I have had my company for about 6 months now having formed as a smaller group to a larger company. I found the hardest thing was marketing the compnay and services we offer I tried alsorts adverts, emails, faxes all a wast of time and money.

Any ideas on successful marketing would be great.


Many thanks
James

The only way to gain significant levels of traffic is via search engines & that topic could take up many pages...

But other sources of traffic

ezines - find on-topic ezines to advertise in - these can be quite valuable. Even better - write articles for ezines.

Pay-per-click (overture) - can be expensive, can be good value dependant on the keywords. Some of the smaller PPC engines (FindWhat etc) can bring some traffic at a lower cost

Google Adwords - same as PPC now

Banners - pretty useless - expect no more than 1% click-thru

Emails - Take care - spam mail can ruin your reputation

You mention faxes - take care on this one - "spam" faxes are illegal.

Pop-under ads - pretty useless

Making your site sticky - Forums, etc - Very useful, but you still have the initial challenge of marketing your forum

Affliate programs

Wolf,

The best methods of marketing are always the least expensive. Word of mouth and the press will get you more clients in a shorter period of time than a hundred advertisements ever will.

Many thanks for your input guys, marketing is a knightmare but Ill take your suggestions onboard and try some of the more simple approaches.

Fingers crossed the stats server will blow up with an overload of visitors soon enough :-)

Again many thanks Thinkcomp & NovaW.

Starting a new company is never going to be a smooth ride I guess, but even though I messed up first time in this group and got a smacked bum (never read the terms and posted my URL all over the place) its nice to be able to ask a cival question and get a sensible answer on a news group.

Yet again thanks to all
James