Can't help myself answer:

There are two rules in business.

1. Don't share everything you know.
2. (see #1)

Serious answer:

What has made my sites successful, on a micro scale, is visiting this site every day, reading more than I post, and posting probably more than I should. :-) It's all here.

[search term] site:webmasterworld.com

Hard work long hours and never giving up.

Never giving up. Spent 4 years working on my site before making a dime... Now it makes lots of dimes... =)

Sounds stupid, but just hard work... Always looking for something interesting to add. Always looking for a way to be informative. I don't play the whole 'beat search engine' game. All that stuff bores me, and I just think it's a waste of time constantly trying to figure out some loophole in the system to take advantage of. Yes, it helps to do some of the basics... But there's people that spend all their time on search engine manipulation, and they're doing it for a site that's crap. Kind of like putting a custom paint job on a Yugo. The internet is drowning in garbage because everybody thinks they have some slick way to beat the system. That's why when you search for stuff now, you get hundreds of pages of BS. There's more industrial biz and retail directories now than any ten generations of people could ever need, and most of them stink. They're just getting in the way. If you have a really good site, the traffic happens on it's own.

Sounds stupid, but just hard work...

.
Reminds me of an old quote.
"Opportunity is overlooked by most because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work" - Thomas Edison.

-- Quality content for the niche
-- Taking obsessive care with the basics of on-page and in-site optimization
-- Working to develop traffic from sources that don't depend on the search engines. (That often ends up pleasing the search engines anyhow.)
-- No tricks, just doing the basics better than average