How can I make my site more popular without having to pay for my website to be on some other website that costs money?

Well, having some content should help.

The only way without paying to promote your website is to advertise it yourself. Put your website url in
things like your emails, buisness cards, letters, and so on. This may seem primitave lol, but its the only way to do it free. But what i would do is buy a domain name, put META TAGS in your documents and register your site with search engines like yahoo or google. Go to www.w3.org for more info on META TAGS

The steps to creating a popular web site are:

1. Create some interesting and useful content.
2. Tell people about your site.
3. Exchange links with other related sites.
4. Keep updating your content so that it remains interesting for repeat visitors.