Ivan

I’m a writer and have been a journalist though and have never found any other way to get people to pay for my stuff (or read it at all) that wasn’t good content (and yes, humour is an excellent condiment!)

Peter

In all seriousness, though, I think a lot of the naivete about gaining traffic comes from inexperience and impatience. It’s the age-old issue of people wanting everything without doing anything.

Jason

You bring up a lot of great points. But I personally think the optimal way of helping people to learn good marketing techniques is to preach from a humor standpoint. For example, “the best ways to advertise your site” looks serious at first glance, especially if you just look at the title. But at least they’re trying to list out good methods in a funny way, making it more likely for people to listen.

After all, the best way to get across to someone who doesn’t want to listen is to make them laugh about it. Over time, humor can change people’s perceptions. (I won’t go into the jester/king analogy, but I think you get the idea.)

Now, apply that to the comment above, and it’s true, people get to your site by seeing a link on someone else’s site, or by paid advertising. If you wanted to, you could say that links from another side are a form of word of mouth – which, of course, is advertising (just not paid) – so you could abstract the comment to say, truthfully, that the only way to get anyone to come to your site is to advertise. The same holds true for everything. Nobody will email you unless you tell people your email address (unless you count random spam that just happens to hit your box because a computer guessed your address, but that’s neither here nor there)

That said, I wholly understand what you’re talking about. There are SO many ways to get traffic to your site if you want to get detailed in talking about them.

Blog comments
Blog posts about your site
Forum posts
Forum signatures
YouTube
USFreeAds
Google Base
EzineArticles (and the billions of other article directories)
Squidoo
Person to person emails
Email newsletters
Word of mouth
Actual conversations with people (gasp! heh)
Google, Yahoo, et al.
Facebook, MySpace, et al.
I could go on… and on… and on…

And, of course, pretty much all of the above can be achieved for free, or paid for, depending on how fast you want it done. (and in some cases, how well)

I’m quite sure I know your frustration first hand. I’ve been marketing my products and services online for years now, and I’ve seen it all (though, I do still get surprised more often than I’d like) – the spam, the pseudo-spam, the “innocent” spam by people just starting out, etc. It’s all elegantly crafted to suck people in to perpetuate the system (read: the pyramid) and not actually teach anyone much of anything.

The sad part is that this can be combatted with common sense and a very small bit of research, but people are looking so hard for a “magic pill” that they’ll try anything that dangles dollar signs in front of them. And I do use the word “try” lightly, because when simultaneously spamming 1 million blogs with a comment about the latest pyramid scheme doesn’t work, they jump ship and try the next “next best thing.”

For the past 3 years, I’ve been trying to find some way to help people who easily fall into that trap, and I’ve found that most of them don’t want to be helped, unfortunately. There are those who do, but the vast majority are looking for push button profits, and that just doesn’t exist.

Sorry for the long winded comment, Lorelle, you hit a pressure point for me on this one heh – Great conversation starter!