If you are going to do somthing, do it well. Make sure you get the best Banner Exchange for you and your level of traffic.
Make sure you have got good Keywords before submitting to search engines as with many you only get the one chance.

When submitting to search engines, make sure you have got a good list of keywords and a snappy discription fist. The Aim of your Keywords is to make you site appears in the search engine and at a resonable rank. But when you have manged that you have to make a disription for you site that will make people click through to your site, and hopefully be quite accurate.

Step 1) choise you Banner Exchange and join
step 2) Make a good set of Meta Tags, Lots of Keywords and a snappy Discription
Step 3) Use AddMe to submit your site to 34 search engines for free. Other compaies
Step 4) Join a webring for each topic your site covers and put thm on the approiate page
step 5) Get your site listed. For example if you offer anything for free, try submitting to the freesite.com. freecenter.com and freeindex.com Your best bet is the latter, they list all free sites, and List them well!
You are unlikely to be listed with the free site of freecenter if unless you have a high traffic Domain
Step 6) Submit to Free for all link pages and do as many linkswaps as possible, these benefit both partys and don't cost eaither a thing. Start by swapping link with me :-)
Step 7) Use Newsgoups to promote you site, especcially if you offer a speciallist service.
Step 8) Get promotion Newsletters, these can give you lots of advice and incites into how serch enigne work, to give you a top listing. internet day is a good one to start with.
Step 9) If your realy serious, get as many newsletters as you can from homepages to corparate sites. This can improve the content of your site, thus getting more vistors
Step 10)Maybe this should of come ealyer but, don't get caught in any scames, newsletters are a good way of avoiding this.

Is your banner exchange giving you a good deal?
If they wern't making somthing out of it they would not be there. The best ratio is 5:4 at the moment by Multi-Exchange but they don't give very good stats or target the advertising
If you decide to get payed from somone like safe_audit they give you $2.35/thousend visits this is quite poor considering they charge $20 to avertise to 1000. If you go directly you can get $10-15 per thousend + good stats using your own CGI script, you can get thes by downloading them from one of the free script pages.