How do I get traffic to my site without SEO?

Not to sound a bit like a broken record here, but the best way to generate traffic is to produce great content with frequency. Really. Once you start to have content on your site that is truly of value to your marketplace, to your potential customers, then you have an easy job of building traffic because you don't have to trick people or spend weeks fine-tuning word choice in a PPC ad: you just have to raise the visibility of your site sufficiently to have the thought and opinion leaders in your marketplace know about it.

Further, I strongly encourage you to consider ongoing publication of quality content. It's much harder to be successful when you publish a half-dozen articles, even really great ones, then ignore the site for six months or a year. Instead, shorter, pithy, topical articles of roughly 250-500 words that you release once or twice a week will do much more to improve the search engine ranking and reputation of your site.

Then you can start thinking about how to bring traffic to your site, and at that point, your best bet is to participate in your industry discussion, regardless of industry. You building a travel site for ski resorts? Find where avid skiers are hanging out and chatting - be it a mailing list on Yahoo Groups, a discussion forum associated with one of the skiing publications, or the weblog of a well-known skier - and participate by adding your own thoughts and comments.

Note that I didn't say "ask them to visit your site" because that will never work and will inevitably backfire, actually. But if you can get out of aggressive salesperson mode and think about what you'd share with potential customers and friends you'd just met at a café, you'll be on the right track.

Once you can start building up a reputation as a smart, clued-in expert in your marketplace, people will want to know more about you and will care about what you've written / built, then you can start really leveraging your reputation to increase the sales and revenue of your business.

For example, notice how I answered this question: I didn't say "Hey, I have a book I wrote on just this topic..." even though, well, I did actually write a book about how to grow your business with Google. :-) but instead have done my best to offer you concise and hopefully valuable information that will help you get going in the right direction. Of course, if you did want to learn more about my book and the great workshop I have spun off from it, I'd like to hope you would click on the links in my bio, but even then, I'm gambling in exactly the same way you should with your participation in your industry discussion: if you can offer truly valuable content, you can pique curiosity and drive traffic.

Then once they get to your site, they really find even more value in what's there (which is what I started by talking about) and bookmark it, send a link to their friends, link to it on their blogs, cite it in MySpace, whatever. Now you're building traffic!

Oh, and notice that I never once suggested anything that'll cost you more than just time and effort. And it's your industry, so the time you spend should be fun, interesting and informative anyway. A win:win for everyone, I'd say!