Effective Marketing Strategy?

[llegent]

Hi, I have been scratching my head in this :- How could I be effectively promote my service out to the public effectively, and reap maximum exposure and response? Someone advised me to go with Press Releases strategy which I agreed too is a good option, just that the cost of it might be on the high side for me to spend.

Apart from Press Releases, what other strategies that you guys would adopt in general?

[taiarain]

What type of business are you marketing?

Press releases could be good. How's your website? Are you effectively using keywords, META tags, etc? Are you taking advantage of free advertising opportunities?

[llegent]

hi taiarain.
Thanks for throwing some lights here!
Ok, I am currently ofering free website hosting service to all my members. My main site is build with phpBB script and it is centered as support forum for the hosting service. I have rework my meta tags to include "free hosting" in description tags, keyword tags, alt tags.

Lately I also have been submitting to quite a number of directories. Well, not much traffic from these free listings. That's why I need to re-look my strategy.

Any guides?

[taiarain]

You can try the press release route.

What is your target market? Why are you offering this for free?

I'm thinking small groups and organizations might be a good bet.

Letters to local parent groups (almost every school has one and few have a web presence), historical reenactors, theater groups, etc.

Hit the school and community circuit. Pin ads on bulletin boards at high schools, colleges, community colleges, trade schools, retailers, etc.

Revise your tags to include words like school, college, website, community, theater, reenactment, reenactor, etc.

I'll think of more later. Lemme know what you think of these.

Taia

[Melos]

How about article writing & submission?  Surely you (or someone) can come up with some highly targetted articles about free hosting.  You can make them super specific to trades or organizations (ie - why every school needs a web page, why ever church needs a web page) 

[llegent]

Hi Melos, I tried writing and submitted a few articles in fact. Initailly it was gaining good result. But as time pass by, these articles will get buried somewhere in the archive folder and get very little traffic. Visitors rarely able to even reach them, not to mention of channelling the traffic to my site.

I am still finding an effective way to continuously promote my service and able to draw traffic to my site consistently. Anyone kind to share their strategy?

[Pamil Visions]

That's not really true about the articles getting buried. If you have a really good topic, they'll bring you back, on a long term, plenty of TARGETED visitors. Take a look at this article: http://searchwarp.com/swa7630.htm I wrote for a German LED manufacturer.
It still brings them interested clients, although it was posted in May 04, 2005
In January the company even got an invitation to a conference in the UK to present this issue.

Second: articles bring you one way links: very valuable for SEO.
Third: read SEO Made Easy by Brad Callen to learn some tips that will help your website get a higher ranking and improve SERP.

If you don't have money to pay for promoting, there's nothing better than articles and blogs.
So, if articles don't do it for you, create a blog and "burn" it: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/home

Hope that helped.