What are the best ways to make small sites become popular on the internet? Do I need to invest into internet marketing or SEO services for fast traffic and grow my site? Any advice?
I think the best way to make a small site become popular is to start out by making the site about something that is in high demand already. In other words instead of launching a small blog and then asking yourself "How can I make my blog more popular?" I am suggesting that before you even launch your blog you ask yourself "What topic can I create a blog about that would be really popular?" or "What type of blog could I create that has a chance at becoming really popular?" or "What sorts of things do popular blogs have in common?"
The reason I suggest you do that is because the vast majority of websites will never become popular no matter what the website owner does at this point.
I think that (for the most part) popular websites are predisposed to becoming popular when the website is first launched. And that depends on what audience the website serves and how well you serve that audience and how motivated the audience is to return to the site or tell other people about it.
Take this forum for example: The people who visit this forum are going to fall into one of a few different categories:
1) People who want to promote themselves, a website, a product or service using this website
2) People who want to learn about the topics being discussed here
3) People who want to hang out and socialize with other people that are interested in these topics
Most people probably come here for a mixture of those reasons.
Let's suppose that the website owner doesn't care so much about the self promoters and instead wants to focus on making the forum more popular among the other two groups. Then you would want to do the following things to make the forum more popular:
* Have as high of quality content as possible. Make sure good questions are asked and really good answers are offered for those questions.
* Create as much activity as possible because activity breeds more activity.
* Assemble a large enough team of core people to run the forum who are very experienced, very knowledgeable and very helpful so that they can provide really high quality answers to the questions that forum visitors are asking about.
* Get those core team members to remain as active as possible and respond to questions as quickly as possible. The faster a person's question gets answered, the more activity it inspires in the people who are asking the questions. It also makes them want to come back to the forum more often. It makes them "like" spending time here as long as the forum seems active and responsive.
* Encourage people to be as friendly as possible to maximize the likability of the site.
* Maintain steady activity by starting conversations when the forum members aren't starting enough conversations naturally on their own.
* Promote the forum to outsiders so those outsiders will visit to see what it is about.
* Make members feel liked and appreciated.
* Maintain forum quality by removing useless posts that don't meaningfully add to the conversation.
If you are good enough at doing those things (among other things) then at some point the forum could reach a critical mass and start growing organically on its own. That is one example of how a site could become popular.
So something like SEO could be part of the tactics you are going to use to introduce new people to the site, but for the site to become popular, the quality of the product has got to be high enough. And in the case of a forum like this, the quality of the product is going to be a combination of 1) the quality of the discussions and 2) the quality of the experience of being a member here.
Without those two qualities, the site would never become popular among those groups of people. Popularity has everything to do with how much people "really like" visiting the website. Find ways to make people really like visiting the site and you will figure out how to make the site popular.