Despite what a lot of scam sites and a lot of webmasters tell you there are only a few "bad" ways of advertising. First I will explain the popular "bad advertising" techniques. The first way is by adding a FFA page to your website.
This is a very BAD advertising method. Despite what others may say it doesn't work. The only people who visit your site end up being people adding links to your ffa page. It is for this reason that popular search engines like altavista, yahoo, google, MSN, alltheweb, and hotbot give you no credit for having such pages, they eliminate all keywords generated by ffa pages on your site. Not to say posting on other people's FFA's will hurt but do not start your own.
Banner exchanges are bad news. Lets face it no one anywhere clicks on banners. How many banners have you clicked on in the past month? The problem with banner exchanges are that first like I said, no one clicks banners. The second problem is the don't get you better search engine results. Most banner exchanges don't directly link to your url. Instead they have banner links that look like www.bannerexchange.com?url_link25. This means all the people using banner exchanges create hits for the banner exchange rather then there own websites.
Link exchange programs are are 50/50. Search engines give you lessed ratings for relying ONLY on link exchange Programs. Link exchanges have been known to not work, provide false keywords, create untargetted traffic, and search engines are starting to see this. Joining a link exchange program is good for some exposure but doesn't bring the results you are looking for.
So what works? Good hard effort. First start your own link exchange and hand pick who you want to link with. Hand picked links are always looked highly upon. It means you take pride in your website, it means you don't link to sites of nothing but affiliate links, it means your links and link returns are targeted, something google looks for, and it gives your site a little something others don't have.
Get listed in yahoo directories. This is VERY important. Google automatically gives you better rankings just for getting listed in yahoo. Another very importanbt place to get your site listed is dmoz.org. Google also gives you better rankings for getting listed on this site. Not only that if you get listed on dmoz you get listed on not only dmoz but hundreds of sites across the net including directory.google.com.
Okay so toher then links where do you go. Go to message board systems relating to your website topic. DO NOT SPAM MESSAGE BOARDS. Rather create a signature file and start talking to others who need help in a given topic. (example you are a website offering free webmaster tools, goto webmaster recourses bulletin boards and talk of all different tools you have used and what you like (not just your tools) The more you post the more people see your links, and the more search engines pick them up also. Don't stop at message boards, also look into usenet groups alt.business ect. Again don't spam search engines remove spammed addresses from the lists.
Free online ezline classified ads do wonders. Finding free classified ads are a bit tricky but when you find them use them. No you don't get huge ammounts of exposure but perhaps if just one or two people visit your site, maybe they link to you and it was suddenly worth while.
Basically the trick to making advertising work is to invest time and try everything. If you find automated programs that claim to give you higher rankings either they don't work, or they don't work long. Its always better to do things the manual way. This is how you make real money on the intertnet and this is how you get real exposure.
http://www.free-personals.tk (one of the best newest unautomated targeted link trading sites on the net)