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Best Free Method You've Ever Used in Marketing Your Business Online

Regular blogging, article marketing and networking with other bloggers. The best links aren't usually from article directories (yes, even ezinearticles), but from bloggers with a large audience. Interest a popular blogger in your blog or your website and you've got traffic coming in from it every day.
 
And IMHO you should NOT spend many many months and spend many many hours trying to make friends at a Social Site in hopes that these people will go to your blog and be customers. Of course it is good for Backlinks. And in terms that is good for SEO !!
But just make sure utilize your time efficiently !! And not get too bogged down in striving for more Social Bookmarking Traffic itself. Its a waste of time that could be spent towards getting Google Search Engine Traffic ;)
The Real Traffic !!!

agree with your thoughts here ... getting that google traffic is the thing that we all strive for ...

some good ideas here folks :) i wish i had something new to contribute, but i'm still learning it all myself ... thanks tho!
 
I have to agree on the idea that it really depends on your target market. I have engaged myself in social bookmarking and other free traffic generation techniques, they all have results.

If you can write well then maybe article submission would be good for you.
 
Once You have used the other strategies (explained already), and are generating some solid traffic, You might want to look into exchanging a couple links to similar sites. Only good ones, and not a ton of them. There is nothing wrong with marketers working together. Try to find someone that compliments what your site is offering l, like if You do free websites, find someone that sells website software or submission.
 
The social networking and other web 2.0 marketing scene is very misunderstood.

For a whole year, I stopped ALL advertising except all things social media. It was a test, that's why. I did it in quiet till the test was done.

My target market, or at least my audience I've attracted, is FAR from teens and stuff. I have to strongly disagree about the true demographic that's going on in the world of social media marketing.

I have people of all ages, even a 50+ female newbie student!

All from strictly social media, no other marketing that long. Very pure test to be sure.

Be valuable, help, do NOT sell AT ALL.

That's it. Sort of....

Sheree

That's great that you took a whole year to really assess social media...that's exactly what the internet marketing community needs to really push forward. I'm seeing more and more how social media is becoming a forefront in the online scene, so it's natural that it's good for business too.

Thanks for your advice everyone, I'll be following this thread too, since I want to learn of good strategies from people who have actually used them and been successful.
 
I'd like to add one thing that can be difficult to wrap your head around when you're just getting started. That is the importance of building backlinks to your site. And the way to look at this process, which sometimes people don't quite understand.

When you place a backlink to your site on a third party site like a social bookmarking site, an articles directory or regular directory, depending on where the link is you MAY get an initial flood of traffic from people who regularly visit that bookmarking service and see your tags, or from people who stumble upon your article from searching in Google on your keyphrases. That's nice but usually it won't be very much traffic.

What is MORE critical about building those backlinks is how this impacts you in the search engines. Google (and all the search engines) love to see backlinks to a site. It will raise its opinon of you accordingly and if it see you have lots of juicy backlinks your site's pages will move up higher in the search engines.
So building backlinks is more about how this affects your site over time in the search engines - that's the important thing to focus on.

Case in point. I recently launched a site and built about 100 backlinks to it. Now it places for the top three spots in Google for its main search terms/keywords. And now I will start building backlinks to more of my inner pages on my site and work to get placements for other keywords. I'm getting most of my traffic now from Google because I made the effort to get those backlinks. I never got much traffic from the actual places where I got the backlink - blogs, forums, directories, or whatever. I'm getting the traffic from Google.

That's the real key in this game - getting those organic rankings in Google by getting targeted backlinks to pages on your site (not just the main page.)

Dan
 
Best Free Method for Marketing Online

The best free methods that I have found are really good keyword research, mini websites like Squidoo and Hubpages, and article marketing.

They seem to work really well for me.

Carmen
 
You could also try these free methods for targeted traffic...

Blog commenting
Answering yahoo questions
Social bookmarking
Classified ads
Free ad forums
Free press releases
Forum marketing
SEO

There are so many more, but it's late where I am, so
I cant remember to much right now:)


paul
 
Consistency is the Key

What seems to be the best FREE marketing approach is just plain old hard work.

No matter what type of marketing you use; blogs, articles, traffic exchanges, safelists, forums. It all takes long hours and consistency.

To borrow an slogan from another industry; wet, wash, rinse, repeat.
 
Best Free Online Marketing Methods

I like building Squidoos, and I also really like RSS feeds, and a lot of the new Social Media.

I usually switch up things to do every week to keep it interesting. :)

Carmen
 
Submitting articles to article directories adding a link back to your site is very effective. And best of all, it's free! :)
 
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