Best way to promote site

[Pugilist]

Good Morning guys. What is the best way to promote your site? I am tryingseveral things but I ma new to this and in the dark. Help.
Also Linda, what do you think of the survey club I have seenseveral post for it. Are people actually making money of this. You honest opinioon is appreciated.

Thanks
Pugilist

[Linda Buquet]

Morning Pugilist,

Learn all you can about SEO, think it's really the best way unless you have money to burn on PPC - then you need to really learn how to play the PPC game well to come out ahead.

I was skeptical of survey club because I have seen so much spam. But then I saw some work at home moms on another forum that were making a little money with it.

[stephfoster]

I definitely prefer SEO to paid methods. I do a little PPC towards my sites, but not much, and it's not a main source of traffic for me.

I've had some luck writing articles and posting them on article distribution sites. I wouldn't say I get an extreme number of links, but definitely enough to make it worthwhile. I do regularly have to contact webmasters and remind them that a live link to my site is required for use of the article, so it is necessary to pay attention. I just use Google Alerts to tell me when it finds one, then I can check for a live link.

Submitting your site to directories can do some good as well. You want to be sure that the directory gives direct links to your site, and I generally skip the ones that require a reciprocal link - although if it's a particularly good and relevant directory I'll consider providing a link.

[benlanglois]

Hi I'm also having trouble promoting my site.

I sat and thought about how I could advertise and then I thought that not only would I gain members from letting them advertise their site on mine, but I could also ask them to advertise mine in reture - both people are happy!

I have now started trying this out. In fact I have gone a little further and made a who site dedicated to promoting!

If you would like to advertise your site on mine, please check out Topsites (below). It's only just started but I'm sure it will grow. (Sorry if you see this last paragraph as spam - it was really not supposed to be spam because I detest spammers!)

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Ben,

I get this: Fatal error: Call to undefined function mysql_connect() in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/web/forumdb.php on line 18

[James Nardell]

Usually, unless you are very lucky, it takes a good few months to get decent traffic from organic search. If you do a poor job of your SEO, or you're in an ultra-competitve niche it can take years...

I think in the beginnning it pays to thoroughly research PPC and then test your pages/programs out...This way you won't waste time waiting for your pages to get traffic through organic search to find out if they're any good or not. In my opinion the best way to test and tweak before your pages get found by the big SE's is to run some PPC campaigns. Google AdWords is generally (emphasise generally) a cheap and easy way to get started.

Check out Perry Marshall's AdWords e-book: http://www.perrymarshall.com/adwords/. Before I got started I bought and read a few of the guides on PPC through AdWords, and this one is the best by a long way.