Effective cost efficient ways to market....?

[garyak]

Hi,
In everyone's opinion, what have you found to be the best way to market? What method has given you the most response for the least money and /or effort?
We all should know about PPC and just how expensive it can get.
Then there is articles writting/submitting which all takes time and effort and is not guaranteed to produce results.
So, please let me know your experiences and thoughts.
What has worked for you

[MrCat]

I have been doing a lot of internet marketing and found that SEO is one of the best way to market your product on the net. The key is quality and targeted link building - especially when you are tight on your budget for promotion. You can get a lot of traffic but the conversion you get out of this would readily suggest how effectively you are marketing your site.

Submitting to high PR directory with high targeted traffic, social bookmarking, article marketing, etc. are just some of the ways you should consider.

[saj]

PPC pricing has been increasing and often beyond positive ROI

Potential for click-fraud - although the large search engine operators now have very good click fraud strategies in place

The disadvantages of PPC and affiliate programs include the minimal amount of money a website affiliate owner would receive from just the clicks. More money is paid for the sales of the item that the visitor clicks on within the affiliate website, but that’s’ much harder to do. For the advertiser, having their ad on a heavy traffic site can bring in a lot of affiliate’s pay per click near leads, but doesn’t guarantee sale of your product, which could result in a major amount of money owed to the website.

To increase your chances of profiting from these ppc programs, start by checking the many affiliate program websites. The many websites of affiliate’s show Yahoo adsense and Google adsense as 1st and 2nd top programs. The Yahoo adsense and Google ppc programs are the 1st and 2nd top affiliate programs because of their popular search engines among users.

Advantages of SEO
Once an effective SEO program is underway, there can be little to no cost involved in driving traffic to new product and/or service pages
A search engine optimised listing can remain for months after it is achieved. The longevity of the optimised listing depends on the competitiveness of the search phrase
high ranking sites are regarded as being more credible by search engine users

[dotservant.com]

Marketing is all about dollar and cents, a deeper pocket helps building up a business faster. Unfortunately, there is no quick and easy way to get known is a short period of time with zero budget.

SEO is one of the cheaper option to try, but it takes a lot of time to test and tweak, and today's success formula may not guarantee to last through every search engine algo changes, completely depending on one source of traffic is a very risky business.

Establish connections through online communities can be another option, again it takes time to build up reputation in a community.

If you have the budget, there are some extra options for you :-

-online marketing (identify potential client online and contact them directly, I believe some reputable online marketing company are doing this for clients)
-building affiliate network (this can be a good long term strategy, online marketing company are helping clients to recruit online affiliates too)
-local offline media (you need local business to sustain growth, diversified channel of sales can help you through difficult moments)
-telemarketing (contact local companies)

[rembrant]

It seems to me that another aspect to marketing is all about time. How much time and effort do you want to put into it. If you are willing to put in your own labor it will be less expensive but if you have no time and need it quick then there are other options (they just seem to cost more)

[Natural Elements]

The marketing strategy for us is very limited, all marketing firm proposals are too expensive, and most of the time they want to lock us into contract which we will never do.

Recently a Management PPC company called us to buy a keyword for a fixed price, when we asked referencies we did get any answer.

I think it will be like SEO companies, as with any scam, will follow the trend of the moment.

[guinanie]

Internet is the best way to market your products and services online no matter what kind of internet marketing strategy you used. It is a marketing method on which you can directly buy and sell and the best way to inform people about your new product to offer.

Originally Posted by garyak

Hi,
In everyone's opinion, what have you found to be the best way to market? What method has given you the most response for the least money and /or effort?
We all should know about PPC and just how expensive it can get.
Then there is articles writting/submitting which all takes time and effort and is not guaranteed to produce results.
So, please let me know your experiences and thoughts.
What has worked for you

[CoolCopy]

Press Releases - my all time favourite! They are:

1.) Inexpensive to implement
2.) Simple to create/have created
3.) Often receive better than #1 position in search engines if written well
4.) Can be submitted to offline publications for free exposure for your business, often bringing you twice as many prospects.



Hope that helps

[MarketLeverage]

Have you submitted your site to Stumbleupon? I have found that I receive quite a bit of page views from it.

[garyak]

Thank you all who contributed. I love your willingness to share your hard gained knowledge. At the moment I use SEO, PPC, blog(s), Articles and of course forums.

Do you use forums manly for link building or do you get good traffic from them as well for the time you spend posting?

[MarketLeverage]

I would suggest Entrecard.com as well.

[garyak]

good work, thanks

[funnyman]

I just tried stumbleupon. I really like their business model plus it is only 5 cents for extremely well targeted visitors. I am really impressed... hopefully the traffic to my site will result into some repeat visitors!

[webcosmo]

As you said I never have good ROI from PPC. PPC takes lots of expertize and research to make best out of your money spent. I have seen better results taking other avenues. But again it depends on the site. If you are selling $200+ priced products chances are you can get away with the expense. But if you have low priced items you have to get the best ROI.

As an alternative solutions you may try:
- Advertise on classified ads sites like webcosmo.com and others. These are mostly free and in many cases gets better results.
- Write your own articles. Submit on social networking sites after posting on your site. If people happen to like that, it will give you a boost of traffic.
- SEO. Optimize your site. Nothing is better then this. In cases people gets thousand or more daily traffic just from search engines. Working on optimizing your site get that chunk of traffic is always a smart move.

[madcaptains]

Do you use forums manly for link building or do you get good traffic from them as well for the time you spend posting?

I do forum posting and it's what I prefer for now. As for exemple, my website is about saltwater aquarium so I sponsor 2 forum. One has 6000 members and the other has 22 000 members so they get lot of trafic every day. Sponsoring those forum cost me about 150$ per year (some cost lot more) and here is what I get for it:
-rotating banner on the forum
-a forum section where I can post what ever I want.
-My trafic is looking for what I have on my website

The forum section is what I perfer. Everytime there is something new on my website, I post it on the forum and make sure my subject will be easy to find by search engin. I have notice that most people find my site this way.

Inconvenient:
it can be time consuming. days I post lot of message I get about 50 visitors on my site and the days I post nothing, I get about 25 visitors. This is not lot but for sure, the more subject I will have on each forum, the more link will be create to my site.