If you have a real site that provides quality content based on real world experiences you can submit to article directories of course, but you can also contact REAL Newspapers (Print Newspapers are really suffering so they nearly all have an online presence). There is an increasing amount of intertwined articles between the blogshpere and traditional news outlets. Get a hold of a reporter at the newspaper and ask them to do a story about a topic you have written about and offer to help them for a link. Most have a published email address. Newspaper links tend to stick around a very long time and generate a lot of traffic.
this works particularly well with smaller local rags. If you offer them free content, and it's well written and topical, they'll probably be interested.
In todays world of internet marketing this is a very realistic opportunity for marketing a website. The other and yet similar alternative is to release a well written press release to the top ten press release websites!
well that's why some people write press releases Write a cool press release, submit it to a couple of sites that deal with press releases and if your article is really good you might inspire a couple of journalists to write about your website in their newspaper.