Marketing Techniques?

What are some good ways to advertise and market my site?

I would prefer free ideas, but I know not everything comes free.

What is the best way to drive traffic to my site?

 

Personally, I wouldn't be concerned right now about getting traffic to your site. Traffic does you no good if they click your site, realize it's crap, and then click away. Internet viewers are becoming more and more sophisticated. Your site must have value.

What I'd work on is your content. Great content has a way of building it's own traffic... all the traffic in the world won't help you if it's dropping you off in a desert waste land of banner adds...

Anyway if you think you've got the content, what type of marketing you focus on (do basic, strong marketing moves, for all your sites but focus in an area that rewards the most). What do I mean? Well, how do you make money? Adds? Start paying attention to the context... what are those adds selling? Who needs that. That tells you your target audience. Where are these people? What do they do? That tells you where to market.

It's impossible to market well without asking yourself these questions first.

 

Forums, Classified Ads, Link Exchange, Blogs and Social Bookmarking . This are the alternative way to boost traffic for the site. But if you want to have more traffic try Google Adwords and Adsense.

 

Try to get a high ranking on the search engines by having a lot of quality backlinks and also by having great content.

 

Submit articles to article directories has been most effective for me. I notice that a product will sell more if i have recently post articles related to it.

 

How many articles do you submit? How often? And where?

 

One free idea is to submit your articles to diretories with your link in the resource box. Webmasters will pick it up through RSS feeds and you will receive visitors thereby.

 

Ever tried free ebook distribution on ebay? You might be surprised by the
amount of traffic you can get

 

that sounds interesting - care to share more information?

 

Article Directories WORK but for quicker results, I would do social bookmarking. They both are beneficial, nothing wrong with using both methods for double the impact on your site

 

word of mouth is the best IMO

 

I agree with the person above who said ....

Before you spend time or money on traffic your site has to be ready for it or your efforts are in vain.

I'm guessing you're talking about the site in your signature line?

If so, and I see by your post that you're not wanting to spend a ton of money, I suggest you spend some time in a good article directory like EzineArticles.com and search for things that have to do with content creation for your site.

Just my two cents...

Liz

 

niche forums are one of the best imho.

 

I personally vote for article submit...

Forums - I have a good forums experience, but I cannot repeat it with guaranty;

Word of mouth - yes! - I'm having many purchase where people know about the product from their friends, but I fill there is no way to make people telling about your product or web-site... the only way is to create a great product.

Distribution of something (e.g. e-bay ebook, white paper, how-to-guides, buyer guide) - it's all up to the channel you use to distribute. I have not tried e-book distribution with ebay yet (tinkerbelljoe, thank you for your idea), but will try soon and share results here.

 

Here is a few ideas i use

Add this bookmarking tool to your website allow users to bookmark your website

Submit articles
Submit Press release

Create free screensavers and submit to download.com like this one i made
Submit free ebooks to download.com as well

Watermark videos with the url and submit to youtube.com
Submit to Digg.com

and many more

 

free way is the tough way.
would recommend you to budget out $100-200 per months to buy ads.
this will bring in traffic

 

I can tell Article submission works best Try ezinearticles.com as your first targetted place to submit your articles.Then buy Links from high PR websites thru textadlinks.Then try DMOZ (Very hard to be listed) also yahoo directory.
Then link exchange,SEO,forum posts etc.

Thats it.

 

Here's a link to a thread in the Warrior Forum - 50 Tips On Getting More Traffic To Your Website. There's a few good ones.

 

Thanks for the link. the list is really useful.

 

Traffic comes from various sources. If you are very particular about targetted traffic, then search engine optimization, search engine marketing, are the best methods. Getting links from relevant sites, relevant link exchange sites, relevant forums, relevant blogs, relevant press release sites will not only help you to achieve good ranking but also bring targetted traffic to your site.