Having a web site full of great content is important, but unless you have people visiting it, you would not be able to monetize it. There are multiple ways of promoting web sites; I am going to cover several most popular ones.

1. Submit the site to the popular social book marking sites like StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, Reddit, etc. Here is the huge list of social networking and book marking sites that you can use to promote your web site. Submitting to social book marking sites gives you immediate traffic plus it creates valuable back links that increase the rank of your web site. I once got more than 2,000 visitors coming to my site after I submitted it to StumbleUpon.
2. Find related forums and participate in discussions. When working on your forum profile, make sure to links to the sites you would like to promote to your signature. If you would be posting friendly and helpful messages, then other forum users would be eager to check out the web sites you have listed in the signature.
3. Post in newsgroups. Google newsgroups are great for driving large amounts of traffic to your web sites. Once again, find the related groups and try to add value to the discussions. When posting to newsgroups, add a link to your site at the bottom of the message.
4. Yahoo Answers is another site that can bring large amounts of traffic to your web sites. Create an account and start helping people by answering their questions. When posting answers, include a link to the web site you are promoting.
5. Banner exchanges still work. The trick with banner exchanges is that you have to get huge number of impressions in order to generate a decent amount of clicks on your banners as the clicks/1,000 impressions ratio with banners is very small. There is a simple “gray hat” way of generating a huge number of banner impressions and I will talk about it on one of the next posts.
6. Article publishing is a good way to get highly targeted visitors to your web site and to increase the number of back links. Write articles and submit them to popular article directories such as GoArticles, eZineArticles, etc. Avoid submitting the same article to multiple article directories as this would reduce the value of the links.
7. Manual hit exchanges are another effective method of driving traffic to your web site. Not all manual exchanges are of good quality. I can personally recommend TrafficSwarm and iLoveHits. The traffic you get from those is of high quality.

Nikolai