Anyone even slightly involved in the web promotion industry has heard of these traffic packages - basically, you pay a company X amount of money and they send Y amount of visitors to your site. These packages don't work, unless your goal is to get ripped off. Web promotion just isn't something that can effectively be outsourced, because of the unverifiability of the quality of the hits received.

These "traffic-generation" and "promotion-package" businesses don't specialize in hit quality. These businesses specialize in creating the appearance of promotion and targeted traffic. These companies are professionals at making it look like they've sent you loads of targeted traffic on paper, and that's all. You can't blame these businesses. They're interested in making sales for themselves. They don't care about the success of your business. They don't care about the success of your website.

You, in contrast, who are interested in the reputation and success of your business can produce quality traffic. With the right methods and effort, you can successfully promote your website or internet business without using black-hat methods or rip-off traffic generators.

Let me shortly outline a few methods:

Networking:

Business networking has been around long before the internet, but the advent of the internet has incalculably multiplied not only the power of networking, but also the ability of small business-people to network. Nowadays, an online business-person can sit-down at home in their pajamas and instantly network with like-minded business-people or clients from the other side of the earth. Networking can lead to great self-promotion, both direct and indirect. For example, a DVD salesman might tell someone in his/her network about a DVD sale on the new X-men movie; then that person may tell his X-Men fan club, which could lead to a large increase in sales of that DVD. Many websites exist to facilitate networking, such as MySpace and Ryze.

Article Submission:

Despite its effectiveness, many webmasters and internet business-people don't know about this method. It's simple really: just write a short article, around a few hundred words. Insert keywords relating to your business. Add a footer or resource box with a sentence or two of information about you and/or your business with links. Also, in the resource box, write that you give permission for the article to be reprinted so long as the resource box and links stay included and intact. (Look at the below this article for an example.) You can then publish your article, by placing it on your website and/or submitting it to article-directories.

Search Engine Traffic:

Probably the most effective self-generation of web traffic is search engines. If your site is ranked highly on search engines for the relevant keywords, then your customers will find you. Search engines look for content-rich websites with a focused subject. Also, search engines rank websites by the number of websites that link to them, called link popularity. Increasing the rank of your site on search engines is called search engine optimization (or SEO).

Use methods such as these to self-generate traffic and promotion for your website, rather then getting ripped off by offers for "traffic-packages", "hit-generators", et cetera.