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Learn to appreciate the traffic you do get. Reply to every e-mail that your visitors send you. Update your site at least one time a week, the few visitors you are getting will appreciate it.
Now for the traffic. First of all, get a good stat program that can track your visitors browsers, track referrals, and give you a daily, weekly, and a monthly break down of your traffic totals. I personally like eXTReMe Tracking; it's a free service that you can get at http://www.extreme-dm.com . Some people prefer HitBox though. Set monthly goals for your site. Give yourself time and make your goals reasonable: you must realize, each month won't bring an increase in traffic, but maybe the next will. Over a period of a few months, try to have an upward steady increase in traffic. An example would be, if you got 1,000 visitors this month, try to get 1,200 within the next two months.
That's great. I have an original site and have traffic goals, now I need to know how to get the traffic. I found that over 90% of my site traffic comes from related sites. I think most other webmasters would agree with that too. I literally spend days looking for related sites. Then, I contact them to see if they can add my link to their site. They say yes most of the time as long as you link back. In most cases, this will be where most of your visitors will be coming from, so spend most of your promotion time on trading links with related web sites. When they add your link, ask them if they can list your link in their newsletter. Newsletters can generate a lot of traffic, but after a few days of visitors flooding to your site, the traffic will soon be gone as quickly as it came. So, newsletters are great, but you can't count on them for your main traffic source.
Search engines. For some sites most of their traffic does come from search engines, for others it's simply not so. In my case it's less than 2% of the visitors to my site, but I still submit my site to every search engine I can find. The search engine that will give you the most traffic is, of course, Yahoo!. More than 90% of the web sites submitted to Yahoo! never get listed. It's the most difficult aspect of web site promotion for most webmasters. It is a task I have not yet conquered. Here a few tips: 1) pick the BEST category for your site, 2) if your site hasn't been listed yet, submit again every two months, 3) don't use excessive punctuation or CAPITALIZATION; remember humans edit this site.
I hope these few minutes have helped you learn the BEST ways to promote your web site. I know it is difficult-- no traffic = no respect. I hope this article helps you to get at least a few more visitors. Remember that all of us webmasters are working to get every visitor, we are with you!
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