Where do you invest your advertising budget online?

Anyone willing to share where you invest your online advertising budget?

Any particular types of sites?

Specific sites?

Which sites are better for traffic or better for SEO?

Found any past purchases to be a total waste of time and money?

That depends on the type of site you want to promote. For instance there are a few type of sites (eg. dating or ringtones) that can be advertised using pop ups, which is a very cheap type of advertisement while others can work better with adwords or similar programs.

Personally I like to buy CPM ads from publishers as a test, using a portion of my monthly budget. If this test works I continue with this advertiser, otherwise I search for more.

For ecommerce sites the best solution is adwords, as their contextual program can really bring in quality traffic.

Regarding your SEO question I think the only thing that works now is paid blog posts. This is due to the recent google "hunting" over the sponsored links.

Like Nick said it depends on the site and the niche and of course the budget

if all you have is a couple of hundred dollars then looking at either using a press release service ala PRweb or go down the review me link, I would suggest if you go down the reviewme route you find 1 or maybe 2 high trafficked sites specific to your niche.

http://selfmademinds.com/200705/chowed-or-dugg-whats-best/

adwords, CPM schemes are good sound choices but are not long term and PPC is addictive like a drug you see traffic coming in but if you stop paying it stops.

So you must look to a more organic route, buying links while technically a no no is very hard to trace if your discrete so go a head and contact sites in your niche asking how much to advertise on their site, look for minimum of 6 month and full fat link.

Buying directory links is a waste of time with the possible exception of aviva and yahoo both of which bring in some good traffic.

Ultimately use your budget as the reserve their is so much you can do for free or nearly free and therefore keep some budget back to throw at the occasional odd or quirky idea.

I didn't know that Aviva really worths paying to get included. What categories worked best for you Tim? I would like to try a listing.

yes right, it depends on the type of website.

I like ads from adengage fro entertainment website ads, furthermore I buy links from related websites I found while surfing the web.

I guess the related link with nice traffic is the best deal.

I use also adwords for some website but not so much. My budget is (very) low $xxx (sometimes more)

I've used them for clients sites, each time a featured listing, using the 5 deep links to point to articles worked well, but only if $80 is not much money to you, if your on a tight budget <$1k I would look elsewhere, and while Aviva does offer deeplinks I would probably go with yahoo if I had to choose

So you are using aviva for seo/fast indexing purposes?

In that case I guess it would be better to outsource some social bookmarking submissions for a better price.

CPC and CPM?

What do you mean? :)

looks like a SPP (signature promo post) ???

I sell services and products online so I generally invest in starting an affiliate program

What about saving all this advertising money up for chrismas presents?

I use social networking to advertise my websites.
Put a social bookmark buttons like ad to any on each of your posts and publications.
Bookmark  it yourself to as many of the social network sites as you like and let your readers bookmark your pages as well.
I get lots of traffic from Digg, Regit,stumbleupon and slashdot this way. They are the most traffic intensive once.
A new social network is Yuwie. Just like Facebook and Myspace you can have a blog there where you write nice little articles about your topic with even nicer little links to your websites.

Now that's nothing new to either of you i guess, besides maybe that Yuwie is the first social network that pays you on top of it. That's right for everything you do there you get paid. even for reading other peoples profiles. but especially nice i find the idea to advertise all of my businesses and get paid for it instead of thinking how to spend my advertising money.
Yuwie got 70'000 + members in January alone. that's about 2'500 a day.

What i did was creating a club about the Koh Tao Community and members started dropping in by themselves. Other than my facebook account that shows two friends in 8 month, at Yuwie i'm on page three in one week only.

There is another one called hubpages.com where you can setup pages with links to your site. Careful though they are not all that tolerant but give you several warnings and the chance to correct your errors if you have crossed the line somehow. It is another fast growing network and same sa Yuwie, free to join. hubpages also shares the advertising revenue with it's users.
I tried to get that work but after entering the information to syndicate the Google account, never got an answer from Google.

Social networking sites are the fastes growing and most complex thing that ever happened on the net. For those who haven't done so yet, it's time to jump on the money train.

Haven't done that much advertising lately.  I like the idea though to send out post cards via mail.  Has anyone else employed this?  Care to share some stats as to the ROI?

I use all the free advertising methods except paying for a couple of premium accounts at classified sites.

Barb