Of course you can. I would say search engine traffic is quality traffic that is incredibly targetted because people come by searching for very secific information. It does not take a lot of money to get search traffic, though money can expediate the process.
I agree, one of my sites (third in my sig) is growing very nicely and has over 550 members (opened August this year) and is making decent profits for me. It is ranked no1 in google UK for quite a few dropshipping terms and this is the main source of traffic. I have spent a grand total of $0 on promoting it! Because it is such a niche it is easy to get high search engine rankings with just a few quality link exchanges. If you have your own niche then it is quite easy to gain high-quality traffic from natural means, but if you are in a mass market like gaming then you will probably need quite a bit of money!
promote your site.. submit your site to free directories, join some forums with your sig.. send articles , find some exchange link partners...
I agree, You might have to do a lot of additional keyword research to strike gold though. But it really can reap rewards.
Write good and new content that people might want to read, that will certainly get people's attention and get more traffic.
Time = money. Same is true on the web. If you don't want to invest the cash, you gotta invest the time. An occasional few creative folk can beat that equation, but it's rare.
It is true that if you do not have money to invest that you will have to exchange your time instead. Maximize your time by producing quality content and articles and submitting to the top article directories. Exchanging links with related sites is also a good idea. And posting helpful content with you sig on forums will also help you traffic wise. You may also want to consider joint venturing with a related site owner who gets decent traffic. For example, perhaps you could provide his visitors with useful content that includes a reference back to your own site. You are only limited by your imagination...
You have no guarantee's with bought traffic. Most of it will probably be foreign traffic that won't benefit your site. Other will be pop-up's that will be blocked or deleted before it's seen. And some will be electronically manipulated and only indicate traffic to your site, when actually there's nothing. Adwords will drive targeted traffic to your site quickly. So will Yahoo targeted traffic and a number of other PPC's that are substantially cheaper than Google. Some can be purchased for five cents or less. Put AdSense on your site to get it quickly indexed by Google and then work on your keywords to find the best combination for your product. If you can rank near the top for one or two key phrases, you can easily drive several hundred visitors a day to your site. Make sure your domain name contains portions of your primary keywords. Make sure that your main keyword phrase is on your home page, near the top or in the first paragraph, and ideally with a html tag of either H1 or H2. Contact someone with a similar site who has a pagerank of 5 or better and ask them to add your link to their site. If they publish a newsletter, ask them to add a little ad for your site to their publication. In return.. appeal to their vanity and ask them for an interview to add to your site. 90% will jump at the chance.. Add fresh content to your site at least once a week. Write an article and put it on your site. After it's been on your site for a couple of weeks, submit it to a couple of the main article submission sites. If possible, and this was a KILLER for my site, get a couple of links in an article or two in Wikipedia. I get more traffic from this tip than even from Google, and I have 70+ pages indexed and numerous first page listings.. Rick C.
simple: write quaility content with selective keywords optimization. Search Engine will find your site.