Believe it or not, there are many rather popular website promotion methods that actually drive traffic away from your website. They usually clutter up your website with a bunch of graphics and do virtually nothing to improve your bottom line. Here are just a few examples:

Top Sites - The premise is that you put a vote button on your site and people click to vote for you, raising your site up in the list of "top sites". People who visit the top site list see your site near the top and click on your banner to see what your site is all about. Things to consider: You have to put a graphic on your site. Of course, you will make the link open in a new window, so you don't lose your visitor, but you have created a distraction for your visitor. You want your visitor to focus on your sales message, not a graphic that leads your visitors away from your website. Let's be serious. If you've participated in a Top Site or visited a top site page, when's the last time you did any shopping from it? Realistically, the Top Site List serves to best promote the website that created the list rather than the individuals on that list. Check your website stats to see how much traffic you get from this list and see if anyone buys.

Banner Exchange - Everyone participating in the exchange places a banner on his site. This banner rotates throughout the participating sites every time a page refreshes. The premise is that you get a lot of exposure by having your banner appear on a number of sites. Things to Consider: Again, you have to put a distracting graphic on your site. Usually banner exchanges are made up of like-sites. Why would you send your visitor to your competitor?! Most banner exchanges give you one impression of your banner for every two times the banner exchange appears on your website. Does it seem wise to possibly give away two visitors for every one visitor you might get back to your site? As in the Top Site List, the banner exchange serves best to promote the website that created it. The banner exchange usually has a link to the creator's site underneath the banner. This is the one link that doesn't change on the rotation, thus, giving the creator constant exposure on all sites, but giving you very little in return.

Web Rings - A web ring is a graphic placed on a website that allows visitors to travel from one related website to another. The idea is that everyone puts the graphic on her home page to create a continuous "ring". Things to Consider: It's the same old story. You're creating a distraction for your visitor and potentially sending your traffic to your competitor. It just doesn't seem like a good idea. These rings are often broken by members and you never know it.

And even more BAD ideas:

Buying Hits - It is so sad, but there is an entire industry that takes advantage of traffichungry website owners. If you see an ad that says, "Buy 10,000 targeted hits" or an eBay auction that says, "2 Million Hits to Your Website," run the other way. Here's how these programs work: Your entire web page pops-up while somebody is surfing another website or is using particular software. Sometimes these hits are delivered within in a day or a few days and you have no idea where your site is popping up. You must realize that these aren't bonus fide visitors to your website; it's just people who may have been annoyed by your website popping up in their faces. Let's go back to our conversion rate calculations. We know that a 1% conversion rate isn't bad. If buying hits was a good idea, we would get 100 sales for every 10,000 hits we bought. We've tested this. It just doesn't happen. And don't be fooled by people who tell you they can target your hits by country or industry. There is NOTHING targeted by forcing someone to view your website without permission.

Surfing for Traffic - There are all kinds of programs where you can surf other people's websites in return for other people surfing yours. These programs are generally free.

Search Engine Submission - It's big business but is a COMPLETE waste of time and money - Let us start by saying that you should NEVER pay anyone to submit your website to search engines. First of all, many of these programs use auto-submitters, which are against many search engine guidelines. But the biggest "scam" of all is that these companies will say things like: "Submit your site to the top 500 search engines" "Your site submitted to 5000 search engines" Let's be serious. There aren't 5000 worthwhile search engines, let alone 500. There are just a handful of search engines that will bring you a significant amount of traffic. These include Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Then you'll probably see some traffic from AOL, Netscape, Ask Jeeves, EarthLink, DogPile and a few more. But you know what? You don't actually have to submit to these sites to get listed. Search engines follow links on the Internet and if you have websites linking to you, these search engines will find you. So, if you want to get listed and stay listed, all you need is to acquire a few links to your website. If you don't believe us, take it from Google & Yahoo:

Google Webmaster Guidelines: "We add thousands of new sites to our index each time we crawl the Web, but if you'd like, you may submit your URL as well. Submission is not necessary and does not guarantee inclusion in our index. Given the large number of sites submitting URLs, it's likely your pages will be found in an automatic crawl before they make it into our index through the URL submission form...
...The best way to ensure Google finds your site is for your page to be linked from lots of pages on other sites. Google's robots jump from page to page on the Web via hyperlinks, so the more sites that link to you, the more likely it is that we'll find you quickly."

Yahoo Help:
"Yahoo! Search crawls the web every 2-4 weeks and automatically finds new content for indexing. If pages already in the Yahoo! Search index link to your site, it will be considered for inclusion in the next update of the index."