DIY site advertisment for free

Create a signature file
Whenever  you send  an e-mail message, make  sure  your signature 
includes your web site URL. Even  if you are writing  to an existing 
customer,  who  may have  mislaid your web site URL. 

Put your url on your stationery and vehicles
Print your web site URL in as  many places as possible.  Put it on your company  stationery,  your vehicles, free gifts,  products, brochures and anything else that people see. 

Ask Your Visitors to Link to You
Make linking to you as easy as possible. You could create a page on your web site that includes your banners and text link descriptions. Put a link to this page on your main page that says "Link to Us." 
See also page design hints (html).

Links to your Site
It has been said about 83% of all site hits come from the Search Engines and directories :-). Spend  time developing as many links to your web site as possible. Not only will these links bring you additional traffic, but you'll increase your Search Engine ranking. 

Provide a Valuable Service
Create valuable content laid out well and easy to navigate. If you provide a valuable service, you can be sure your visitors will tell their visitors, their visitors will tell their visitors and so on. Word of mouth is still a good form of advertising. 

Give Away Free E-books 
Everyone loves getting something of value for nothing. Create a free e-book and allow it to be freely distributed. Provide complete instructions and the code for providing downloadable links to your web site, provide a description of your e-book. 

Write Articles 
This is a brilliant form of advertising .. and will bring better "targetted" traffic to your site than submitting to countless search engines!

Write articles, allow them to be freely published/distributed. Submit articles to electronic or even conventional newsletters and magazines. With each article you write you are entitled to include your details.
If an article that you write is published in an ezine, and that article is sympathetic to the content on your site and it has links to your site attached ... and will potentially be read by people that already have an interest in what you are providing and interested enough to read your article (ezine subscribers - and there are a lot of them), who only have to pick on your link to 'find out more' on your site. ... the potential is there to generate a great number of hits.

Also subscribe to ezines and respond to articles again with your details atached.

Here is a list of some of the best articlebanks (places where you can post your articles for ezine editors to view and use).

http://www.themestream.com/
http://opportunityupdate.com/articles/
http://www.allforwomen.com/network/articles.shtml
http://www.dime-co.com/articlesub.htm
http://www.ezinearticles.com/
http://www.ideamarketers.com/
http://www.mailbiz.com/mailbiz/magcat/
http://www.makingprofit.com/
http://www.marketing-seek.com/articles/submit.shtml
http://www.netterweb.com/articles/
http://www.powerhomebiz.com/termsofuse/articlesubmission.htm
http://www.the-best-list-site-in-the-world.com/lotsart.html
http://www.websitings.com/classads/submit_article.cfm
 

Free for all links pages FFL
These sites are free and there are many programmes on the net that claim to massively increase traffic to your site or add a link to your site on 10 zillion other sites so that traffic is increased. The adds rotate and they rarely stay on a members site for longer that 24 hours, your ad. is a one liner in amongst a zillion other one liners and is rarely noticed, and rarely increases the traffic to your site one iota. However in being admitted to the programme you will be asked to join a "newsletter mailing programme" which is generally an excuse to lump a whole heap of shaky get rich quick schemes in as many emails as the site owner can create and send them to your email box, .... multiplied by 10 zillion other member sites that you were added to,  you quickly find out that the only traffic increase is the traffic to your totally over burdened email inbox!!
I LEARNED THE HARD WAY ... I would advise that you avoid these schemes. 

Banner Exchange Systems
These systems can be very helpful in marketing your site for free or for little cost. Generally the way that they work is that you produce a banner advertisement that markets the product or content on your site. You join up with a Banner Exchange Company (like the one displayed below, .... there are numerous others on the net). You upload your banner advert. which the Banner Exchange Company displays on other members sites with a link back to your site. You download a code with a unique personal id attached, to aid in tracking impressions and click throughs, and you insert this in the HTML code on your page. Every time someone visits your site and clicks on the banner advertisement (generated by the code mentioned above), the banner ad. that you uploaded, is displayed on another members site. Various companies offer different ratios for click throughs etc. ie for every two or more click throughs on the banner ad. on your site your banner is displayed once on another members site. Some systems have a joining free but others are free, (the one below is free and the ratio is one to one).

These systems are good in as much as they will steadily grow exposure of your site, the more visitor numbers increase the more your site is exposed. If your Banner Ad. is well designed with appropriate content, the visitors that will be generated will also be targeted visitors with an interest in your content before they arrive. Also the more that your site is exposed on other sites (linked to yours), the better your chances of achieving a higher ranking on search engines and directories as search engines generally like to see lots of links to a site 

See also search engine hints