Welcome Alan to our community!
I think a successful site has to use multiple marketing approaches. Online marketing is very essential for an online business. Traditional marketing such as newspaper advertising can help but, by itself, it may not drive enough traffic to a website. For example, let's assume you have a newspaper circulation of 1,000,000 ....how many of these readers will see the advertisement and at the same time have access to computers or the Internet? Furthermore, how many will take the steps to save the information and then go and checkout the website? This is the reason why many Internet companies focus primarily on web marketing and leave traditional marketing as an additional advertising channel.
By the way, I have noticed that many members, when they post a message in this vacation rental community, are not taking advantage of the signature option. And when they do place a signature, they are not placing links back to their website in a search engine friendly way. The following explains how it's done:
Let's assume you want your signature to have a title "Vacation Rentals Web Directory" clickable to http://www.vrwd.com, just follow the html format below:
<a href="http://www.vrwd.com" target="_blank"> Vacation Rentals Web Directory</a>
It's that simple. But, please remember that you cannot just post your link without contributing to this community with a decent post!
Happy vacation rental advertising!