Actually, you should use PR, SEO and whatever else to DRIVE your target traffic. Make it specific, don't choose to not use it. How else are you going to FIND your target traffic? Unless, of course, you are lucky enough to have thousands of someone elses dollars to expend without much regard. SVentures - your post, well played. It started to piss me off until I actually read what you were doing. Way to impersonate a SPAMMER.
Depends on your marketing strategy! I don't care much for SEO. With seo you're generally looking for fresh visitors. Takes too much time. I prefer to work on brand building through paid ad campaigns or traditional advertising methods. Focus is on building customer/visitor loyalty and upselling. Takes even longer if you consider the entire process but getting the initial customer/visitor is generally near instantaneous. To each his or her own!
When I get a good wave of quality traffic it's usually from a free source like a newspaper article or a site like digg. My road rage took off that way. It got plenty of plugs from radio stations too. I still buy visitors though. I just bought some for my new site A Popularity Contest. I was able to see that the visitors were voting on my site, but not registering to become members. I have now made a few changes to encourage them, and am getting a few to join now. But of course that is why I am here. I need a new way to get people excited about it. Maybe I should bring my laptop down to a popular pub, and get people to join while they are drinking.
Best advice I ever received was this "just do something" Get the ball rolling, do something everyday to get the word out about your site or do something everyday to get new clients. Do something. Dont sit and think and plan forever, just do something, anything to get the flow going.
creating a online marketing, you must have a plan and knowledge to what you are doing, knowing some of your competitors techniques so that you can stand the competitions online... gaining the trust and having the quality of what you are marketing -then you also need to expand and explore more gimmicks in your product!
Good advice, for the 'real world', and 90% of the Web. In Cyberspace, the little guys can "fiddle about", and some of them "actually hit a home run".
Variation end experimentation. Try to use as many strategies as possible, drop what doesn't work and invest more time and money in what does.
Work hard to get the name out there. Once traffic starts coming more and more will usually follow but you need to continue every little free time you have