As a webdesigner/Admin I have made may sites and have driven various ad campaigns for them and something I have learnt is never to spam in order to gain popularity for your site. By doing so you are unleashing several consequences upon your self.

- If you send emails to random people continiously they will list your domain name as spam and all the popular mail servers will automaticall redirect your email to spam mail

- If you go to forums such as nairaland and post randomly in order to get attenstion from the users the Admin can either kick you out, get angry and erase every post you put on the site or simply just have a replace word for what you are advertising.

Spamming is a bad way to go about advertisment, us as webmasters have to come together brain storm on effect ways to reach the market out there. Any ideas?

I have the same problem too. how do u get a website to be very visible so quickly?

You can try keywords advertising (Pay per Click) with Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing (Overture). Also, I see a lot of billboards here which advertise websites, I see them on TV too! They are mostly dating or gaming sites though e.g. Match.com, 888.com. These ones are really big sites sha, infact 888.com is now on one of the jerseys of these clubs.
You can also advertise in your local newspapers or technology/computer magazines.

Well if you are not in a hurry for attention, getting your site noticed is not too difficult.
The truth is i have been able to generate quite an encouraging traffic to my knew site
www.hostportfolio.com through search engines.Not just vistors. I am actually selling.
Apart from pay per click advertising,
which is capital intensive, i think search engines are where you should concentrate
your efforts.The fact still remains that 70%-80% of website traffic come from search
engines. So to get enough attention, start while designing your site.That is, make your site
search engine friendly.
I have done this to my knew site and i am not regreting.The site is just about 2 months old.
It took about 3 weeks for it to become indexed in The major search engines and i am even suprised
at the number of unique visits it receives daily.Soon i'll redesign all my sites to be search engine
friendly.
You can also get targeted traffic from forums like www.nairaland.com.But here
you have to be careful and must not go against the rules of the forum.Let your contributions
be well researched and soon you'll add reputation to marketting.
Then newspaper adverts in your niche area is also very efficient.But these are more expensive
options.

Why are people still wasting time making personal sites? Nobody visit static personal sites anymore. If you have something to say get a blog, say something useful and there is your ad. Or if you have interesting forum site (like Nairaland) or CMS (like nigerianbloggers etc) or news site (e.g nigeriaworld) Outsides of these, personal static sites wont get you traffic.

demmy:

Why are people still wasting time making personal sites? Nobody visit static personal sites anymore. If you have something to say get a blog, say something useful and there is your ad. Or if you have interesting forum site (like Nairaland) or CMS (like nigerianbloggers etc) or news site (e.g nigeriaworld) Outsides of these, personal static sites wont get you traffic.

Of what use is a blog when it is not know? Do people visit sites they don't know exist?

brushparke:

Well if you are not in a hurry for attention, getting your site noticed is not too difficult.
The truth is i have been able to generate quite an encouraging traffic to my knew site
www.hostportfolio.com through search engines.Not just vistors. I am actually selling.
Apart from pay per click advertising,
which is capital intensive, i think search engines are where you should concentrate
your efforts.The fact still remains that 70%-80% of website traffic come from search
engines. So to get enough attention, start while designing your site.That is, make your site
search engine friendly.
I have done this to my knew site and i am not regreting.The site is just about 2 months old.
It took about 3 weeks for it to become indexed in The major search engines and i am even suprised
at the number of unique visits it receives daily.Soon i'll redesign all my sites to be search engine
friendly.
You can also get targeted traffic from forums like www.nairaland.com.But here
you have to be careful and must not go against the rules of the forum.Let your contributions
be well researched and soon you'll add reputation to marketting.
Then newspaper adverts in your niche area is also very efficient.But these are more expensive
options.

Brush, visited hostportfolio and checked the meta tags, what is your ranking on the search engines? I think this is very important in getting SE traffics. But I believe you've got a good strategy going on there.

Well, IMO, I used free means to get visitors to my website. I run a motivational website and the traffic has been encouraging. I write a lot of articles and do some online Joint Ventures with website owners in my niche. I have several websites linking to my website and they drive FREE traffic to my site anyday any time without me spending a dime. Article writing is easy and a long-term means of getting known online.

If you want to get quick traffic then it has to be through PPC and several paid adverts.

I hope this helps.

we are obviously talking about dynamic sites with something to offer.

The easiest way to use google's adword. Google because its the most used search engine on the net. Adwords because you get targetted visitors (not just anybody). This however is cost-intensive cost statistics show that you need a minimum of 10,000$ to have an effective ad campaign with google.
2 partite reason
[list]
[li]A lot of searchers don't go beyond the first result page so it better to have your ads show up on the first page[/li]
[li]To have your ad come up first u need to be the highest bidder for that keyword. imagine some keywords have bids as high 10$ per click. But on the average 5cents per click to be on the first page.[/li]
[/list]
Google adwords does wonder anyway, if you've got the money. It can transfer you from obscurity to a full fledge internet brand.

Alternatively
[list]
[li]
You can build your site to be search engine friendly. Flash pages don't do your site good. The web crawler can't "crawl" over such files. Site optimization for search engines is important.[/li]
[li]
You can also use branding method. Get lots of unique non-targetted traffic to sites. If u get thousands of visitors daily, it shows on alexa's radar and sometimes google list results based on traffic (using Alexa's service). U can use www.wantedhits.com to generate (unique) traffic to url. 180$ gets your sites in front of 200,000 people within a month. Non targetted though so don't expect much from such a campaign but rather build on it.[/li]
[/list]

Word of mouth however is the best traffic generator. It already puts u in your intended visitors good books. So u have to build a unique product with efficient customer service (for commercial sites) else your ad campaging would be useless. It wont be better than the "Basket effect"
"Like they say a unique product sells itself"

There is no shortage of places to advertise if you've got the money.

If you don't have the money to spend, then you have to work hard to get the word out, especially if you're in a competitive market.

Here are some ways to do it:

1. SEO.  No blackhat seo, or you'd get banned in the search engines.

2. Write keyword-rich articles, with links back to your website.  Submit them to hundreds of article directories.

3. Grab free reprint articles and post them on your website.  Just search for "free articles" in google.  Having many articles on your site increases the content, which in turn boosts your ranking.

4. If you're smart enough, do traffic bait.  This is where you write controvertial stuff that would spark spirited discussions across the web.  Before you know it, everybody is linking to your article to reference it.  Lots of inbound links to your site will shoot you up in rankings on google and other search engines.

5. Create RSS feed and distribute it to rss aggregator sites.

6. Contact other webmasters and ask for reciprocal links.

7. Create wireless access to your content using WML.

8. Add your site to your email signature.

9. Become a blogger and write frequently.  Include links to your website on those blogs.

10. Don't forget the newsgroups.

11. Get yourself an IRC channel.

bolaoni:

Of what use is a blog when it is not know? Do people visit sites they don't know exist?

@Bolaoni

I hope I am reading your post wrongly, or else you may want to explain how "personal websites" are more popular than Blogs. And how do you get people to know your site or Blog? Isn't it all about PROMOTING IT?
A personal website does not attract any more visitors than a Blog, if you don't advertise it.

@Layi
I beg to disagree on the google adwords thingy. I happened to have run an adwords campaign ( jointly with a friend) for just over six months and I can assure you, it cost nowhere near $10,000.
The thing with Adwords is you shouldn't bother with it if you are not actually selling anything.  Unless you've got too much money and feel like throwing some away.

Have you tried www.linkreferral.com??

Depends on the industry you are in . Nairahost for example relies on referral strategy, hence we don't advertise besides via forums. If you are able to tell me what industry you are in, we could be able to find an effective marketing strategy for you.

if you want to get good trafic without spamming,just go to google and type your competitors url like this

link:www.competitor site.com and it would show you where to post your adverts.if you do it exactly the way they did theirs,you wount have any problem.your site would got high.i have tried it b4

The best 3 ways to get traffic to your site are
1, search engine optimization
2, payperclick
3, blogging.
but the most cost effective is blogging.
you can check out my blog and see for your self http://www.onlinemoneyhome..com

HAVE you try article marketing?

you can use some real link exchange program to generate traffic sitesell.com has a very good link exchange program that i just discovered recently. I have used them and is free. This though has a long term perspective

seeing that there are people with clues about SEO, can i direct you guys to a thread i have over here: https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-378121.0.html

thanks

Do these two (2) assignments and watch how the traffic keep flowing to you website freely:

Step 1: On-page SEO (30%)

Step 2: Off-page SEO (70%)

Brief explanation:

Step 1:
a. Longtail keywords analysis
b. Meta tags
c. Page title
d. 5-20% keywords anchor links to your website
e. Fresh 350+ words content
etc

Step 2:
a. add your URL to google, yahoo, MSN
b. Submit your URL to your niche directories e.g hotel URL to hotel directories
b. Blogging linking (anchor) back to your site
c. Comment on PR2-PR6 blogs
d. Submit your URL to www.autopinger.com
etc.

Hope this help,

To our success!

Actually spamming is a very bad thing in online promotion or internet marketing.No body like spamming on their website because every one do very hard work on their website.So we should avoid it.We can use SEO for online advertising but we should use only white hat seo techniques for that purpose and never try to do spam on any website.
Many thanks for discussion on a very bad thing in online advertisement.  I hope people will understand and nobody will use spamming in their online advertisement work.

It is highly pertinent that they do.

We are a USA company trying to gain a prance in Nigeria selling used Mack dump trucks. Any ideas where we could advertise our products. Kind regards Mack