Unfortunately, not. To just build a website now-a-days is not enough. If there are no links to the site anywhere, or pings, or crawls or search engine hits, nobody is going to visit. Sadly enough, its the truth when it comes to most niches. To get traffic, you will need to do promotion.

One of the more important things you can do to a website (aside from actually build it and continuously update it), is to market it and publicize it. It can be a thrilling yet grueling experience, or it can be the end of it all. There are a few multiple ways to make your website popular, whether it be through web directories, PPC, reciprocal linking, or a few others which I will eventually talk about (such as link-baiting).

Web Directories:

Though this is a basic part of any promotional campaign, web directories may not generate much in traffic itself, but it will definitely make a positive impact on your sites search engine ranking. Link backs are a great way to build up a websites visibility on the internet which can lead to some good quality traffic.

Pay per click Advertising:

Although a bit riskier (depending on your niche and what you can get out of it), it is very easy to go through a lot of money with no reward if your not careful. If you do not have a sales copy or lots of linkbaited referral links (preferably with cookies for future sales) then you will need to be careful with how much you spend on this. google adwords is a good place for this, however, because you can set your maximum daily budget. However, though 3/day doesnt seem much, thats $90 a month out of your pocket. Without a well defined sale letter or website, this may not be all its cracked up to be (at first).

Reciprocal Linking:

I know, I know. Ewwwww! Not Reciprocals. While frowned upon to many webmasters, a relevant reciprocal link can be an important traffic generating tool. It isn’t really a good idea to link to competitors, although visitors will be interested in your product/site/blog (take Entrecard for example). If you are just starting, there is a small chance that you might lose them to your competitors who have built up more posts or more content than yourself. Be your own judge on this one. Some places require a recip link to get listed in a directory, for example. I have found these a bit useful (but not overly).

Quality Traffic:

This is the golden nugget. Everyone wants more quality traffic to their site. Sure, “Traffic” is easy to obtain. Manual Hit Exchanges, PTC (paid to click) sites, auto surfers, etc. This will bring traffic to your site/blog, but that is all that it will do. It will not create repeat customers (especially with PTC sites, because the address bar will not actually show the real site name on it, but often a garbaged up address that links to it), it will, if anything, just burn up your bandwidth for little to no reward (other than an inflated alexa rating and perhaps some CPM counts, or if you are receiving a decent amount of money from banners/popups/popunders.

Repeat Traffic:

Unless you are selling a product and want customers to get in, get it, and be done, you will want visitors to return to your site. If there is nothing of value on your site, visitors will not return (if anything it will be rare). This is what most people wish on their Christmas list, however. Repeat traffic. Repeat Visitors. That would be the life
One Way Links:

Here we are. This is what we need. One way links. Trackbacks. Pingbacks. These are best viewed in the eyes of the SEO deities and can also be a good source of traffic (if you look in the right places). There are a number of ways to get one-way links. The easiest ways include submitting to free web directories (refer to ThinkBlogger’s previous post of web directories) and Article writing (again, Thinkblogger has a few top sources for this, aswell).

So these are a few buildings blocks needed to get visitors coming to your site. Others can include contests for prizes or special rank. Forums. Blogs. RSS.

Really though, there are hundreds of ways to get some nice traffic to your site, and guess what, their really up to you to implement. You have to be creative. Be unique. You will succeed, just give it time. (I know I will). I’m not in any rush to make this blog swarmed with comments or visitors (even though lately, we have had some nice life and activity on the blog and I thank everyone for visiting and leaving their comments)