I started an image bookmarking site 2.5 years ago: http://imgfave.com http://imgfave.com Now gets ~40,000 visitors a day and just pays my rent.. so not exactly

I started an image bookmarking site 2.5 years ago: http://imgfave.com http://imgfave.com Now gets ~40,000 visitors a day and just pays my rent.. so not exactly ramen profitable yet. A few things I did which helped it grow: - Got my initial core group of users by soliciting feedback on friendfeed and a few other places. The first version was based on identi.ca and I got some buzz just because it was a novel use of the identi.ca microblogging software. - Started a bunch of facebook pages around different topics (photography, design, etc..). Got a lot of fans, and posted a new image every day to each one. This was probably the single biggest driver of return traffic. - Made sure the site is fast. Every time I'd upgrade my server or improve performance in some way (like move files to a CDN) I'd see a huge increase in traffic. Speed is really important. - Besides that I just gave it time to grow, periodically added a new feature, and sending an email to all my users about it. Top traffic sources are: direct traffic, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Tumblr, and google search.