New websites don’t debut like blockbuster movies, with lines stretched around the block on opening day. Driving traffic to a business-related site takes time. The aim is to create sustainable and increasing traffic.

Every website strategy should include a plan to drive traffic to the site, and the effort should be ongoing throughout the life of the site. The methods vary depending on the site’s purpose and audience, but a successful plan will encompass one or more of these five approaches:

Tell people about your content:

Post comments on relevant blogs directing people to your content.
Contact thought leaders, bloggers, and journalists who may find your content
  relevant.
Spread the word via Twitter, newsletters, and word of mouth.

Encourage others to refer to your content:

Enter into link exchange programs with relevant websites.
Send concise story ideas to news websites and blogs that cover your industry.
Submit your design (and story idea) to design websites.
Make it easy for readers to share your content via email, Digg, Twitter, etc.
  with direct links on your site.

Make your content easier to find:

Submit articles to ArticleBiz, FindArticles, etc.
Submit videos to MSN Video, Vimeo, YouTube, etc.
Submit podcasts to Audible.com, iTunes, Zune Marketplace, etc.
Share your design with galleries such as Konigi and CSSHeaven

Make your content easier for search engines to find:

Submit new websites to Google, Yahoo, and Bing (formerly Live Search)
Submit new websites to directories such as Yahoo and Open Directory
Submit new blogs to aggregators such as Google Blog Search and Technorati
Optimize your content for search engines by:

Ensuring that 2 to 3 percent of your content contains relevant keywords
Implementing unique and accurate page titles for all of your pages
Implementing META tags that include relevant search keywords
Ensuring that your URLs are unique, readable, and relevant
Creating a robot.txt file to guide search engines crawling your website
Creating (and submitting) XML sitemaps for search engines to crawl

And finally, pay others to tell people about your content:

Create search engine marketing campaigns (e.g., Google AdWords,
  Microsoft Search Ads) that drive traffic from search engine results
Create contextual marketing (e.g., Google AdSense) that drives traffic from
  relevant websites