Hey everybody. I wanted to stop by and share my experience and a little encouragement with my fellow webmasters out there. I launched my website (i.e. the newest version of it about a month ago). Things were painfully slow in the beginning, but I must say, things have started to pick up. I began following the advice of posters on this board and began to actually market it old school style. I have found that if you rely completely on SEO and search engines you will get discouraged very quickly. There is just too much competition to rely on this avenue as a sole channel for traffic and I have abandoned many a website because of it. Don't get me wrong, search engines offer the most potential for traffic, but I wouldn't rely on it, at least not in the beginning. If you want to succeed, you first need a useful product, be it items for sale or information or whatever. Next, make sure your website is fully functional. Nothing deters visitors like a half completed website. Then, market it old school style. Sure you want to make sure it is optimized for search engines, but you also want it to look nice and be comfortable to move around in and that is part of marketing it. Now, roll up your sleeves and promote it. Open a squidoo lens about it, post comments in blogs, write and submit articles about it, submit it to directories, talk about it on twitter (and follow a ton of related people), produce youtube videos about it and it's subject, open a myspace account about it...the list goes on and on. Hard work it the only option...and time. You have to be in it for the long haul. Just remember, you have to start with something useful...
That's very true - and especially if you focus on creating something useful, SEO efforts are likely to actually pay off. And other marketing activities can supplement your SEO efforts for example through link acquisition - which also is more effective if you actually create something useful. There are some great synergy effects to pick up this way.