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Do you have a website that doesn't receive as much traffic as you would like?

Well of course if you have a website the answer is yes - you can't have too much traffic (providing you aren't over your bandwidth limit, but we'll come to that later) so of course you want more.

The best way to increase your traffic of course would be to advertise, but that costs a lot so you need to either need to pay a lot or do a lot of work to advertise yourself.

The first step is simply to put your website in your signature on forums, on your Blurble, MySpace, Bebo, iMeem, Facebook etc. This can generate much more traffic than you probably think, much more people click links that look interesting (or click random ones and get interested by your site) than you think!

Another simple but powerful tool is word of mouth. Tell all your MSN Messenger, XFire, ICQ (etc) contacts about your site! Ask your friends to spread the word! With a few hundred contacts and a good site to interest them enough to tell their friends, you'll be rolling in traffic!

Along the same lines, if your site has any sort of points or rewards (even a forum where you can give them extra posts would do!) then you can set up a referral system. They type an email into a box or give their friends a personal referral link in exchange for a reward of some sort; this is a VERY effective way of spreading the word about your site.

Pay to read/click (PTR/C) sites such as www.polarptr.com and www.clickevolution.com can be helpful too.
They work like this: you view adverts to gain points, which you can either cash in for money (which you could buy contextual advertising with!) or exchange for your advert being on the page rotation. Lots of people use these schemes to try and get rich, but the reality is that they are much more useful to advertise on than get money from, since pay is usually very low on them.

The actual DESIGN of your website is a vital point that shouldn't be overlooked! A shoddily laid-out website repels potential users! Don't have tiny text, keep things in easy-to-find places, GET A SITE MAP! You can get a free one from Google: www.google.com/webmasters/site maps/ - these greatly increase the useability of your site.

DYNAMIC IS THE WORD! Allow your users to change your site. Easy ways of doing this are to get a guestbook (http://www.smartgb.com/ is good) or a forum (www.phpbb.com is the best forum software in my opinion). Profile pages and friends lists are even better; people love a site where they can log in and change things.

And last but not least....
There is always the contextual ads option - http://www.bidvertiser.com/bdv /bidvertiser/bdv_ref.dbm?Ref_O ption=adv&Ref_PID=44500 is the best one you are going to find. www.adbrite.com is supposed to be good too, but I haven't tried it myself.
You should get contextual ads if your site is reeling in enough money. They work.

And remember! When you do have a large amount of traffic you can earn a lot of money by displaying other people's contextual ads on your site!
Bidvertiser does a publisher scheme too: http://www.bidvertiser.com/bdv /bidvertiser/bdv_ref_publisher .dbm?Ref_Option=pub&Ref_PID=44 500
People may encourage you to use Google AdSense for this, but your are better off with Bidvertiser for three reasons:
1) They pay a LOT more.
2) They will pay by PayPal, unlike AdSense.
3) As soon as you aren't 100% useful to them, Google will close your account.

Of course displaying adverts on your site could ruin its layout, and some people don't like ads and don't understand that without them there wouldn't be many sites left.

Its a matter of balance really.

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