When I first attempted to make money online I was so naive just like any newbie. But I learned from school of hard knocks. I learned by trial and error and by just doing. In beginning I submitted my site to every search engine under sun. I tried traffic exchanges, banner exchanges, FFA's, safelists, online classified ads etc. and not surprisingly I got zero results. If anything... I was very good at getting sp-ammed.
I wasted weeks and even months of my time with stuff that didn't work. But little by little I started to head in right direction. I dropped all stuff that didn't work and looked for other ways to bring traffic to my site.
I subscribed to a whole bunch of ezines and started posting fr-ee ads. The results weren't great but at least this time I was getting some results. My confidence started to build and I knew I was heading in right direction.
Then I started to spend a little money on my business and used pay per click search engines and things really started to take off for me and my confidence grew more.
Then I started writing articles and press releases and and in middle of all this I would spend time learning how to optimize my site for major search engines to get a high ranking.
The sales started coming in regularly. But I didn't sit back. I wanted to convert more of my visitors into customers.
I added an opt-in form on my site to capture email addresses and set up an autoresponder to automatically follow up with my prospects. Eventually I added an alert box to capture email addresses which really exploded my mail list.