Once youve tweaked your sites content and layout to a point that youre satisfied with, you need to promote it. Web traffic is not going to jump up out of nowhere. Firstly, you should submit your site to some free directories. These directories make search engines aware of your URL and will basically speed up the spidering process. Some of the biggest free directories are Ezilon (search.ezilon.com) and Open Directory (dmoz.org). The submission process can often be agonizingly tedious, especially if youre submitting to several directories, but this is a crucial step. The most important thing when submitting your site is to submit it to the correct category. Be sure to be in a category with similar sites. If youre mis-categorized, it will be that much harder for someone searching for you to find you.

Once youve done this, you need to start advertising. I know, its painful, but if youre serious about making money online youre going to have to spend some money. Probably a pretty good chunk of money, too. Bottom line. Creating ads in Google Adwords is the fastest and most effective way to get quality traffic to your site that I know of. Some people will tell you to try similar programs on sites like Miva and Kanoodle, but Ive found that those smaller sites really arent worth it.

With Adwords you set up a text ad, set a spending limit, and then pay Google a few cents each time someone clicks on your ad. It doesnt sound it, but this is an extremely effective method. People display these ads all over the internet. The down side is, if youre really serious about making money with your website, youre probably going to have to spend about $5 per day on this advertising. Thats about $150/month. I know it sounds like a lot, but in my experience, if you have a good site, it really pays off. The ins and outs of keyword bidding and setting your price limits with Adwords can be found in the Google Adwords adcenter.

Another way to promote your site is to straight-out buy incoming links from big sites. This also can get very expensive, but it is also very effective. If you have respectable websites linking to you, you look that much better and will get that much more traffic. Simply email the webmaster of the site you want your link on and politely negotiate a link. You can even cut and paste the same email to different webmasters to ask for links.

Now that Ive covered all the expensive ways to promote your site, I should probably mention some free ones. The most efficient way to promote your site freely is to create a blog or post regularly to an existing one. Im sure youve heard of these, theyre all over the place. Well, it turns out that posting to a blog every day is a great way to promote your website. Search engines love the way blogs organize information, and spider them almost every day. Just include a link to your webpage in your signature. That way, each time you post, you will be creating quality backlinks to your website. Thats the key here: getting all kinds of links all over the internet pointing back to your site. This is basically how search engines determine that a page is important. The more outside links it has, the more attractive your site is to a search engine.

All of these methods will help drive traffic to your site and hopefully make you more profitable. As you start to get visitors, you will want to try to optimize your site as much as possible. Putting Adsense ads in the right place and integrating them into the look and feel of your site, for example, is key. Try to ask yourself, Is my website going to make people want to buy anything (or click on an ad)? If not, look at other similar sites and see what theyre doing. Maybe their layout is superior to yours. If so copy it! Theres nothing wrong with your site looking a lot like a comensurate site. Once you are getting traffic, its important that your site is optimized to make the most of that traffic and turn it into revenue.