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It's like opening a great store that everyone will want to visit, locating it out of town and keeping the windows boarded up.
Now whether you want to buy seo, or investigate it your self or use PPC advertising is up to you, but it seems that you need to get your site out to your customers and if it's a purely online business the search engines are definately one of the biggest routes to market.
Even if you then decide to seek out SEO services, you'll be better armed to ask for and receive what you want/need.
As for traffic, this is still one of my all time fav WebmasterWorld posts:
Link Development Versus Traffic Development [webmasterworld.com]
Also, these have become "oldies" but they are still "goodies" and for the most part still fairly relevant:
Successful Site in 12 Months [webmasterworld.com]
Themes [webmasterworld.com]
Building the Perfect Page [webmasterworld.com]
1. befriend about 100-150 to get about 60-70 to vote on your content so it can be noticed by the rest of the community.
2. have great content for which even people that you haven't befriended will vote.
3. put out several pieces until you start to figure out the type of material that goes viral.
it's great to get links to your site, which is imo the hardest part of seo. if you are making money off cpm, 20K visitors in a day could make you some money.