Have you ever heard about mouth-to-mouth advertising? It’s when you say your website to someone so that he’ll visit(in real life, in person) and you also ma say to him, if you like it tell your friends about it too.
That’s definitely the most cost-effective way to get some traffic usually from your area and country!
I have been doing some sort of a little experiment over the last months which only recently has shown its very good results.
I was telling my website to some friends and told some of them to promote it if they like it. Well those who were not interested at my articles, unfortunately didn’t ever come back. Though there were some who not only liked my posts but also promoted it too!
So just by referring to some good friends(i thank them all) i managed to get in the top 1000 of websites my country’s internet users visit, according to alexa.
Right now i get around 20 visitors daily that are from my country and my area. Couldn’t hope for something better as that way i didn’t spend any money at all and got a good amount of traffic. Though mouth-to-mouth advertising is not enough itself to get you traffic and visitors. Quality and attractive content is needed to keep the interest on and visitors coming back!
I would also suggest to use the mouth-to-mouth advertising method to targeted traffic(only people that may have some interest in your articles/content) because they’ll be the ones that will share your link and visit again 
So what are you waiting for? Give it a try! Start with your best friends and hopefully you;ll get a good result yourself too!