Anybody here who doesnt promote your sites at all, yet make good money. what you think about this? Does this hurt the full potential of a site.
I don't think money can be made without promoting your website. Even if you pretended to have lots of visitors and sold a link spot on your new site, you have just gone and promoted it to that person that would have bought the link sale. So no promotion = no money. Even if you purchase domains and sell them cheaper, you are still promoting the domain by trying to sell it dearer.
The figure varies a huge amount depending on how well you market and how well you SEO your websites... One of my websites gets 80% traffic from search engines while another gets 10%.
If you develop an awesome website and do some pro SEO there's not much need for promotion, people will spread the word (the people who arrive from search engines).
I doubt you can popularize and make money from your site without promoting it. There are so many new sites and without promotion you are just one of the many. Your name will be remembered after being seen a few times, well hopefully more than just a few. Once a prospect gets to know your site and then sees you're serious about your business, he/she will feel more comfortable by doing business with you. Promotion is KEY!
SE are of course one part. But remember, social networking sites like Digg, Stumble can send you huge traffic, if people like your site.
I don't think so. Even if it is good. How will people find out about it? Just because you'll be listed on Page 200 in SE results?
If your site is very good you only need to do a little promoting. If the site is crap you'll need to do a tonne of promoting.
Little promoting is fine. Will "little" income also be fine? Good and Best will not always sell if people do not know about it. We all buy a lot of garbage, just because it is bombarded into our sychic by Marketers, TV, News and so on. There might be better products and services, but if we do not know where they are, we will never buy them. If Coke and McDonald's (by the way, I never drink this s..t or eat the other garbage anyway) were not advertised (read: promoted), would they be so popular? Why would you want to swollow 10 spoons of sugar anyway? People do, not because there is a "little" promotion going on.
I made a proxy unfliter.us and didnt put any links to it, to see how fast it would grow, it didnt grow, but after submitting it to be crawled by google it skyrocketed so you can get a way without heavily promoting your site but why would you want to limit yourself like that.