What are your TOP 10 ways for free promotion and paid promotion?

[Woodcs82]

What are your TOP 10 types of free promotion and paid promotion to your website?

Please share with everybody. Include the website url's.

If you know of any good programs please list them as well.

 

[Randall]

Nameslot's top 10 techniques.

- First of all I try to get the domain name that is most suitable and if has any keywords in it.
- Unique Development from ground up to keep away from similar structure which might be a hindrance if used a copy of the script in the market.
- Extensive Keyword research before sitting on some particular keyword.
- Unique Content writing for the developed site.
- Directory submissions.
- Forum posting on relevant forums.
- Social Bookmarkings.
- Blog reviews from a group of bloggers.
- Articles writing and posting them to the article repositories.
- After some waiting I get some PR and then I exchange links with relevant sites of other webmasters.

All the above mentioned ways are for free marketing of your site.
The Green ones are for Onpage optimization and the Red ones are for the Offpage optimizations.

 

[Woodcs82]

Thanks so much for replying to my message! Have you had any experience with any websites inparticular? Have you ever used any special programs?

Should offline advertising ever be done?

Lastly, do you recommend going with a standard pr firm like prweb or prnewswire or do you recommend going with a publicist?

 

[Randall]

I have used some directory submission tools like digixmas and informenter the firefox plugin for filling in the forms.

Other then that I have used WEBCEO which is also a free program for SEO things.

In past I had used one commercial program called submitwolf but now I don't use it anymore.

If offline advertising is possible for the site on which you are working then offline advertising is a great way to boost the website. If people living near you or in your city don't know anything about the site or its products then it will be a waste of time in explaining most of them.

I have used PR in past for promoting the sites. But on both the occasions I was not very satisfied with the outcome. It might be working for others and I cannot say that it is not a good idea. But personally I haven't seen good results from this PR in past.

Going with a publicist depends on the budget you have for the marketing of your web site.

If a publicist is a professional in his field then there will be no problems at all in hiring one.

 

[nielsencl]

I also mainly focus on SEO for marketing, but I have used forum marketing (and I don't think it has to be targeted, but that's another topic), and also Press Releases.

I submitted the PRs to PRWEB and a number of other sites that are free or low-cost. If I had real news (and a budget) then I would use more paid press release services. I spent about $60 ($40 at PRWEB) and got a lot of traffic to the site for a short while. If you do a search in Google for "vioxx search engine" without the quotes you can see some of them. The PR was sent out about February 2005. In February of 2006 I sent out a second PR for a different site and you can see that in the results as well because I mentioned the first site launch in the second PR.

 

[nielsencl]

Oh, the #1 top method that I have seen but not used (yet) is giving away something for free that is popular.

A client had a shampoo site that was built for them and they made a page that offered a free sample of their shampoo to anyone that would fill in a form. Then they forgot about it. Well I started to work with them 2-3 months later and I noticed that the email that the forms was being sent to was a POP3 mailbox that noone was checking. I told them about it and heard back that they had 10,000 emails!!!

They were really, really freaked out. They didn't know what to do about sending all those free samples with getting the samples made, packaging, addressing the packages, paying for the postage, etc.

They thought this was a huge problem, but when I talked to them, I told them they were looking at this the wrong way. Sure it's going to cost you some time and money, but look at the cost compared with other kinds of advertising where you get 10,000 people to give you their address and email...? If you can't send them all samples (because you ran out), you could contact them an offer them coupon with a nice discount.

I don't know what they did in the end, but they are still in business.