Targeted and reasonable newsletters for me. As long as I know they have a good base and that they aren't always filling their inventory. Then I know I can negotiate.
we get alot of traffic from search engines. but I find affiliate marketing works extremially well. I personally use Clix galore.
Google products for the ecommerce sites, adwords for a few, but mostly just SERPS. Own the search results and traffic will follow.
I haven't really done much SEO, but I recieve about a quarter of my visitors from SE's. The rest is through paid advertising through related sites and the other is simple forums advertising such as here on DP. I don't think that this is the solution for everyone though. I think it really depends on your type of site. If it is extremely unique you could probably do well with PPC and SEO.
I've found advertising my software on sitepoint.com's marketplace and digitalpoints own buy and sell area has been really successful for me. -- Phil
Ok i have just tried an advertising campaign with outstanding success!!! I gave away 400 Free Gift Vouchers all with only $5.00 credit on them and made them only valid for 4 days. what i did is i sent the free gift vouchers for my online fishing store to 400 clients and i got a SALES!!! so far probably about 20 sales or (5%) return and the program is still running..... and most purchased between $40-$300 worth of product from me. Out of the sales i did recieve there has only been 1 person or incident where i lost money on this deal where the person only spent the voucher amount and nothing more. so I guess in my eyes so far i feel this is a successful campaign and a great form of advertising. I Also sell a bit on ebay so i will also now look at testing this same theory by putting a free $5.00 gift voucher in each ebay sale delivery and see what results i get in my online store.
I`ve been using forum advertising for the past 2 months & found that this type of advertising is very effective.