Short story: literally no traffic comes, regardless of the time and efforts put in.
Here's what I and, I assume, most people without money do when launching a new unique website that took forever to carefully put together from scratch and which contains absolutely no advertisements or anything else that could be annoying and off-putting:
I pay $150 to test AdWords. I get ~100 clicks from bots or completely uninterested surfers who apparently clicked on the ads by accident, out of malice or because the ad matching was poor. A complete waste of money, unless the budget is at least 10x bigger and you can afford to do it daily. But with that kind of money, you can get real advertisements instead of feeding that Google scam…
I submit both the main URL and then each and every post to Digg. Zero votes, zero clicks and zero comments. Doesn't matter if I use the same account or different ones.
I submit both the main URL and then each and every post to Reddit. A handful of clicks, sometimes a couple of comments (ON REDDIT!) and mostly negative votes, seemingly out of habit/malice. Doesn't matter if I use the same account or different ones.
I tweet about it all. Always zero clicks from Twitter except from link checker bots.
I friendly manually ask people to visit my new site in a chat room. Ban and insults.
I friendly manually ask people in private to visit my new site. Insults and reported, then k-lined for spam.
I put the URL in the signature and post genuine, high-quality posts on major forums. Insults, harassment and virtually no clicks. Definitely not worth the effort either.
I write nice, relevant comments to major blog entries and discreetly add my site's address. No clicks.
I indiscreetly dump my site's address in random forms as an experiment, sometimes automating this in desperation. No clicks. Deletion of entries.
I manually spend hours upon hours of actively finding the correct e-mail addresses for news tips (or when unavailable, fill in their web forms) for all newspapers and news outlets in existence and ask them in a very friendly and professional way to write something about it. Zero response. Nothing written anywhere.
I make a YouTube account and upload attractive video clips to get many views and put my address in the "description" field and on the profile. Zero clicks. Account banned in a sneaky way by Google without stating the reason.
I always try to work on SEO, but since SEO, for all practical purposes beyond the bare minimum things you can do locally, depends entirely on the number and "quality" of in-links, no traffic comes from search engines either. People don't link to quality content at all, because they don't find it in the first place.
I keep polishing the site, add features, weed out bugs, create quality content, do all of these things over and over again, constantly trying new angles… until I finally give up and try something different. A clear pattern has now formed: it doesn't matter what you do.
It's as if there's a great party prepared where everyone's invited, but almost nobody shows up. That's exactly what it feels like after months of planning and executing all of this.
Then I check what's hot on random sites and I see links to spammy blogs full of ugly ads with copied and pasted content ranking #1 with thousands of upvotes, comments and praise from various communities.
There is something terribly wrong somewhere. I'm sure I can't be the only one in this situation, and I'm also sure it doesn't make sense to anyone who hasn't been there. The sad fact, however, seems to be that the quality of a product/service doesn't matter at all. It's all about knowing the right people, having the initial funding and plain dumb luck. There is no other way to explain it, and maybe it's obvious to some people… still, it's extremely hard to actually, truly "buy" that theory/fact, as it requires extreme amounts of cynicism.
The entire "system" that the commercial Internet relies on really is designed to stop people like me from ever getting their voices heard. It's a bizarre paradox to have such a huge part of the total human population connected to each other, yet it's more difficult than ever to get a message out. Sure, you can write as much as you want and publish it on your site, but nobody will read it. So in practice, it doesn't really exist at all. "If a tree falls and nobody is around, does it make a noise?"
I've read countless inspiring posts over the years by people who went from rags to riches, but it unfortunately doesn't seem to have anything to do with anything but pure dumb luck. That's what I have to conclude from this miserable life.
*checks site*
<sarcasm>Oh. Nice. The trusty old Googlebot has paid me a visit in the last few hours. I'm gonna be rich!</sarcasm>
