Communities

If you have parked your site on a host of any size, especially if it is one of the larger free services, you should definitely join their communities.

What is a community? It's generally just a directory of the sites hosted by the service. For example, Tripod communities are called "Pods", and there are lots of them. What cool about this is it's free advertising. You probably won't get many hits as a result, but it is automatic and free.

Let's use Tripod as the example. If you had a "Renaissance Faire" site hosted on Tripod, you could join it to the "Renaissance History", "History", "World History" and perhaps "Partying" pods (I've made up the names for purposes of illustration). This would get your site listed in those directories on Tripod. Thus people who were interested in those subjects would have an easier time finding your site.

Virtually every major host (Tripod, Angelfire, Geocities, AOL and so on) have communities of some kind.  Many of them do not determine if the site being added to the community is on their service. Thus, you may conceivably add your site to the communities of other hosts.

Doing this step will probably not gain you an incredibly amount of traffic, but it is one of those things that once it is does it is automatic and does not have to be repeated. The more automatic traffic generators you can create, the more traffic you can get.