Hey The constant issue for us IM:ers I would say is the magic word traffic. Let's say you have an awesome site with the coolest graphics and sales copy that would make even the great Gary Halbert (R.I.P) green with envy. All of that doesn't matter if you don't have visitors to your fabulous site. You need TRAFFIC. Doing PPC with Adwords has become complex and expensive. Now we're looking for more simple, less expensive, and even free alternatives. Lately I've been looking in to for example; iTunes and Google News. Then we always have the constantly growing YouTube. I was thinking we could make this in to a traffic-brainstorming-thread, share ideas and experiences. So let's share what we've got! Pat
-Make a blog that is full of good content related to your product. Start building backlinks to your blog and update it every day and you will see traffic coming in. (free) -Start article marketing. Similar to blogging but you are writing articles and submitting them to article directories. Have your article link back to your landing page for traffic and it will also increase your credibility in the search engines. (free) -Forum posting with a link in your sig. -Build an e-mail list. Create a squeeze page and have your traffic funneled to this squeeze page. Offer something free to your subscribers as an incentive to join yuor mailing list. Keep giving them free information about your niche for a week or two then you can blast them your real offer once you've built up enough trust. -Affiliate marketing (if your product is suitable for affiliates to market) Hope some of these help!
Don't re-invent the wheel, the answers lie in the past. It's funny how marketers look for ideas and forget all the things people have done since marketing began.
He isn't looking for help, he wants us to brainstorm on NEW things, not stuff like you mention below.
I know this technique seems low tech. You can go to twitter and do a search, and do a on-topic reply. If your answer helps them, they will retweet to their followers. This technique is like real world street peddler, you hand out flyers at the street corner...
You need to embed your URL in the answer/tweet. When they click that link, you get traffic.. when they retweet, you get word of mouth traffic.. I have to admit, it is very labor intensive... It may be cheaper just to go buy traffic.
One under estimated source of free traffic is classified ads using data feeds. For example at oodle (dot) com.
Focus on SEO, Organic traffic is always always always always better than PPC. Its free too, basically.