According to this, forum and comment signatures are worthless: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=803380 Submitting to directories are worthless (basically) Writing press releases cost money Submitting to ezine costs money So what free is there? Nothing, really. To advertise, you have to have money. Can someone teach me?
Stumble upon begs to differ And signitures do help as said in that thread but they just don't help enough to really give you any boosts in PR. So do you want to advertise using money? If money is a factor then your options are huge, just depends on your budget.
Geez... there are a lot of free advertising methods: -build a Squidoo lens/Hubpage -build blogger blogs -write blog comments on dofollow blogs etc. These are just 3 free promotional methods from the top of my head.
I have a book explaining 175 free advertising methods and all of them work, in addition, anything you post on DP or elsewhere is not worthless as evertyhing is crawled by search engines If you are chasing pagerank it might worthless, but if someone queries Google for "chantown" you will get about 1,110 results, and the first result is your DP profile. It is up to you determine how market your services or website after your online activity has fed search engines
LOL! well said. @OP, i disagree with forum signatures being worthless. forum signatures are not meant to be the only method of promotion one would be doing. they don't worth a lot if you have few occational posts, but over time they do worth something. otherwise people would not spend ton of money buying forum sig links
I get alot of traffic from posting on forums and gain backlinks. I do agree its not free....My time is worth something.
Writing articles and then submitting then to ezine directories is one sure way to advertise for free. You can also play the hit and miss game of safelists, traffic exchanges , classifieds ads. Submit your link to directories. There is alot of free advertising out there but they can be time consuming. Jason p.s And yes money does help
There is no such thing as free advertising, silly. Advertising either costs you time, or it costs you money. Period.
Read this post http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=803197 - The Wealthy Affiliate WILL TEACH YOU!
I found a great site yesterday http://mixedmarketarts.com/2007/11/08/advertise/ You can also follow my sig link for some great free advertising sites.
There are effective free methods, but they do involve time. Time is money- you need to use your resources wisely. If you are short on money you will need to invest time in your marketing efforts.
I think the answer to your question is "Be Logical". There are plenty of places to spend money online and not see a ROI. However, if you put some rational thought to it, there are a lot of good places to spend money on advertising. Advertising is always a good method for getting in traffic if you know where you can advertise at.
personally i dont think squidoo is that great because you ahve to actually promote the lens. So why not just use the efforts to promote your site?
A paid review would be great on mixedmarketarts.com if the links weren't all nofollow. Still 40 bux isn't bad.
free advertising .. dont work much yes its hard work and mostly waiste of time.. but that doesnt means paid advertisement always work.. you can spend 500$ in google adword or 1000$ on adbrite and still see no sales or less return of investment(loss).. yes you can get visitors easy with paid advertisement but that doesnt gurantee anything.. websites thats making bigtime where promoted in newspaper tv press release magazines telemarketing and all other sort of offline advertising.. they were made to serve a niche(say dating) or provide information (say yellow pages) check out http://www.quantcast.com you will see the big boys there they have office and a lot of ppl management working for it.. making blogs and webpages for fun.. with no business plan isnt going to work and copying others articles and just putting up text images video and sound.. and hoping some one will click on ur ads or buy something you are affiliated with is gambling.. hit or miss try sit down a few hours and plan how you can serve ppl with your website.. and how its different to 100 000 others.. even if you are a reseller of domain and hosting.. atleast brainstorm and make a business plan and provide something free if ppl host with u.. post it on 1000 forum.. and see sales coming.. ============================================================= Free ways to get traffic to your sites 1. Write and submit articles and press releases to the article directories. 2. Leave comments on other people blogs with a backlink to your site. 3. Answer people questions on http://www.answers.yahoo.com. 4. Post in forums and have a link to your site in your signature. 5. Submit your sites and products to wikki sites. 6. Advertise your site on free pixel sites. 7. Give an unbiased testimonial on a product/service that you have used in exchange for a backlink to your site. 8. Start a blog and submit it to the 100s of free blog directories. 9. Manually submit your website to the major search engines. 10. Optimize each page of your website for a particular keyword or search phrase. 11. Add a link in your email signature to your website. Its a free and easy way to get a little more traffic. 12. Make a custom 404 error page for your website redirecting people to your home page. 13. Submit to picture posts and hot or not sites with your URLs on the pictures. 14. Add a Bookmark this site link to your webpages. 15. Have a tell-a-friend form on your site. 16. Send articles to ezine publishers that includes a link to your website. 17. Make a stamp with your domain, and stamp it on everything 18. Give away a freebie (ebook, report, e-course) to keep people coming back to your site. 19. Add an RSS feed to your blog. 20. Submit your site to any related niche directories on the net. 21. Participate in a banner or link exchange program. 22. Create a software program and give it away for free. 23. Purchase the misspellings or variations of your domain name, or those of your competitors. 24. Buy a domain name related to your niche that is already receiving traffic and forward it to your site. (expired domains) 25. Pass out business cards with your domain on them everywhere you go. 26. Print your domain on your shirt. 27. Start a page on social bookmarking sites such as http://www.MySpace.com. 28. Submit a viral video to http://www.YouTube.com 29. Conduct and publish surveys to your website. 30. Find similar sites who want to trade reciprical links. use http://www.linkpagecreator.com to manage your recip links page 31. Start your own double optin newsletter or ezine. 32. Use a autoresponder to let everyone who emails you know what your site is. 33. Post comments in guest books, and putt your site in the homepage box. 34. Submit porn galleries to tgps. 35. Sell or place classified ads on http://www.eBay.com with a link to your site. 36. Post free classified ads on any of the sites that allow them with a link to your site. 37. Offer a free service, like a free dating site, where you have your advertising banners displayed. 38. Network with other people at seminars or other live events. 39. Purchase advertising in popular newsletters or ezines. 40. Join google groups, where you can submit your urls in messages 41. Create a free ebook and list in on the Free ebook sites. 42. Answer forum questions related to products you can sell. 43. Do something controversial, so you make the news. 44. Create profiles on dating sites/ bebo / facebook etc with links to your products. 45. Add your site to http://www.cbtoplist.com and other similer sites 46. Use a traffic / homepage exchange. http://www.trafficswarm.com 47. Submit videos to tube sites with your urls embedded on them 48. Create and giveaway a product with resell or giveaway rights and include a link to your site in it o others pass it around for you. 49. Create phamplets advertising your products and leave them in bars. 50. Buy a pair of sandals; get your website engraved on the bottom and walk on the beach, stomp in the mud or play in the snow. ================================================================================ good luck