I'm having a hard time figuring out how to get traffic to some of my sites.

I have one site that has some fair traffic, about 2/3 of it coming from its forums.

I have three other sites that I can hardly get any traffic to. Two are forums, in pretty good niches, and one is an content site with technology/web design articles. I've written two articles on php that have been submitted to multiple article database sites (ezinearticles.com and the like, probably 10 sites).

I get virtually no traffic to all of these sites, probably 5 uniques at most per
day on the two forum sites, and probably 5-15 uniques per day on the article site. The one site with fair traffic is getting about 250 uniques per day, but this is basically the same visitors everyday.

Should I list out the sites here?

My question is basically what are my options for getting traffic to these sites?

I've read all the basic tips (unique content, more content, backlinks, etc) but none of these seem to help very much at all. I just feel like i'm going in the wrong direction with all of it. My goal is monetizing with ads, and i've got the four sites monetized, but I'm not getting very much money, and I know its due to traffic.

For the webdesign stuff I'd make a point about joining up on forums and things and helping out with questions people have etc - make sure you've got the link with a short description (just saying what it is quickly as well as url) in your sig. For some questions you may even be able to direct them to an article on your site....or use their questions as a prompt for more articles to write.

This way you get more exposure for your links, and people are likely to check your site out just out of interest. Other options you could look at is to submit some content to Digg and Netscape.com etc. It just gets your URL out there a bit more...and once it is Google et al will pickup on it then hopefully you should start to get some more traffic in through seraches and stuff.

I had a look at your studiothreehundred one - are the articles there from an article site? You may find that there are a lot of established and higher-ranking sites with the exact same articles who are getting a slice of the pie before you on the most common keywords. Could be worth trying to get unique content (i.e. write your own or get someone to write it for you), instead of concentrating on quantity.

Not sure if you have done any SEO on it, but would be a good idea if you haven't

On the studiothreehundred site, I have written two articles that I sent out to all the major article sites. That did okay, but the response wasn't really worth the effort it took.

As far as SEO, I feel like I'm completely lost on it. Everywhere I look for help on it, I feel like its all over my head, like the information starts out on step 5, but I don't know steps 1-4 (if you know what I mean). I've submitted the urls of my sites to the major search engines, tried creating some backlinks, but there's no response to any of this, so it feels like a lost cause.

For example, on my studiothreehundred site, say I decide I want to show up for a certain keyword/phrase, what are the steps that go into that? Do I pick a phrase, put it in my meta tags, make sure the content is specific to the phrase, then submit the urls? If that's all I do, how does the search engine know that i'm trying to show up for those keywords? Is it simply because that's what the page is about, or am I missing some steps in there?

Well for a start the best/easiest way to get traffic to your site aside from PPC is Organic Search Results.

If you want to rank for a particular phrase in the search rules then that phrase needs to be on your pages & you also need links to your pages with relevant anchor text.

So for example, in your signature there you are making the first mistake of SEO.

You have your sig down as

http://www.studiothreehundred.com

Ideally, depending on what sort of keywords you wanted to rank for your sig should be:

PHP Resource or whatever keyword you were targeting.

Submit your site to directories I've got a Directory List over on my forum you will find useful, it has over 600 non recip directories you can submit to.

Submit your site to directories with the Anchor text you want, I would pick 5 phrases or so:

PHP Resource
PHP Articles

And so on, use Digital Points Keyword Suggestion Tool to see which phrases are most popular, then once you start your campaign track your SERP Position with Digital Point's Ranking Tool

If you have any other questions etc I'd be happy to help you out.

Thank you very much Big Daddy. The tip you gave me about the mistake I made is very helpful!! If anyone else has anymore SEO pointers, I'd VERY MUCH appreciate it.