@bnsmav

As far as proven results go, it will probably depend on industry. What type of blog/business do you have?

Most of our traffic comes through search engines, so I spend a lot of energy on optimizing my site and blog for SEO, understanding what words my ideal customers are most likely to Google and working those into my title tags, body copy, etc.

I supplement this by using social media platforms to drive additional traffic to my blog and website.

I don’t do much w/PPC, but when done right it can drive traffic to your site for sure.

@bnsmav Great question!  Since I am fairly new to the whole Social Media process, I am interested in the advice you get also.  I would have to agree that the type of business you have would greatly determine what methods you use.  However, it would seem that doing search engine optimization would benefit many.  Since my company is “business to business” more than individual customer driven, I have been using Linkedin to join groups of interest and have developed my Facebook page.  Being considered knowledgeable in my industry and up on current events that pertain to my industry is key for me (my company provides background check services).  So good luck to you and I hope you find success!

Thanks for all of the great responses.  I do have a facebook page, google plus, and twitter.  I just started learning more about SEO and the back linking this video taught me a lot. http://bit.ly/Lve75A For a newbie anyway.  There is no optin or sales on this promise.  I don’t want to be that guy. There are product plugs but that’s it.  

@richbrooks and @michaelyublosky, I concur.  FB & Twitter will bring traffic but tight SEO for organic traffic is the best.  Don’t forget, traffic without conversion is no fun either.  Make sure you have good compelling content.

I don’t use any of these, here are some strategies I’ve tested with pretty good results (I’ve left out the ones with bad results). I’m writing a detailed guest post on how I use each one at the moment so I’ll post that when it goes up. These are all free traffic strategies that have worked well for my web app that I am launching.  

• Submitting my site to CSS Galleries (do it if the design is good and original)
• Forums (free and paid)
• Guest blogging on popular blogs (problogger, think traffic etc)
• Emails list (my own pre-launch list and my personal list from my blog)
• Integration directories (these are apps that my app integrates with but you could apply the same philosophy to most sites)
• App listing sites (again I guess the non app equivalent is directories but relevant targeted ones)
• Startup sites (if you have an interesting business these sites can send a lot of traffic)
• Tweet adder (auto follow people and send them a DM when they reply – don’t do it with your main account)
• Podcasting
• Social media (posting my content mainly and interacting with others, mainly on Twitter, trying linked in groups now too)
• Reaching out to press contacts (this will come in handy when I launch and hopefully send some traffic then).