Promotion technique you use

Doesn't matter if it requires money or free.  I know that most of you use multiple method.  Just which method you like and use the most.  If there is a method that I fail to list up there, just post in the thread.

One method alone doesn't really work, promotions need to be co-ordinated for example if you write a great article which in tun feeds a purchase you promote the article rather then the site or product. We adopt a really simple approach to much of our promotion techniques which goes.

• Write a good piece of link bait by that I mean an article people will want to refer to that is separate from the product you wish to promote.
• Link the 2, both with references and actual links but don't over do it.
• Blog about it, this is often over looked if your site has a blog and you have posted an article elsewhere, blog about it.
• rewrite the article into a slightly shorter more generic article, limit the link between product and article, use this second article as a hook by submitting it to article sites.
• add the first article to del.icio.us and then visit blogs with articles relating and comment in them (remember comment spam is no good to anyone but a nice comment with a link goes a long way)
• Wait for some one to Digg, if your impatient Digg it yourself, though be wary of doing this its better if this is done organic.
• Once Dugg modify the article so it has social bookmarking tools ready, the act of the Digg will hopefully bring in more links via blogs.
• Sit back and enjoy (please note your server will die!)

The combination of article|teasers|Links|digg|blogs is a very effective one in increasing overall traffic but comes at a cost, you will see a very large spike of traffic (if on the front page) but it is only after you have been dugg does this technique work, its the long term links that will generate visitors, digg is used here only as a method to get those links.

Now the above is easier said then done, and there plenty of resources out there on link baiting as well as the best way to use digg.

@ventureskills

you are a hard worker ;)

I'm happy that you're here we can learn a lot from you!

Usually I use all the promotion methods mentioned, but I voted for SEO as it is the method that can bring some "free" residual traffic to your site.

I will agree with Tim, but I will try to say this in a more generic way. My top strategy is to have something unique. It doesn't matter if there are millions of web sites like yours when you can have one unique thing that people can talk about.

The purpose is to create a site that people will link to it, without asking them to do so. To do this you need something unique (as I said before) Then you need some attention/publicity in order to have more chances to get those free links. For me many ways of achieving this have been worked, some of them are :

• Article distribution (just syndicate a few articles to niche sites and top article directories)
• Link exchanges - not too many - with relative sites (3 way links if possible)
• Motivating your visitors to help (eg. add social bookmark buttons, affiliate program, etc.)

Also the comment thing is very cool, and I will give you a tip on that. You can be a member of a site like web2announcer.com and subscribe to tags that are relative to your site. A big portion of the top stories every day are blogs, so you can easily post some valuable comments to these blogs, and get some traffic and relative links from them. Some times this technique can even send you up to 500 visitors from one single post (if you post a comment early) but in anyway it helps in the long term.

Perhaps a good way of explaining is to use an example or create one, (this way we can see if it works)
I have just written a blog article on my website which I think is a compelling enough read to invest my time on. Its all about steganography and gives examples of decrypting and encoding, now I have an interest in the subject and am in the process of expanding the PHP class referred to in the article. My goal is to distribute this code when I'm finished as a Drupal module, this article is meant as an introduction both for search engines to identify my site of interest to those looking for steganography as well as to my small but growing readership.
I therefore have two goals

• Increase readership via links to my blog
• Promote a future Drupal module

The first stage was to write the article, its currently to small too be reworded into a teaser article nor complex to really be anything but an introduction so for now I can't do step 4.

The next stage is to link to it in various places to attract interest from people, using a couple of blogs I can write on to drive traffic towards the article as well as adding it to my del.icio.us account and my claimID account.

I could at this stage submit it to Digg and other social bookmarking services but for now I won't do that if no one has done so after a few days I was probably wrong and the article wasn't as good as I thought anyway.

The next step is to use services like Technorati and web2announcer to find similar posts by people and direct people to the site as a simple demonstration of the techniques. Everybody is always running around doing very complicated and interesting things in this field no one does anything simple.

After that I have joined 3 mailing lists over the last month or so, and will wait till the opportunity is right to post an example to those lists.

I will let you know if it succeeds (the obvious thing now is to give you the link but thats a bit to close to spamming my blog is timnash.me.uk which you can cut and paste if you want to find the article, please do and if its any good spread the word)

Summing up tips

• Links bring users do not feel bad about asking for links, seriously you can all link to my site I don't mind ;)
• Good title can make or break a story on digg, if your submitting your own story you might want to read up on digg link baiting
• once dugg it's worth putting up a digg counter it gives your users a very positive incentive to click (though only do this after a few clicks)
• always leave useful comments... ...just like this one
• always link comment to your post if you are linking to that post
• you can always change pages to adapt to users
• If you think your going to be digged/stumbled etc, turn your comments off or into heavy moderation mode

Thank.  There were some good points that I had not thought of before.

Yeah this thread is going to be one of the best in terms of advice :)

One thing I should point out is I use the digg as my example its a great tool but don't just rely on digg the above tips are important for any social sites.

Also another quick tip use an rss reader like google reader and subscribe to your favourite blogs, though if you can use their blogs rss feed rather then Feedburners or a similar service. On the Venture Skills blog we offer both feeds and the difference between the two is about 5 hours.
On my own blog I currently only offer the feeburner in my autodiscovery, however you can always get the second feed. I've noticed several people hunting around and finding that feed, the nice thing is they quickly return after a post where as the feedburner traffic doesn't really appear till several hours after the post.

I  currently have 54 feeds in my reader covering subjects like blogging, analytics, php and search marketing, I also have a small group I call link baiters these are .gov or .ac.uk .edu etc domains with blogs with comments open, and while most blogging software uses no follows, these particular ones don't, allegedly one of the .gov/edu/ac have more weighting when determining PR I'm not sure if that's true but do find a large increase in traffic about 3 weeks after posting to these blogs.
[updated post rather then posting again, sorry I'm hogging the thread....]

There is no one method that is the best, to successfuly promote a website you should use several of the methods listed. While using different methods it is realy hard, if not impossible, to tell which one is working best. I think the best method varies on each website and probably also changes over time. Your best and safest bet is to try to use all the different methods.

Why do you guys like web2announcer.com?  Doesn't del.icio.us do the same thing?  Or is it because del.icio.us is too popular and is hard to get in a top comment?

I use both, though I use del.icio.us for my bookmarking primarily and in fact use it as it was designed to be...

I use web2announcer because I code it (just kidding :) ) but also because I can filter the data from many different sources (using the tag feature)

yes, both websites are totally different, with web2announcer you get all article headers from all the social communities

Actually, I like all of them.

If the subject is not very saturated with lots of sites and competition I will definetelly take the Search Engine traffic

I have never gotten any traffic from the directories (free ones - don't know about the paid ones) except for one hit from each which is when a moderator actually checks that the site actually exists before accepting  it ;)

we got a lot of traffic from some directories on keywords related to "web proxy and Myspace", but in general you're right

Yeah it sounds funny but some times directories can bring in some traffic. The only problem is that you can't know this from the beginning(I mean you can't know before submit)

Some of the big paid directories bring in a small but constant flow of traffic but they also cost a couple of hundred dollars and don't pay for themselves, however if you have the money Yahoo directory is worth getting.

I have the website from a customer listed at DMOZ, never saw a visitor coming from there :(

DMOZ looks to be interesting only for SEO, as Google gives some extra weight to sites that are included there. Of course this is something from the past that may have changed by now (as social bookmarks can give better rankings to a search engine)

Something interesting about DMOZ is that hundreds of other sites duplicate the contents and structure of it so getting in will give you over time not one link but more than 100.

I have seen 6 visitors in a year for http://hausfay.com but topic is travel and greece so it might have something to do with that
or I must be lucky

DMOZ turns up in refers from time to time but not often, its interesting that many of the social bookmarking use no follow, but I'm convinced Yahoo is now using del.icio.us as part of its ranking factor.

Google also gives some weight to social bookmarks. I have realized this with my new blog. Every post that is going to digg is contained in Google's top results for some keywords. I don't think this would happen otherwise as it is a very new site.

No wonder lots of people lately, spend lots of time on Digg/delicious/stumbleupon exchanges with other visitors of forums

interesting

Digg is unusual in it doesn't use no follows (is that a double negative) so is great for indexing even if your story doesn't make it to the popular, which takes us nicely back the beginning of this thread

Plus a lot of web sites are aggregating social bookmarks (eg. web2announcer.com)