I use software and hard work to get my marketing done. There are so many different ways of marketing and so many posts on it here. What is your favorite method, and which methods have you found to be useless?
Content marketing using articles and news releases has been very successful to create inbound only links without having to fuss with link exchanges. One item we can tell you is useless is the automated blog postings. We found that to be more of a headache and with not as much success. One item we found painful for long term maintenance is link exchanges. To do it right, there was more labor involved and not as necessary since there are other less labor intensive ways to generate inbound links. Thanks for starting this thread. It will be interesting to see what else people respond with.
I dont really do much online marketing, i started of from a cheap radio station then built up to a few more, then i hit TV and went from there now hit mags, newspapers etc. I got lucky from the radio station paid 400 pounds then went from there. I am starting to do some online marketing so many different ways etc, i see a lot of blackhat ways also hmmm
I pay hardly anything for my advertising. I find if you have a product or service that interests enough people, then they will do your advertising for you. Just get your name and link in as many places as possible, on forums, blogs, directories and search engines, and you'll find you'll get a tonne of traffic.
I am currently messing around with Forum Marketing. I haven't perfected it yet... but it is a work in progress. I always try to post valuable content whenever I post on a forum like DP, because it is indexed. One thing I have begun to get curious about is SEO optimized posts. If a post can be indexed, would it get a better ranking if you put a bolded keyword at the top, or if you mentioned that keyword 3 times for every 100 words. But I really like Forum marketing, because if you provide valuable content, people will take your recommendations more seriously, vs. the "CLICK HERE BUY NOW" method. The main reason I like it so much is because most forums are free, and you have to do little work to put your product in front of thousands of viewers. Using digital point as an example, I have watched the activity of the Buy Sell Trade Forum. At any given moment there are no less than 400 people browsing that forum. At times I have seen it as high as 650. That certainly would be an easy way to at least get 20 or 30 clicks on your link... which if you used PPC could cost as much as $50 or $60 if you are using a pricey keyword. My website doesn't have anything on it right now, and and when I put a link to it one of my forums I post on, it was getting 5 to 10 uniques per day from that forum even though there was no content. So I put up a squeeze page on it, and it started building me a list. Web 2.0 Marketing is king. I am not knocking PPC Marketing... because that does work, but you have to know what you are doing. However it does get a lot of traffic quick and qualified. Whatever marketing method you choose, it needs to match your strongest skillset. If you are good with keywords and selling people with 2 lines of text, then PPC may be for you. If you are better at establishing relationships and networking with people, then Forum/YouTube/MySpace, etc. Marketing may be for you. It just all depends on you as an individual.
My way is to use affiliates. I am currently still building my army of affiliates which I will help to bring income to their business.
For my blog, I am using Facebook ads and depending a lot on my content. I do get some spikes in traffic when I got linked from reputable local blogs.