Long gone are the days where the phrase if you build it they will come applied to web sites. There are simply too many web site owners competing for the same viewers. This means you now need to actively promote your web site if you hope to attract a profitable amount of traffic.

The good news is that there are still free and low-cost ways to bring traffic to your site. The cheapest i.e. free also requires the most amount of your time. Fortunately, this heavy time investment can have long-term payoffs. In a nutshell, you need to get links to your site on other web sites. These can be directories, blogs, and forums. It doesn't matter really as long as the external site is relevant and of high quality.

Relevance is easy to determine as you simply need to confirm that your site and the external site cover similar or complementary topics. Quality, on the other hand, is hard to measure. You need to look at different things to assess quality. Some of these things include the PageRank assigned by Google, the number of subscribers to the site's RSS feed (sometimes the owner publicizes this), the number of comments from other users, and the frequency of updates. The higher the quality, the more impact the link to your site will have.

If you build links slowly and consistently, you will benefit in two ways. The first way is that you'll receive traffic from those clicking on the links. Typically this traffic will taper off over time, but when you have a lot of links on a lot of sites, even a small amount of traffic per links adds up.

The second way you'll benefit is that search engines will eventually consider your site to be an authority on certain topics. When this happens, your site will be presented near the top of search results in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Being in the top search results can be very lucrative as it means you'll get a steady stream of traffic 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Each of these visitors are in effect self-selecting themselves by having searched for content related to yours on a search engine. And, the best part is that each visitor from a search engine doesn't cost you a thing.

Some specific techniques for promoting your web site include:

• Adding your web site's URL to your e-mail signature. You might as well let your friends and family know that you have a new web site and the gentle reminder of an e-mail signature is a good technique to use.
• If you are already participating in online message boards, include a link to your new site in your signature there too. This can be particularly effective if the message board is about a related topic to your web site.
• Using services such as Pingoat.com to notify other sites about your content.
• Claiming your site, if it's a blog, on sites like Technorati.com.