5. Word of mouth I have told everybody I know what I am doing and there are rafts of redundancies occurring in my former industry. These are all bright people with a pocket full of money. They look at my site and like what they see - they tell their friends.

6. The press I refuse to pay for unfocused advertising which nobody looks at, even in specialist magazines. My advice would be to call editors up and tell them that you are doing something that nobody else is doing (in their field) and that you have included a free link to their publication as an information service on your site. Would they be interested in doing a small write-up of your site for their next issue? If you can get them to do this, you will get much better traffic generated than a standard advert and for free! They won't always do this for you but hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

7. Reciprocal links I offer a lot of links to other sites on my own pages and I have called them all personally to ask if they would include a link back to me. Normally webmasters are quite good at this and will try and accommodate you. This is especially advantageous if site you link to has high traffic. Information sources are amongst best of these - find a high traffic site that covers your area of commerce and link to it/get reciprocal links.

8. Banners My experience tells me to forget it - when's last time you clicked on one.

9. Be Discrete I belong to lots of e-mail lists and occasionally, someone asks for help on a topic that I think my website would be useful for. I don't send a whole sales pitch in to those lists but send in a very low key reply addressing their specific question and mentioning my URL as an additional resource. This has paid dividends and has not upset any of list members.

10. Write an article for an opt-in list such as this one! All publicity is good publicity and if you can help others by sharing your knowledge with them at same time, all better.

Then again maybe you have no problems writing articles but instead don't feel they are worth time and effort required.

Writing articles is VERY MUCH worth effort! Here are just a few ways:

More content for your website

Keyword rich content to feed search engines

When someone else publishes your article on their site or in their newsletter you get more traffic, more exposure for you and your site, and more links to your website

And once you put together an article you can benefit from it for many months to come. I get email asking permission to reprint articles that I wrote over a year ago!

The information is still just as relevant now as it was back then, but point is that minimal effort I put into it is rewarding me over a year later.

How many banner ad campaigns can promise that?

Also, many people don't realize that you can even benefit from posting other author's articles on your site.

I'm not saying pretend they are yours, that will get you in trouble. What I mean is that you can pick up additional search engine traffic because their articles will have keywords in them. Add some good meta tags to pages and submit away.

I have a couple of articles on my site written by various authors that happen to rank very well for certain keywords.

Since articles are related to my site content, this is free targeted traffic, and I didn't even have to go through effort of writing articles.

So get over your fears, get prepared for writer's cramp, and dive into one of greatest traffic generators for 2001!