Sign up for as many as you can.  Many allow you to have a member profile, blog, website and zero cost classified ads.  Be sure to include your picture with your profile, it really helps attract contacts.  It doesn’t matter what you look like, people feel more comfortable if there is a face behind the emails or posts.  Adlandpro, Direct Matches, My Space and Tribe are just a few.  Some also have paid ads, and I have found that those aren’t much more effective than the free ads.  Be sure to read the rules at each site for posting commercial ads or your IP and email address could be banned. 

Post blogs on any subject that you can write intelliently about with links back to your main site.   You don’t have to re-invent the wheel.  Read lots of blogs and articles and then incorporate some of their ideas in you own words on your own blog.  Read other people’s blogs and post relevant comments to their blogs.  People who write blogs like to get feedback or answer questions, I do.  Always include your signature line with your link, but keep it brief.  The same goes for forum postings.  Be sure to stay on the topic and read the forum rules.  Many forums will not allow you to mention a product or company name, but will let you have a signature line with a web site name and link.

Write articles and submit to whoever will take them.  Again, attach an blurb about the author in the author's box.  Be sure to include a link to your site.

Add your business signature to your email with your web site link. 

Buy business cards and a box of thumb tacks and carry them with you.  The cards are pretty cheap so scatter them like leaves.  Every bulletin board you encounter should have your card on it.

Start your own newsletter or ezine.  You can include your own content or publish content from other authors.  Always give credit to the contributing authors for their articles.  You can add a directory where other advertisers can place free ads or directory listings.  A requirement for placing a directory listing on your directory would be a reciprocal listing on their site.  You should be a little choosey about who you approve for reciprocal links.

More About Reciprocal Links: 

This is one area where manually placing listings is best.  If you were to purchase a service that automatically lists your site with thousands of directories or FFA sites at once, your search engine ranking could suffer.  These listings should only be on sites related to yours and only a few at a time. The major search engines evaluate the quality and relevance of the back links coming into your site.

Submit your site and be sure to have the right meta tags at the top of your site so that it is automatically submitted every 30 days.

Search engines like new content so add a relevant audio, video news feed or article feed to your site.  Search for Ezines as they often supply content and the RSS code to place on your blog or site.  Only install high quality related content.  If possible convert the javascript feed to HTML as the search engines do not notice javascript content.

There are lots of places where you can place ads for no cost, blogs, Ezines, ad sites, local business directories and forums.  Start doing searches for the sites, and then focus on the ones that don’t have many listings in your category.  If there are 800 listings in the home business category with new ads coming in every few minutes, don’t waste your time.  Some of best classified ad sites or forums come from small communities or special interest groups.  Small towns often have business directories that allow free classifieds or directory listings.

Obtain a new email account just for this advertising.  Place as many ads as you can.  Use no cost ad tracking software or script to evaluate the performance of your ads.

Many Ezines will allow free classified ads or directory postings.  Look up Ezine Finder to find ezines.

Use free keyword software to find the phrases most often searched in relation to your site material. Yahoo, Google and MSN have other search suggestions that come up when you do a search.  These are good sources of often searched keywords.  However, make sure that you have those phrases in your website content.  Don’t sacrifice the quality of your content and over do it with too many unnecessary phrases as that could affect your search engine ranking negatively.

Freewebs and Bravehost offer free webhosting and I think allow about five pages of content.  Just search for them and have fun. You should use a redirect url, like hotshorturl or tinyurl for your ads.