Today I want to have a discussion about advertising. If you have a Web site that is struggling to gain more traffic, then you’re probably looking for hundreds of ways to increase your traffic. I feel your pain because I’m on the same boat. In fact, many people are on the same boat. But I want to tell you that you don’t have to spend tons of money in advertising to gain traffic. In fact, all you have to do is a little bit of homework.

Think about this logically. While these top ranked Web sites get many readers, often those are returning visitors who may have learned to block out the advertisements as they view the site. If you have the money, go ahead and do whatever advertising you wish. But if you want to save some money, think about this.

Smaller Web sites are often struggling to gain more traffic, so they market themselves much more than the larger Web sites that might not need as much. So if you find a Web site that shows signs of heavy marketing (showing up on digg upcoming, stumbleupon or reddit, but not getting popular), then you often have the opportunity to buy advertisements at a low price and just wait for the Web site to become popular.

Obviously, you really have to do your homework. You can keep an eye on Web sites by using alexa.com or e-mailing the authors and asking about his/her general statistics. But the point of this is to save you money while still marketing your Web site on a budget. In the near future, we are going to cover some free marketing schemes you can use (services, groups, forums) to gain a little more attention to your cause.

Having trouble finding these Web sites? Use stumbleupon. Not only is it a great marketing service for your own Web site (the more times you rate others positively, the more you have a chance for them to view your site and rank it positively), but you will stumble upon Web sites that are small and also very interesting.

Since this is a short post this week, here is some new music we have been listening to this week.

Flying Lotus , Luke Vibert