Writing a good article and submitted it to an article directory won't automatically get you thousands of visitors, but over the long term there is no better way to generate free traffic. While one article may only get one visitor to your site a day, 100's of articles will result in 100's of visitors. Expand that power by your articles being submitted to RSS feeds and suddenly you can find 1000's of visitors to your site over the space of a year. There are many arguments over whether you should submit articles to just one or two article directories or as many as possible. I believe if your going to take the later option, get an article post robot and submit to 100's. Although its true Google and other search engines tend to ignore duplicate content you will still get the individual readers at each article directory as some readers can be VERY loyal to just one directory. By limiting yourself to one directory you can miss out on some potential readers.
2) Submit to Forums
There are many huge forums out there with thousands of threads. Some even have sharing arrangements for advertising income so your posts might earn you a cent or two. Forums like Digital point can have up to 3,000 people online at anyone time. By including in your signature a couple of links to your site you can get visitors and traffic back to your site. Who knows you might even learn a thing or two or start a buzz about 'this great new site you just have to see'
3) Social Networking
Mybloglog, myspace, and other similar sites have hundreds of thousands of members and can give your sites a wide audience. Make sure you include your links in a short description your sites, businesses, etc.
Pay per click. Costs money but will get you targeted traffic. Especially when you start a site, forum, directory the most difficult part can be convincing your first hundred people to join. Running an adsense campaign or like advertisement can kick start off your site. If you look at any sites Alexa history you will see a J-curve. Every site starts off small - the greatest growth occurs as a function of time, however you can short circuit the length of time by kicking your traffic at the beginning. A hundred dollars spent at the beginning might cut years off the length of time it takes your site to hit the big time.
5) Linking
Link to other sites. Directories, reciprocal links can not only lift your page rank but can bring traffic. Think about it - how long does it take to read the average website. Once the visitor has finished they have a couple of choice normally, get off line, click on the Google ad, a banner or a link to another site. Humans like to surf - T.V., internet, whatever - the search for knowledge continues.
