I've no idea what age you are but think of it this way.
Say you have a town or neighborhood and their's a great pub or club that everyone goes to to hang out. Lots of people go their every weekend, it's always full and the owner probably makes a lot of money.
Now if you want to open your own pub or club in the same town what do you do? How do you convince people to come to your place instead of the existing one.
Well their's a lot of things you need to do. You need to do a shit load of research. You have to find what people like and dislike in the exiting club. How it works. How do they advertise. Do they do promos, live music, what type of music, how much is it, what sorta style is it, etc etc. Their's loads of things.
Well the same principles apply to a website as they do to anything in life. You have to do your research. Find out what's your competition and what their doing. If your club or pub is to be more successful then it has to offer more in some way and not just a little bit more but a lot lot more to encourage people to leave the place where they've being going for ages. To achieve this your site has to offer something special that people what. Like a new pub or club you have to advertise like crazy. In the internet world SEO is the main part of advertising. You gotta be ruthless. If you ask someone to put up a poster advertising your club and they don't then you go put it up yourself. If nobody gives you a link exchange then you go find one. If nobody hands out flyers for your club then you go hand them out yourself.
You gotta work hard, really hard if you want to make it and get people who have their favorite hangout to leave it to come to yours.
EDIT:
took too long typing. It's turned into a flame thread
