Some PPC, a lot of link building. Our strategy was to rank well on Google and rely on organic traffic to grow. I am not sure if that was a good strategy to start with but it has paid off handsomely (although it took a while...). Having free visitors delivered to us everyday by the search engines is quite an asset to have.
We were complete amateurs back then, we literally emailed hundreds of sites asking for links. That didn't work so well but it was enough to secure some organic traffic. We tried doing a few press releases and in retrospect, the content of those releases was rather embarrassing - but hey we were learning by doing right?
The PR generated quite a few back links but it is hard to assess how effective it was. We also tried to buy links and that didn't work out at all (too expensive).
I will check our AdWords account to see if I can retrieve our PPCs ads text.
