how you use them and for what kind of website so it might be clever to try as many different ones as you can find.

This one is a very easy promotion method that can still bring you very good results, depending on your content and how often you update it. The only thing you basically do is add your content to a RSS feed and then syndicate this feed on other big RSS lists and directories, which will then link directly to your content. Those sites will then update your listing automatically after you have added new content to your website (and your RSS feed) and "Pinged" them through a free service like the http://pingomatic.com/ program.

Link exchanges are mostly used for the purpose of search engine optimization and to gain a better Google Pagerank only but if you use them right they can bring very much traffic, too. And using them right just means using them with the right people at the right place. For example you don't want your link to be buried on a links page with hundreds of other links or on a page that is not read by anyone of your targeted audience. Instead, try to approach closely related websites to yours (but no competitors) and try to negotiate a fair deal with them.

You might notice that I am just using this technique because when I submit my articles to free article distribution websites like http://www.ezinearticles.com/ I can include some links to my own sites at the bottom of the article and therefore get one-way backlinks from everyone who publishes my article. Depending on the article's topic and how well it is written this might be several hundred different sites. You have to remember however that writing articles is hard work and does take some time however I can still recommend doing it.

A method that does rather require much work since you will have to learn how to write press releases for yourself (or you have to pay someone to do it). You do also need something newsworthy to write about, but after everything is done the hard work will surely pay off as this is a very effective method to gain new visitors. You basically get them by publishing your press release (that will of course contain several links to your website) on some of the free press release distribution sites like http://www.prweb.com/. After your press release got published there it will normally be read by hundreds of people and reprinted on many other sites. Sometimes, if your news is truly interesting, it might even be picked up by a newspaper or other print magazine and therefore drive thousands of new visitors to your pages. To improve the effect of your releases it might be wise to spend some money and make a contribution to PRweb because this will give you access to some special services like inclusion in Google News and file attachments.