There are several different things you can do to increase your website traffic:
Social bookmark the content that you have on your website by writing little pieces of information about the article, submit your RSS feed and market with writing articles. Find high PR ranking websites; write them to see if you can obtain a website link.
Sometimes buying links from these higher PR ranking websites is the best route to go. I've found that some will do swamping of services. Make a good impression when you first contact them and you just might get the link for free.
You want to always be marketing your website through off page optimization. Come up with a consistent plan and stick to it. Go to your keyword list and do some testing to see which keywords you should be using. Pay-per-click is a get way to test out to see if you can get traffic with the keywords you picked. Now create some content and submit those articles to the directories. Write your goals down on a piece of paper and stick to them.
The keywords that don't have a lot of searching are the longer tailed keywords, usually. So I'll bookmark them and write articles. Writing articles is a great way to get free exposure because of the link credit you get back from them.
Stick to your plan and do the work yourself before outsourcing. Problems always come up and when they do you'll have a good understanding of how to fix them. Some people enjoy doing the SEO marketing for their website.
Now that you have a good feel of how things work and what you'll expect from someone else you can outsource it. I have always found it difficult to find someone to do my link building for me because I want it done a certain way. When you build links, you only have one chance to get it right. If you hire someone and they don't do it the way you want it done, then all that work is wasted. When I'm ready to hire someone I'll take baby steps and give them just a little bit of work at a time to see if the investment will be any good.
I find that the smaller things can be outsourced, but for some reason I have a really hard time finding someone to do my linking for me so I just do it all myself. Going the social bookmarking route and submitting articles to the directories have been really good for me. There are automatic services that you can sign up for but doing these steps outlined in this article is how I get most of my free website traffic.