Getting my stubborn monkey to sleep (life saving advice included)

My son has been a bad sleeper since he was born, giving me 1 or 2 hours a night for a very long time. I am sure part of the reason is errors I made as a newborn but I got no advice about what I was doing when he was a newborn.
For the first 6 weeks of his life I never once slept in my room with my partner, but spent my time downstairs trying to get him to sleep in his moses basket whilst I was on the sofa.

At 16 weeks we put him into his own room because we were out of options.  In his own room he did sleep a little better, getting maybe 3 or 4 hours of disrupted sleep a night but still not ideal.
This chronic lack of sleep, in my opinion, was a major contributer to my postnatal depression.

At 10 months old, my health visitors got involved and with their help, my son now sleeps through the night. I am wanting to share the advice I was given in case it helps any other mums. But do be aware that the advice was taylored to us to correct what we were doing wrong. There may be something additional that has to change for others. Also bare in mind that my son was 10 months old so again some of this advice may not be given for younger babies.

• Make sure he's full each meal. I was advised no baby food which I was already doing except for breakfast he was having 10 month+ porridge. He should be eating cereals like weetabix. Also giving him a little cows milk with his afternoon snack.
• Put him down to bed awake, not almost asleep awake like I was, but very awake. I was encouraged to give him his bedtime feed and then brush his teeth and read him a story afterwards. Definitely not allow him to fall asleep whilst feeding.
• Put him to bed in a quiet, darkish room (I had been putting his cot mobile on).
• Leave the room but to continue to make noise upstairs (flushing the toilet, having a shower etc) so that he can hear that we are still around. (I had avoided making any noise because everything was waking him).
• When he wakes up during the night, do not feed him. He was associating going to sleep with a feed. I had to send my partner in when he woke initially because he could smell the milk on me making the process harder.

After I had implemented the above advice, which improved his sleep a little,  I was then advised to do the following:

• After putting him to bed, if he starts crying, a real cry not a sleepy cry, then I was told I had to leave him for 5 minutes,  then go in and place my hand on him for 15 seconds (not pick him up and not speak), then walk out the room again and repeat until he is asleep.
• Repeat this if he wakes up during the night.

I was not keen on doing this last bit of advice but I was so sleep deprived and it was affecting my health. Plus the nursery nurse who gave the advice was very confident it would be sucessful. I was out of options and decided to try it that night. It was tough. We repeated for 45 minutes until he fell asleep. He slept through the night!! The following night he cried for 30 minutes and we followed the advice to a T. Again he slept through! Such a difference to go from waking 5/6 times a night to sleeping through! This started over 3 weeks ago and apart from one wake up that was obviously teething related he has slept through every night. Plus since that second night, he hasn't cried at all at bedtime. He lies there chatting but quickly goes to sleep. We are both finally getting some much needed sleep.  I'm a new woman.