Every webmaster makes his strategy a little secret. For good reason as nobody wants to give up a good idea and surrender his most important ideas for the benefit of competitors. However, many website developers agree on one basic idea: organic growth!
When starting up a new website a realistic vision for the ultimate goal and a roadmap for the development are the most crucial items. It's hard to give advice, but use of common sense is usually the best guide.

First step: registration and content guidelines
After I register or buy a domain my first task is to install a basic index page that contains relevant info about what the site is intended for. In the past this was a simple html page with a title, meta description and keywords together with 2 or 3 paragraphs of text. If possible I would ad a couple of picture with corresponding alt tags. Additionally, I would insert a handful of links to other relevant pages. Let's say I would start a site about sports shoes, links to i.e. Addidas, Nike and Puma would suit well. I would achieve the following goals: people and bots would occasionally come by the site and take note of it. Additionally, I would set one or 2 links from my own sites to the new project. Then I usually don't touch the site for awhile. My first aim is achieved: I want the search engine bots to know about the site, index and categorize it properly.
Sometimes I have a lot of ideas flying through my head and I register like 10 domains for different things, so I put up a basic page while I plan further development. To be honest I have modified that strategy a bit. I no longer use a simple html page for the initial site, but install a blog or cms script on the server, choose a neat skin and publish my first article that is pretty much containing the same things as mentioned above.

First results:
What happens next is like a miracle. The blog tool sends out ping notifications to various services. Suddenly, new sites get visits from robots and I get included in feeds and directories. I did this a few times and domains without any significant content or inbound links advanced to Google PR 2 and even 3. It seems Google is throwing around with PR rankings for nothing, but this initial PR is an excellent tool when I decide to develop a domain as it will make things very easy for a future link exchange strategy as many webmasters are more willing to trade links with high PR sites - even when they have next to none traffic. But that's just a positive side effect and not really a viable strategy without content.

Creating Content:
Ok, I have completed the first step and I develop content for the site. Let's say it is a blog. I write a couple of articles and publish them over time. The important thing for me is to have time go by between the blog posts and not throw out 10 new articles at the same time. Let's say I write 10 blog posts a day, I will schedule them for publication every 3 days or every week. Most blog tools like b2evolution and Wordpress have a feature that allows to set a date for the publishing date when you want a post to go online. I make sure the ping notifications are sent out at the same time of the publishing date by choosing asynchronus mode to make sure robots won't be confronted with a 404 error.

Chose a publishing date for each blog post and schedule your articles for days, weeks and even months in advance.

Follow up:

Once I have sufficient content published I continue linking to it from my own sites that are relevant. These are usually one-way links inside the blog. I keep on adding new content and after a couple of weeks I go ahead and submit them to blog directories and link indexes. Those links are nor very effective to create direct traffic, but they provide decent link popularity as long as you pick niche and category specific directories. I keep working on the content and within a couple of weeks I usually see a nice increase in traffic from search engines like Google and Yahoo. PR is usually up at 2 or 3 and sometimes higher. Now, I do have a great base for link exchanges with other established and related sites like blogs and portals. I don't need to limit myself to trade reciprocal links with small, insignificant sites, but I can chose the best link partners for my online niche. This will grow my referrer and search engine traffic further. If my site is interesting enough people will throw links to it and they will share it over social bookmarking sites. All I need to concentrate now is to have them come back over and over again :-)

Generating Revenue:
Once the content is up and good traffic flow is accomplished, I can start thinking about making money. Now, I can put up advertising like Google Adsense, affiliate banners, maybe sell plugs to third parties or charge flat fees for banner placements. I see a lot of people starting blogs put up ads before they actually publish their first article. Most of them will never be able to grow their site because every visitor with common sense will smell this site is dishonest and just aiming at making money at any price.
I am a very conservative white my basic strategy. I believe organic growth is the most reliable path to success. It takes a bit longer, but it is sustainable over a longer period of time in return. Think about a website as a tree. Your plant will die if exposed to the sunlight without water. Consider content as the water to feed your tree's roots. Without it everything will fail the chance of survival.