How important is marketing a site? If you don't advertise your site - will it not be very successful?
And is adwords the best way of advertising? Is there a free alternative that isn't much hassle
Marketing is important if you have a site that sells a product. If you have a site that is made up of unique content you can probably get a good flow of traffic as long as you have one or two link backs and have submitted the site to some search engines.
The only 'free' alternative to adwords is promoting your site by yourself (word of mouth or on other sites).
Marketing can give your website a boost (or a good start), but you can't rely on it all the time. Good content will bring you in some traffic anyway
I think marketing is always necessary. As 2xp said, you cannot rely on it all the time.
Depends on the topic of the website or forum usually.
It is very important to me. I feel I can tell members about it, but that isn't exactly all round effective. The best option in to get your site indexed and get visitors from across the web.