If there is one thing this business can be boiled down to is that of getting hits.

There are numerous ways to get visitors to your site

Traffic is the key. You can have the best looking site in the world, but if folks don't get to your front page, you will make nothing. While there are numerous ways to get traffic, I will go over a few. I welcome other input from webmasters who have found success in other methods.


Direct E-mail (spam) 
 I personally have never done this, so I cannot go into detail about it. But so much spam goes on that it must be working for someone. Unless you are very experienced in sending out spam, I would suggest letting the pros do it for you. For a certain amount of money, they will get your e-mail out, and you won't have to worry about your service provider cutting you off.


Newsgroups
Newsgroups postings are used by many sites to generate traffic. James at AdultServe makes a comfortable living by using postings almost exclusively. Once again, though, I am not an expert here, so I will wait until I get more info to expand upon this.


Links
Links generate traffic. No doubt about it. The quality of the traffic can vary, though.


Links to link sites 
Link sites, especially the good ones, can bring in a lot of traffic. If the link site webmaster categorizes the links and maybe write a little bit about them, the traffic converts even better, and there are thousands of link sites out there.


Picture posts and thumbnail galleries
Picture posts and thumbnail galleries are very popular with browsers. Some of these can generate huge amounts of traffic for short periods of time. Surfers who hit in these, though, are not the best as far as conversion goes. People use these sites for free content, not pay. However, the large amounts of traffic can exceed your contracted allowance of bandwidth, and the extra charges may be far more than the extra income generated because of the traffic.


Links to other sites 
If done smart, this can be a treasure trove of quality links. I recommend that you look at top 100 lists and sites with high search engine rankings with the same genre of content as your site has. Then e-mail them and ask for a link.  If they say no, or if they do not reply, you've only wasted a few minutes of your time. But if they say yes, you can get some good quality traffic. Remember though, that the more links you put up, especially outside your pay area, the more opportunities your surfer has of going elsewhere rather than paying you. So pick and choose your links carefully.


Top 100 Lists
Sometimes called bad traffic recyclers, Top 100 lists can never-the-less generate hits. The more you send the list from your site, the higher you are placed on their list, and theoretically, the more hits you will receive in turn. I am not convinced the traffic is particularly great, but I think it is a net gain. In order to earn high rankings, you need to send the lists traffic. With membership or avs sites, this means placing the links outside your membership areas. So you are letting potential customers get away, although most of them would most likely have left anyway without joining.


Advertising
Ads work. But they may not be financially viable for small or AVS sites. For example, Excite offers banner impressions for adult keyword packages. That means that when people request any of many adult keywords, your banner shows at the top of the list. However, only about 10% at the most will click on your banner. With an AVS site, you would be doing well to convert 1 in 500 visitors to sales, and each conversion might put £10 in your pocket. So the economics does not support it.  However, if you have a large membership site, one which is fairly expensive and which does recurring billing, the numbers can support the outlay.


Search Engines
Search engines produce the best traffic, by far.  Getting SE hits is the webmasters' holy grail.


Yahoo is the king as far as getting traffic. However, they are rather more stringent in accepting sites. You may want to try their Buisness Express service. It does not mean your site will be accepted, but at least you will have a decision within a week.


Many services offer to submit your sites to thousands of search engines. Most of these search engines and directories are worthless. You need to get into AOL, Alta Vista, Excite, HotBot, NorthernLight, and Lycos. These will provide you most of your traffic.


Getting a top placement in a search engine is a complicated and only somewhat understood evolution. Going into it is far more than I can attack in the scope of this site.  I recommend WebPosition as a good place to start in trying to understand the meta tags, keyword weighting, and other techinques used to gain high placement.