Great post, Hercco! One problem I see is this: The more you give your visitors control of the content of your site, the more you loose control. If it's a big website you have to spend lots of time with censorship or at least with reading. You can block specific words and ban users but the site will give you a lot of WORK. Every website owner is responsible for the content on his site. So if somebody knows a cool way to get rid of this responsibility, please let us know!

Acidburn, good idea! So where is your signature?

Promoting your site takes some work, but it really does pay off. Do the following:

1. Submit your site to the major search engines. Be sure to include plenty of important keywords.

2. Link to other Websites through Web Rings. Just do a Google search to find out where these rings are.

3. Post on relevant forums and use your site URL as part of your signature.

4. List your URL in Directories for the content areas your site is relevant to.

Try these!

Have to agree with you!

Also I can add. You should search for simillar sites like yours and contact webmasters to do link trades. The more links from similar sites points to yours, the higher place you will get on Google. And if You will make your site good (search engine optimised), you will get much traffic from google. And that is also key to driving traffig to your site.

well content is key. but what i did is i went around and i look for other sites like mine.. my site was mainly graphics , backgrounds stuff like that.. so i found other sites like mind and convinced them to affiliate with me... know you find about 10 of them .. even if they dont get heavy hits ... trade buttons ... keep that going for awhile... know somthing els i did that boosted my traffic was creating a banner and button exchange.. and it worked , only after i had a constant flow of visitors, it was around 100 or so a day.. but people signed up . what i did was under the generator i had the link (BLAH BLAH BANNER EXCHANGE - MY SITE.COM) it was realitivly small and no one complaned. as the banner exchange grew so did my site... but what ever works! i do like the hot girl idea

Promoting any site takes thought and time.

One way is to make each email you send have your site as part of the signature. Same for any forum you visit, have your site url as part of the signature.

Enlist family and friends to help spread the news of your site.

Don't forget those free business card places (you might have to pay for nominal shipping) and hand out a few cards.

Have each of your friends with a web site to link you on there. It will generate additional traffic.

Free service can increase your traffic a bit. But free webhosting and free email will cost a lot. How about the short url or called url redirection or url forwarding. Of course, you should have a short and good domain name. ADs of your site can be applied to the free service, then the free service can also help your tranffic.

Another way to promote your website is to have something on AIM or Yahoo! Messenger and when your away someone messages you have it say something like this:

Hey sry I cant be here right now but in the meantime checkout my website! Here it is: www.yoursite.com

I didthat with my other free website and my friends told there friends and there friends told there friends so i had like 50 to 200 visiters a day! Buut the website i got the free one off of said there was too much traffic :sad:

WElll....... sending out your url to search sites has shown me A LOT OF BENEFITS!

I think this involves a multi-pronged approach. As the above posts mentioned, good content is a must. Even if you can't produce much good content, you can always leverage on good content produced by others. Be sure to ask for permission.

Cross-linking is important. Google for related website and ask for reciprocal link.

Pay if you must. I recommend Google Adwords. Cheap and effective.

Do not worry so much about content and design or how attractive the site looks. I have seen sites that are the world's ugliest get lots of traffic. There is pretty much one way to get traffic to your site. Buy Google ad words. The greatest meta tags, content, layout, graphics, etc will not do anything anymore. If you cannot afford a lot of adword expense then find adwords that are going cheap but have relevance to your site. It can be done!

I have been doing web development for 8 years and the marketing landscape has narrowed every year until now it mostly belongs to Google. You can advertise in local weekly shopper type newspapers across the country fairly reasonably as far as cost, and effectively drive people to your site with the ads. But that takes a lot of effort with ad writing and contacting the papers to place the ads. Google is the easiest and most effective way to drive people to your site.

If you still do not believe me, do some research. Go to Google and Yahoo and Excite and other search engines and look at the top sites for various search values and compare their meta tags and content and look and feel and tell me that the best written and best designed sites win the battle. It does not happen! Try it!

And then ............

Buy Google Ad Words