When you are ready to start driving traffic to your website the initial step is to submit it to the major directories such as the Open Directory Project, Web World Index and Goguides.org. You can either submit your site to these directories manually or use a service. After you have submitted your website you may opt to not use pay per click advertising such as Google adwords due to budget constraints, especially if you are a small home business. In this case their are other ways to generate hits to your site for free, but the flipside is that they are often a little bit more time intensive than the other ways.

The first method you may want to consider is reciprical linking. naturally, the top websites to trade links with are similiar and yet non-competing. For instance, if your site sold cars you may want to trade links with car detailing, automobile insurance or auto accessories sites but not with another site which sells cars. Reciprical linking builds traffic while improving your link popularity, which will improve your search index rankings, needless to say.

After that you may wish to begin posting to bulletin boards and forums. These sources can send in hits while you are waiting for your directory listings to take hold. These source may also improve your link popularity. You could also post to Newsgroups but be very careful not to cross post to more than one newsgroups. This will get you "flamed" very swiftly!

You can also submit to the free classifieds such as Craigslist. You might also want to search for 'free classifieds' on your favorite search engines and submit to those as well. You can post your site to webblogs but only if you have something relevent to add. You will definately want to write some article's as well concerning the topic of your website and post it to the content directories of the web such as promotewitharticles.com. There are numerous other free reprint article directories similiar to this one and some will even syndicate your article for you and send it out to a list of individuals who have requested free content. You get to link to your website from the bottom of your article and this can increase your hits considerably. Make sure to add those same articles to your own site to create much needed content for your site. Eventually, more site owners will add your article to their website or newsletter. You get a link in the form of a 'byline' or a 'resource box'. This will likewise help your Google pagerank. This is an underutilized method, perhaps because writing seems like more work than many people want to do. But really, if you are writing about something you know a lot about, you should be able to write an article in a relatively short period of time. You will also be rewarded by an increase in your expert or authority status on the web for your specific topic area. More info on building links to your site can be found here