One link from a site with lots of daily visitors can bring you hundreds, perhaps thousands of viewers per day. That link will also index a brand new site so it can be found by the search engines. An article can do this for anywhere from free to a few hundred bucks depending which directory, how fast, and how well you want to rank for a particular search phrase.

Got $300 to $500 to promote with? Write a press release and file it at prweb.com to get guaranteed pickup by Google News, Yahoo News, API newswire, blog visibility, seo visibilty, the whole 9 yards. The resulting 2 day traffic spike is truly a thing of beauty, especially if you run it past a subscription form on the way to the promised free goodie. Short free reports work well for this- just write it like you would a hub page.

Usfreeads.com is another way to get quick, bargain priced traffic and lots of quality backlinks which will help your rankings and ongoing traffic. Since they're owned by Google, they get spidered twice daily.

One word of caution here- pick the wrong keywords for your headline and mini ad and the ad will bomb. Fortunately you can change it as often as you like. This is a great way to test keywords if you're thinking of doing a PPC advertising campaign. The guru approved method is to use AdWords for that, which is fast but can cost well over a thousand bucks to get truly precise, stastically valid results.

You need to sign up for the premium membership and the featured promotion to really benefit from this. You can also expect it to suck a lot of time logging and analyzing keyword experiments, so you may wish to look into the other methods or hire a professional seo firm to do your keyword research for you.

Eguru and elance are perhaps the best known freelance sites. Their authors can write reports, books, web pages, scripts, make product boxes, and in short develop an entire product and most of its marketing.

Huge traffic spikes can crash a server. If you're selling from your site or blog, a huge sales spike can freeze your merchant or paypal account, so always specify how much traffic you want in a year, divvy it up by month and week, then target your keywords to deliver the slower but steady and predictable traffic that you can reliably pay bills with.

I look at online writing as my retirement account. Once a page is finalized it needs very little upkeep per year, but will pull in a known amount per year as well as draw and move traffic within my personal network.