What's are some good strategies to attract customers to a new website?

First determine the goals for your website. What is the purpose of your website?

1. To convert visitors to customers?
2. To build brand awareness?
3. To gather market feedback?
4. Something else?

Once you've established your goals, it will be much easier to determine the strategy for engaging and attracting visitors. It will also determine the metrics to use to judge whether your strategies are effective.

Once you know your strategy, it's just a matter of picking the most cost-effective way of implementing it.

For example, we wanted to build brand awareness and reach out to thought leaders within our market segment. We found the cheapest, most effective way to do that was to start a blog, participate in discussions on several prominent forums and websites, and post relevant links and comments to Twitter.

Ever read Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell? He talks about "connectors", people who know a lot of other people and have social capital to burn. Connectors love talking and socializing and are rarely single for long because rejection hardly phases these people. Above all, connectors love introducing people to other people, just for the sheer joy of it (hence the name).

Find out who the connectors are in your niche, and introduce yourself. Ask for their help. Don't offer money or give incentives to push your product, just ask this person to connect you with others in their network. If you don't know a connector in your niche, talk to any connector.

Trust me on this one. Word of mouth is the best advertising in the world, but word of mouth from a connector? Out of this world!

First Thing I did was look at how my competitors started and gain a few tips that way but I think at the end of the day just about any one can get traffic to there site whith a good advertising firm, the art is keeping customers at your site and them telling there friends.

It also depends on your budget for advertising and what you can afford, somtimes just getting out to your local community using more traditional meathods can be quite succesful and cheaper e.g handing out flyers at the shops. It all depends how hard your willing to work.

When I launched my web site I went from 0 to over 3000 unique visits in the first week however I started with a good budget and I did not rilly even bother with SEO however later It bit me on the back side because my competitors started to optimise me in highnsight I would have optimised at least six months before launch however I fort back and the business is doing verry well.

Hope this helps and good luck into the future!

Running broad PPC advertising and compiling the queries from referrer links may help your organic strategy. Here's what I did, which happened by accident.

I bid on some generic phrases in AdWords for our niche to get the ball rolling on SEM.

Meanwhile, I SEO'ed our site for the ideal phrase "target stands." Even after several months of tweaking, our site wasn't even showing up in the top 100 organic results. However, something interesting was happening on the SEM side.

I compiled a huge list of queries from the AdWords referrer links. I was surprised to find that there were tons of unique groups of queries that no keyword tool ever suggested, not even Google's. One of those popular queries was "target stands for shooting." It is kind of long, but it is used almost as much as "target stands," probably because of Google's auto suggest feature.

Long story short, I quickly optimized the homepage for the newly discovered phrase, "target stands for shooting." Within 4 days, the GoogleBot indexed the new homepage and now shows up in the #3 spot in the organic results!

I'd say keep SEO, Ads aside for a few months. For best returns, you'll need to spread the message personally for the first few months.

You'll need to prepare a list of emails/contacts you know, then add to it the people who are closely associated with your industry/vertical. Larger the list the better, 500+ will be nice. Reach out to them, ask for their suggestions, beg them to link to your website from their blogs/websites etc. etc.

Once you are done with it, you'll have a much better chance at various other forms of promotions. And yeah this period will help you know - how to acquire more and more customers...

We launched our site 4 months back, and we get 75% of our traffic from Google.

How will Google find you? Have content on your site which will come up in search engines. For the same keywords there could be so many variants and you do know what people are typing for.

I do not have advertising budget and I am not that well connected. So it is all Google.