I always feels that instead of spending money on adwords for bringing traffic you should spend it on getting backlinks and to rank higher. You may not get immediate results as compared to adwords but in long run this will be far better.Ofcourse if you are selling something that adwords is fine
adwords proves well for copywriting sales letters and the like. but in fact you are right, spending $300 on a seo company or freelancer is much mroe worth than spending it on clicks for a non-selling, but commercial web site
IME if you get the correct keyword it means business for you... On my first adword try I lost 30$ in 1 day without ROI... you can get a lot of adwords clicks but the response rate is low.. so research for the right keyword and adwords will do the rest...
I believe that it just takes time. The older your site is the more you'll get visits. You have to just stick in there for the long run, you know.
How do you know who bookmarks your website? Awstats is not accurate (when my site first started, they assumed 327/135 of my visitors had bookmarked my site!
Of course these statistics aren't accurate, but looking at AwStats and Webalizer, I see that for some of my sites, most of the users don't have any kind of referrer, so they must come from direct typing, bookmarks or homepage. Of course the system has some flaws...
Google seems to get me the most traffic but not as much as I would like to. I'm still exploring other ways to get a boost.