Does anyone have a full proof traffic building strategy?

If you want to get more traffic to your site then reach out to your target audience.
The perfect example would be social networking sites, there are groups/pages for people with same interests in social networking sites like facebook. You can join there and tell people about your site. Share your site and make it go viral, by then you are most likely to get traffic.

 

Well it completely depends, if you want more traffic then you can get it, the real question is do you want quality traffic... I found google advertising really good (if you have the money). But when you don't, forums are a really good way to go. People have to trust your site, dependent on the content you can be sure there is a thousand more websites that have the same content, so why will they be going to your site? What do you offer that no one else has? I guess that has much more to do with quality content like everyone else is saying.
SEO is another thing, people won't trust your site if they can't find it on google (simple fact), and that is something that if your doing it the right way will take a little bit of time. Make sure you use google Webmaster tools, and get google analytics up and running, so you can keep an eye on what people are doing, where they are coming from what is drawing their attention and what isn't... And i found watching your bounce rate is a really good way to judge your content.
If your going with google adwords then i would also suggest getting in touch with them, as they know what keywords will do you best etc. they will make up a full free campaign too (not sure if that was just here or if it's something they do everywhere).

Anyway good luck, hope some of my ramblings helped.

 

You can't throw the baby out with the bath water. Link building is still very much a part of SEO and it is essentially what you're working toward with quality content development. You're hoping links get built naturally over time as people share and promote your content. The problem is not with the development of links per se, the problem is with building spammy or low quality backlinks. It's going on a forum or blog about hiking and posting some obviously spammy comment about what a great article it is and a link to "Nike Air Jordans". This is the sort of shit being targeted, not legitimate, high quality links on high quality and niche-relevant websites.

Traditionally, there have been several factors Google uses to determine where your site gets placed in the search results. There is quality of content, there is popularity, there is relevancy and there is authority. While quality of content is an obvious no-brainer, how exactly does Google determine popularity? Through the number of people visiting your website and actually reading your content. What about relevancy and authority? Relevancy is determined by your ability to relay what your content is about with things like keyword density and on page optimization. Authority is determined by the number of legitimate high quality backlinks your site has. The more places linking to you, so long as those links don't appear to Google to be spammy or contrived, the more authority your website has. And this is why link building is still important because while spammy links will get you penalized, valid links are the number one method used by Google to determine a website's authority.