What is the best way to promote a new website?

activeserve, forget directory listing. who uses directories anymore anyway? And google is not dumb enough to give any link juice to them.

Create an account on ezinearticles and start submitting articles. Get at least 30 articles on there. This is a great way of starting off a site. I do it and Google seems to like it. I create no other inbound links except those on the footer of my articles and Google starts to send me SE traffic within a month or two.