Promote your web site online: 5 ways to do it

• Forums & Newsgroups: To use online forums and newsgroups to your optimum advantage, you need to establish your expertise in the chosen field. Blatant advertising is usually frowned upon by the newsgroups. So, unless you are an expert in your chosen field and want to share some useful tips and tricks, these avenues won’t help. After you make your presence felt in the newsgroups and forums, you will be recognized as a knowledgeable participant and can create contacts. These avenues will also help you to leave a thread that your potential clients may follow to visit your web site.
• Email newsletters: You can offer newsletters full of valuable tips to your visitors. Creating a subscription form on your site for this purpose will be helpful. Visitors to your site can use this form to submit their names and email addresses in order to become subscribers of your newsletter. Try to entice your readers by offering crisp and interesting advice and information on your offerings (like what products/services you wish to sell).  
• Have a purposeful site: You should stay focused on your business vision and mission while developing your web site. Remember to have clear and precise objective while each phase of your site is created. To bring visitors to your site, try to offer information rather than just using blatant self-promotion. Customers of the modern age are quite well informed and you can’t fool them. So, it pays to have a purposeful site offering quality content. 
• Search Engines: To bring visitors to your site, your web site needs to have a presence in the search engine results. In order to make the robots of major search engines visit your site, you need to use relevant keywords in your content and meta tags. However, don’t just stuff keywords in your site or else the major search engines may penalize you heavily.
• Directory Submission: Though you can do this in different ways like manually, automatically or by hiring professionals, automatic submission is not a good idea. Often people have found that their sites were submitted to porn or other non-relevant sites, which ultimately resulted in lower rankings or heavy penalization. So, irrespective of whether you do it manually by yourself or hire professionals, remember to submit your site in the relevant categories. Such submission in the popular directories will improve the visibility of your site.