Getting Traffic may seem like a daunting experience but it really isn't To hard to do. There are many diffrent ways to bring traffic to your site some which require money to do so and some that are free but you will have to work a little harder at it.
What is traffic exactly? It is when a person on the computer lands on your site. Thats traffic once there its up to your content to keep them there.
Paid Traffic
Paid Traffic has some great advantages over the free traffic in the beginning becuase your getting traffic sooner.
The one we all know about is Google adsence, a website or business pays Google to show there ads on websites, in turn Google pays you when a person clicks on the ad.
So if you are a website owner and you want to get some quick traffic you could advertise on Google adsence then when a person clicked on the ad you would pay Google.
This is a very expensive venture normally and will end up costing quite a bit. but the results will be noticeable pretty quick and if done right you may get more traffic than you thought. Setting up the ad properly will be your main concern, if it doesn't attract, you get no traffic.
There are other services one can use to drive traffic as well, Facebook and Yahoo has there own version of Google adsence.
Then there are Paid Directories . Paid Directories are kind of like a phone book for websites. You pay to submit your site or specific pages and then your site is added to the section which it belongs. Warning here Some Directories will charge you a admittance fee and if you site does not pass there standards it will be declined and you will be out the cash. (Don't pay just yet)
Sometimes you can buy space on another site for a small charge per month.
FREE Traffic
Free traffic is a bit more tricky and you will have to work harder at it.
Lets start with Directories yes some of these are free to submit too and are suggested to do so. While The paid directories are looked more fondly upon by search engines there are free ones as well that they like. Finding these are fairly difficult and will take time but you want to submit to page rank 3 or higher. Page rank 2 and 1 are ok but they are normally not looked at like a page rank 3 or better.
Write a Article and submit it to a article site like ezinearticles.com. Becoming a author at one of these sites actually does a few things for you show that you know what your are talking about and it allows you to send people to your site. There are many article sites, and the more of these your article's are on the better. (you may want to change them a bit for each to give them a diffrent feel)
Links to your site if other people link to your site this is great especially if you do not need to link to theirs, however sometimes you may want to link share with another website if there site give great information about something that will help your readers but u know very little about. If you can get them to link to your site and you link to theirs this is called link sharing.
Word of mouth, the way this works is someone finds your site, see's that it has great content and tells another person. This is great way to get traffic becuase people trust people they know.
Also having good content makes Google sit up and notice you and more you have the more it sends. IF you have directories,links to your site, articles and ads Google is going to say hmmm maybe this site has stuff that people really need to see.
Note: There are Paid Directories out there that will submit your site(s) to free directories for a fee, some will even submit to payed ones for a fee as well. Also there are programs that you can buy that will do the same thing.
Resources
Kieran Gill & Imran S Present Auto Traffic Avalanche
New Article Submitter Software - Submit to 668 directories!
Easy Traffic Steps - The Ultimate Traffic Guide
MySpace PPC Cash Videos
The Domain Tweak System
Steven Lee Jones Presents... Traffic Anarchy