How do you know when to give up?
alex_c: I find it useful to think in terms of rates and percentages.  Sounds dull, but hear me out.What % of blogs respond to your product?  If you've only emailed 5 or 10 blogs, you don't really know yet - that's a pretty small number, and you might've just had bad luck.  The rate of success really depends on a lot of factors unrelated to your site itself (subject matter, the blogs themselves, how you approach them, etc.), but I wouldn't be surprised to get a 10% response rate for an average product.  I haven't really done this enough to go into more detail, or to have a winning formula, but I would expect the success rate to be relatively low, which can get discouraging.What percentage of your visitors are sticking around?  Again, if you've only received a few hundred visits, it's hard to tell.  The best way to iterate is to have a steady stream of traffic, make changes, and see how they affect stickiness.. but getting the traffic is the tricky part to start with, right?  I'm not really counting Digg/Reddit/Stumbleupon traffic here, since those visitors typically have the attention span of a fruitfly.How much search engine traffic are you getting?  How feasible is it to get on the first page of Google or Yahoo for some combinations of relevant keywords? (use the Adwords Keyword Tool to research keywords, see how much traffic they could potentially get you, and how competitive they are).  Search engines can bring you thousands of visitors a month who are actively looking for something like your site.  Don't ignore them.Can you think of any other domain-specific promotions?  You mentioned game forums and guilds, I don't know how far you took that.  Is there any angle under which game developers or publishers might see an advantage to promoting your site or collaborating with you?  What about game magazines or review sites?These are all the cost of giving your site a chance to succeed.  Weigh that against the reward of success - how badly do you want your site to grow, and how much effort are you willing to put in to "give it a fair chance"? (you're the only one who can give it a fair chance, by the way - no one else cares enough).