Is SEO really even close to as important as marketing? How do you actually market a site to begin with?

[EyceMan]

I have a few sites that I started up but nobody visits them because nobody knows about them. But is this because I did not optimize my SE marketing or because I just did not push enough oomph into marketing in the first place? It seems that SEO is a buzzword but all it really is is optimization of your search engine marketing campaign. But no matter how hard I look I don't really see that many nice and innovative and useful articles on the net about pure marketing on the internet.

Can anyone list some cheap ways to market websites such as health and weightloss blogs?
Ok I guess my question was, besides fighting for positions in the search engines, what other ways are good to market a brand new website. Adwords? I mean you have to get the word out. I don't want to just OPTIMIZE my SE campaigns...I want to know how to use them to drive traffic to my websites without worrying about how google or yahoo "ranks" my site. There must be feasable ways to market a website with total disregard for what a search engine thinks of your efforts, right?