As far as online marketing & advertising, what is/are the best way(s) to spend your money wisely when trying to increase traffic to your website? What are some of your personal accounts (good or bad)?
If your selling something I would say AdWords, PPC and expire domain traffic are the best way to get traffic to your website.
I have tried adwords and it seems like a money pit to me, even when i focus on the keywords that are relevant to the site. All those fradulent clicks these days.
Adwords is the best if you are looking to sell a specific product. It is up for debate how much fraud clicks actually cost the advertiser. If you are looking for sustained traffic it would be wise to get into banner or text link advertising. You could generate continous traffic on a monthly basis.
Well, one thing you could do is go to the buy sell part of this forum and start a thread saying you're looking to place a banner on someone's site, and you are wiling to pay monthly. Ask everyone who is interested to send you a PM with their site, page rank, traffic stats, and price. That should get you quite a few PMs. Then you can just check each site to see which one best fits the theme and needs of your site.
I would target very specific sites that I know the market I want to attract uses. I'd try to get free promotion from the site or else buy links and advertising there.