Think of other resources besides money that you can use for promoting projects: 1) your time and energy and 2) creativity. A reliable way to get traffic is to produce valuable content such as articles and videos. Sure, they also need promotion, but you can post them to HN, reddit, etc from time to time and it will be more reliable and sustainable source of traffic than a one-time link to the project. It's a hard way but it works 100%.
Look for new platforms and communities that are not sick of things being promoted. There is an excellent observation about Mastodon now in the comments.
SEO works. I've prototyped a new project recently – a collection of learning resources on IT topics (https://bestresourcestolearnx.com) – I haven't even started to promote it yet but it gets some relevant SEO traffic anyway.
Creative promotion ideas are project-specific, but I would think about how you can collaborate with people with some audience in your field. Like game developers giving away their games to streamers and influencers.
And mention your project when the opportunity arises (if appropriate, of course).
Look for new platforms and communities that are not sick of things being promoted. There is an excellent observation about Mastodon now in the comments.
SEO works. I've prototyped a new project recently – a collection of learning resources on IT topics (https://bestresourcestolearnx.com) – I haven't even started to promote it yet but it gets some relevant SEO traffic anyway.
Creative promotion ideas are project-specific, but I would think about how you can collaborate with people with some audience in your field. Like game developers giving away their games to streamers and influencers.
And mention your project when the opportunity arises (if appropriate, of course).