Website promotion is essential if you want profit. It can be hard, and it can be easy. It all depends on how strong the keywords you are targeting are, or more accurately, it depends on strength of competition that is targeting that same keyword. If you don't choose right keyword your website is worthless and you won't make money.

If you had chosen your keywords well and if they have weak competition with enough searches per month to give you decent profit, then you did great job. You drastically increased your chance to earn money online. If you failed at that part, then you will have to do better and stronger website promotion to succeed. That's why they usually say that keyword research is one of the most important parts of building a website. So, where to start with website promotion?

First, submit your website to every search engine: Google, Yahoo, MSN... There are so many out there and every single one can give you profit. Of course, the one that matters the most is Google because it has the most visitors.

After that, submit your website to various directories. Use general and niche directories. On top of that, you should social bookmark your every inner page. You could do both tasks manually, but I highly recommend automatization. There are a lot of services (free or paid) that will do that instead of you. You will minimize time spent and you will be able to focus on other things.

After that, you can use several other ways to promote your website. For example you can use: article marketing, forum posting, blog commenting...

Those were all free ways to attract visitors to visit your website. If you want paid traffic, you can use PPC or you can buy banners and links on other websites.