There are many places and ways to promote your Website. Let's take a look at the different places you can promote your site and which are most effective. I will list the hottest ways and places to promote your site first.

Absolute Best Ways to Promote Your Site
Search Engines - A High Ranking using good keywords can give your site a great deal of targeted traffic. You can literally drive hundreds to your site with a high rating in the the top search engines. The best do-it-yourself tool to achieve a high ranking is Webposition. You can try this Award Winning software for Free on a limited basis. Visit: http://www.the-work-at-home.com/webposition.htm.

Hot Search Engines:
Yahoo, GoTo, Altavista, Excite, Netscape, Netfind, Magellan, Webcrawler, Infoseek, Lycos and Hotbot.
 
Not So Hot Search Engines:
MSN, Snap, What-U-Seek, Northern Light, Looksmart, Galaxy, etc.

Publishing Your Own Articles - You can get instant traffic by writing your own articles and submitting them to top newsletters. Some newsletters have a circulation over 100,000 subscribers. This can bring hundreds of hits to your site within just a few hours after your article is published. Here are a few examples of this type of newsletter:

Internet Day
Web Promote Weekly
Virtual Promote Gazette

Best Ways to Promote Your Site
Trading Links - Trade links with other websites that are related to your site. Yes, even trade links with your competition - a prospect at their site maybe more interested in what you have to offer than your competition. This form of promotion can bring you a good deal of traffic as well as help you to create valuable relationships with other marketers.

E-zine Classified Ads - This is one of the most cost-effective forms of Advertising. For as little as $10 - $50 you can have your ad run in an e-zine that has a circulation of 1000's of subscribers. Be careful to look for targeted e-zines and do not pay more than 2 cents per subscriber (example: the e-zine has a subscriber base of 1000, the cost of an ad should not be higher than $20 unless it is a top sponsor ad or exclusive ad). Some good sources for finding e-zines and newsletter that will target your market are:

Lifestyles Directory
E-Target
E-Zine Directory

Pay-per-Click - Pay a few cents to get top ranking. Goto is the first service of this kind and has proven to be a very good and inexpensive way to drive targeted traffice to your site. Alta Vista is about to add a pay-per-click program to their search engine. Net One is also showing great promise.

Good Ways to Promote Your Site
Press Releases - Unless you have an extraordinary homepage this type of promotion is best for commercial websites. It is best to have a professional service send out your press release. Two of the better ones are:

Internet News Bureau
Press Flash

Awards - Winning Awards is a good way to bring in traffic because you will have your link on some very high traffic sites. You can also give away your own award. This can bring a lot of traffic from people applying for your award. A good place to look for the top awards to apply for is WebSite Awards.

Banners - The best banner exchanges are the ones you have to pay for, or are on a high traffic site and are targeted to your market. Banner trades can also work well. Do not bother with Free Banner Exchanges, they bring little to no traffic.

Not So Good Ways to Promote Your Site
Offline Advertising - Put your website url on your business card, letterhead, postcards, notes, or any item that you send out to customers or prospects. This type of promotion will give you a little extra push but it is not worth paying for a massive snail mail campaign.

FFA's & Free Classifieds - These type of links provide little to no traffic. The people that visit these types of sites are typically those that are placing ads, not reading them. Do note that automated submission to FFA's are only helpful with your search engine placement because of the number of links the search engines find to your site.

Not Worth the Time or Expense Ways to Promote Your Site
Automated FFA Links - Submitting to services such as Link-O-Matic and FFA-O-Matic are of little good. You will be lucky to receive 2 visitors for every submission you do. Again, note that this type of a promotion will help with your search engine ranking and your link popularity.

Absolutely Worst Way to Promote Your Site
Bulk Email (sending your unsolicited ad to thousands via email) This method is way too risky and expensive. Your reputation can be completely destroyed by it not to mention that your ISP can shut you down and your web-host can shut your site down completely. If you really must advertise to thousands a day get yourself an FFA links page from Link-O-Matic and you can safely send your message to thousands everyday without any risk.

Betty Ann Wilkins, Publisher/Webmaster "At Home Working News" - receive 2 FREE Reports listing 600 Work-At-Home Jobs when you subscribe. To subscribe: AHWNews-subscribe@onelist.com. Archives at http://www.the-work-at-home.com/archives.