What is the best free advertising method "today"? What really works the best for you guys and what worked before but not now anymore? I tried PPC like adwords before, got alot of clicks but no result. Anyone can share their methods with us?
writing and distributing articles is the best method by far. however, distributing your article by hand can be a burden. It's best to spend a little and get a service like www.articlemarketer.com or www.isnare.com
I have to agree, an article can never hurt. (Unless it's written in poor english with no real content). An article goes a life time But the biggest free advertising....viral marketing.
post a blog or an article/news release and then post it on digg, techtagg, reddit, stumbleupon, netscape and etc... these will drive some free traffic to you and if your article is good then you will be surprised.
And Perhaps always - Word Of Mouth! Link Building - this still works although not the way it used to. Article Submissions - story goes that your back links will exist as long as the site your article is on exists. You get the opportunity to elaborate your point in an article as opposed to link summary in the link directories.
For me: creating UNIQUE articles and placing them in my own forums. I don't post them in article directories since I didn't get traffic and they would stop being exclusive content that way. And forum posting. I try to post good messages in some top forums and it seems like this got me almost all my members. It's a difficult promotion way (been posting thousands of replies in tens of forums), but it gets me steady people. The third most important is ...trying to keep up the topics in my forums. It's not a promotion way itself, but it sustains the other means of promotion.
Try and make your site an authority in the field you are targetting. I'm working on a site for a client (its a tourism site with PR 5) and we've only done free advertising for it. Never used any paid advertising / banners/ PPC ever, because the client doesnt want to go for paid marketing. With all these efforts, the site isnt doing bad. We've used directory submissions, link exchanges, newsletters, article writing and submissions, RSS feeds, blogs, lots of unique content, site updation and expansion, on-page SEO etc. and now working on forums. Since the site is already established now, it will be easy to start the forum once its online.