'Low Cost Advertising' in many many cases is simply 'Waste Of Time'.

A lot of the time, the cheapest advertising is cheap because they're crap.

Try to link up relationships with other sites and get your link on their site. If you have friends with websites, see if you can put your link on their site.

Meta tags with keywords/description/etc is a good idea for search engine pick-up. Basically, submit to anything free you see, like all search engines, maybe nose around Adbrite.com and see if theres any big companies that aim towards visitors that may be interested in what you offer. Buy a link on there (some aren't that expensive, but some really are. Advertising in DeviantART for example, is about $250 for a week)

It's still difficult to actually have a successful site with a great amount of traffic without a decent budget for advertising. Ive been trying for ages, and it isnt easy.