Anyone have success promoting their site with low cost advertising?

I rarely ever use paid methods of traffic generation, you can get a ton of traffic for free, it just requires a little more effort on your part that's all.

I actually recently just wrote a post about this too, but I find BuzzBundle an amazing bit of kit to find your audience & interact with them.

Sulia is another great place to push your content too

If good traffic can be bought, I'm interested.

There are many ways to do it. I'll tell you one approach you may have overlooked:

Directly contacting niche webmasters.

This can work superbly, since you'll often encounter webmasters who undervalue their traffic.

GRM

My main business is online shop..You know what..I've never promote through advertising..I just promote it through SEO..And I make lots of money by zero advertising cost..

SEO is number 1 to me for marketing but I think diversifying source of traffic may have potential too.

I became a newspaper columnist for a particular niche. I don't get paid for the column, but I promote my e-Book and blog in the last paragraph of my articles. Works splendidly. Generates lots of daily traffic, and now I plan to pitch local businesses to buy advertising space on my blog. With a newspaper column in print media every Friday and good target traffic to boot, prospective advertisers would likely consider paying good money for ad space. That's how it works.

I would say socal media, social bookmarking sites, Youtube, press releases, forum marketing etc. are some things that work well regarding free traffic.

You just need to leverage sites where your targeted audience is "hanging out" and leverage those sites to redirect traffic back to your own site.

You mentioned office products so one thing you could do is write some articles about productivity issues,, time management or relevant topics and then contact different webmasters or forum owners where that is a frustration for their readers or newsletter subscribers. Offer them an article that has a good solution and at end then link back to your site.

Debbie

The thing is you need to use multiple methods to bring traffic to a business. SEO is a great start, then try posting in forums that allow you to add links in your signature.,If you put the link to your site in the signature so people can find it, and post often, that will help. You might also try writing articles or posts for your site that are natural but keyword specific. Write no less than one article for every single keyword that you're looking to rank for. Your content needs to answer peoples questions and give them some value so they will want to send all of their friends over to read it.The more quality content that your site has the more Google will like it.

Here are some other ideas.
- Set up your social media accounts ( Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Slideshare ) for your site and post to them as often as possible. Post useful info, images, videos, lists of things. People like interesting posts.
- Find the top 5 forums in your niche and post to them regularly. make sure your website address is in the signature. DON'T spam them, you want to build a reputation with them.
- Do ad swaps with other marketers in your niche. you can search for ad swap networks that can help with this. safe-swaps is one that gets used a lot. Do your due diligence before signing up with any network though.
- Article Sites are still an option, not the most popular, but they can still drive traffic to your site if you use them right. Make sure to use the signature section of any website that you are posting to, get your web address out there.
- Don't laugh, this actually works. Post a printed ad at laundromats and on college campuses in your local area with your website address on it. You would be surprised how well this works for some niches.

When you are trying to get traffic, ask yourself what would make you go to your site to make a purchase. If you are solving problems and giving value to people then you will get traffic and Google love.

I hope this gives you some ideas.

I think it really depends on what your goal is. If you're going to blast your banners out there, you're probably going to have a lot more success increasing name recognition as opposed to increasing conversions.