Best traffic sources

Let me say it another way. What are the best places to leave links that generate traffic rather than junk links that don't send traffic but help your serp ranks?

Any advice on where to place ads for web design and other advertising items like postcards and such? I didn't see anything on craigslist for that.

some social bookmarking sites like stumbleupon, slashdot, pinterest can give you good source of natural traffic...really good for blog sites.

I really like Reddit just being patient and paying dues before posting articles from my own site

I use mgid, as it has real people and they make me high PPV

Mate, let me give you some ideas.

If you buy or write crap articles to put in directories or random 2.0 blogs or FB pages - nobody is ever going to read them and go to your site. They will also not affect your rankings for keywords either as they will all be PR0.

Here are the best ways to get traffic to your site IMHO.

1. Guest Posting
This requires more work than most people are willing to put in, but it works damn well. I am sure that most folks here will agree. If you are willing to put in 10 min to scan Google and search "your niche" "guest posts" then you will find some sites. Contact the owner with a personal message and ask if he wants some free, epic content for his site. Write something that is so good people will wonder "Who wrote this masterpiece", and then click on your byline and go to your site.

This will also help get you up in the SERPS as you are linking from an established site (I would advise to always go for PR2 and above - a PR5 won't want to link to a new site).

2. Blog Commenting
Some blogs get hundreds of thousands of readers, and they are just like youtube. Everybody scrolls down to read the comments. Leave a decent comment that contributes to the convo and leave your site link there too. Don't use the keywords you are trying to target as anchor text though, it just looks spammy and you will not get the same amount of traffic.

3. Forum Posting
Forums are indexed by search engines really quickly so if you leave some posts or even start a thread and leave some info, you will get visitors.

Something you have to realise is that back links won't get you the traffic you want, nor will social media, nor will anything else except paying for traffic.

You need to create epic stuff so that people are amazed by your content and then share it, THEN you will get good traffic. If you create a FB account or a Twitter account, you still have to work your butt off to get traffic and followers, you need to promote your site constantly and market like mad. Perhaps read some good marketing books and copywriting books to learn how to pull people in.

With SEO and "free" traffic methods you have to go out and network, trade your content for a links, create insanely epic content (vids, pics, info graphs, blog articles) that people will naturally want to link to and tell their friends about.

Some sites like StumbleUpon and Digg are good for getting free traffic, but unless you have really good value you won't get a huge amount of traffic.

The only exceptions are when you pay for traffic, PPC, CPM, PPV etc. Then you will get the traffic, however if your site isn't set up to make money then you will be throwing your $ away.

If you have a site already up and are proud of it, contact some web masters in your niche and ask them if you can promote to their list or give them an ebook to give to their list. Write a Kindle book and promote the hell out of it. Just start haunting a few places on the web that have your target market and start networking man.

We all gotta work for traffic, work or pay for it. I gave up buying courses and chasing the next hot thing a long time ago. I just started making networks of people and working my butt off and it finally pays off.

If on forum is big real traffic, nofollow link also will be good.