I work on Cruise Savvy , a Drupal 5 site that helps people plan a cruise (esp. important for the first cruise ), and browse and share their own cruise ship pictures and cruise stories. We're pretty new, and working on building site traffic, so I thought I'd share five things we've learned....
1. Create content people care about! This may sound obvious, but even if you know a lot about your topic, you might be surprised by what people want to know. Spending time on Yahoo Answers for our topic helped us identify some recurring questions that led us to write several new sections that draw in significant traffic.
2. Contribute to other sites. In related Q&A forums, give helpful answers and a (relevant) link to your site for more information. Keep in mind some forums have different link policies - Craigslist Forums pretty much consider any post with a link to be spam. Similarly, if you can add value to Wikipedia with information that's unique to your site, contribute to the site and footnote with a link. (To help deter spam, Wiki links no longer affect PR, but it can drive some traffic.)
3. Newsletters. Prominently display a newsletter sign-up block. Make it easy for non-members to give you their email address. A friend of mine who's run a fabulous fashion site for years recently started doing this and said it's the #1 thing she wishes she'd done since Day 1. As for the newsletter, don't over-saturate (once a week TOPS), with GOOD content: what's new, something you want to feature, etc.
4. Ask for a plug. We all know bloggers and journalists. Don't be shy! Ask them to write about your site. Offer to do an interview. Even if it's just a simple "a friend is working on this" link in your buddy's blog, it'll help people (and Google) find you.
5. More specifically, ask for anchor links. For a new site, these really help Google figure out what you do. Let me give you two versions of the same sentence:
(a) Nice to have: "CruiseSavvy.com is a helpful site for people thinking about their first cruise, or who want to browse and even share cruise ship pictures and cruise stories"
(b) Awesome to have: "CruiseSavvy.com, is a helpful site for people thinking about their first cruise, or who want to browse and even share cruise ship pictures and cruise stories."
Version (b) takes up no more space on the blogger's site, while also linking words like "cruise information" to specific destinations on the site, complete with Title descriptions when the reader hovers over the link. This is helpful for the readers, and helps Google figure out what a site is all about.
The HTML for that, by the way, is:<a href="http://www.cruisesavvy.com" title="Cruise Information and Reviews">CruiseSavvy.com</a>, is a helpful site for people thinking about their <a href="http://www.cruisesavvy.com/savvyguide/introduction_to_cruises" title="Introduction to Cruises">first cruise</a>, or who want to browse and even share <a href="http://www.cruisesavvy.com/gallery" title="Cruise Pictures - search by line, ship and topic">cruise ship pictures</a> and <a href="http://www.cruisesavvy.com/journals" title="Members' personal cruise journals">cruise stories</a>
Speaking of which, would YOU be so kind as to help spread the word about CruiseSavvy?
I sure would appreciate a plug using that code (or whatever you like) on your site or blog. =)
Hope that helps. And if you have additional ideas, please share!