I've recently put up a website to sell fishing lures, and I am looking for a cheap but somewhat effect way to advertise the site... my budget for this project is currently quite small. Anybody have any ideas?

The best low budget but very effective advertising method I have found is being listed on the various search engines.

Being on the first page of a google search would be the goal.

You can not purchase this placement so it solves you budget dilemma.

The XOOPS CMS is a very good tool to achieve this with.

I have managed to get several of my sites onto the first page.

I did not use any search engine submission services or expend any capital on this.

By carefuling choosing keywords and being in the correct category you will have success.

Thanks for the good advice.

You are very welcome.

Try searching google for a keyword program. These tools are used to determine what keywords people are looking for on the various search engines.

If you choose keywords that are not being sought your ad campaign will be useless.

You can also read the Xoops Webranking in 10 lessons written by Solo for the Wolfactory.

Happy Xoopsing.

Don't forget to exchange links with similar sites.

Spend 15 mins everyday finding a site that is somehow related to your product (preferably in the top twenty for that Keyword, with a high page rank)
and ask the owner to exchange links.

Google loves sites in constant development, and because it wants to be the most up to date search engine will revisit constantly updated sites everyday if necessary. You should mention your product as often as possible on the homepage and change this text slightly every week. To get indexed quickly find a site that is being indexed everyday and ask if you can have a temporary link on the homepage. The googlebot will follow the link and index your site that day. A site that is being crawled everyday has the date next to its listing.

Don't set your links page to 'open in frame' as a webmaster that knows what he is doing will not exchange links with you.

Concentrate on Google - you must be page one to get any decent traffic.
But once you are there, don't rest - there will always be people trying to get above you. Look at sites in the top ten for your keywords, and note how they have structured their text. Remember, writing for a search engine is not the same as writing for a human.

NB: Google is currently displaying a 'Sandbox effect' where new sites appear in its index and then disappear for up to three months.

You can use overture.com to find out the most searched for terms for your product.

Thanks everybody for the help, hopefully over the course of the next couple of weeks I can get my site to climb towards the top 10 websites.

@rudycash

This is very insightful information about a subject (Google) which is hard to nail down.

Thank you,

I've spent months, studying Google. If you have no advertising budget it is the best way to generate traffic to a commercial site. + Google is one of the few search engines that will index a XOOPS site properly. The only problem with XOOPS is that ideally every page should have a different page title. (try some of the hacks to do this)

Posting on forums related to your service (always including your URL in the signature) is also a good trick to improve your pagerank.