Relevent IM Promotion Methods for 2012

Hiya,

I thought I would get off to a good start with 2012 and clear out any irrelevant/out of date IM promotion methods I use to save time and energy and hopefully help others do the same. I have definitely noticed a reduction in traffic generally and would like to concentrate on methods which are most likely to bring in visitors.

Personally I feel article submission has gone downhill but have heard advice that syndication is the way to go either by contacting webmasters with successful, on topic websites or submitting high quality articles to Ezine and others in the hope that someone will syndicate (and leave your link:rolleyes

Am unsure if web directory and feed submission are of any worth these days and do not submit anymore (or maybe thats why a decline in traffic?)

I don't ping at all anymore (my webpages get indexed no problem, don't think there is another use for Pinging?) and only social bookmark to Stumbleupon and Digg really.

Am also of the mindset that keyword use and research is becoming less and less important for ranking. Purely due to expereince that I often seem to rank for keywords I don't promote. I quite often write content for my website with no particular keyword in mind and I can still get regular visitors to that page with a variety of other keywords. I have never consiously used latent keywords.

Here is a list of promotional methods (I've not used all of them) but most.
Please feel free to comment on the following methods and/or add your own list and which you think are a waste of time and which will continue to help your business thrive in 2012 .

• Regular, unique good quality website content (obviously always a winner
• On topic, uselful blog commenting (quality v's quantity)
• On topic forum posting
• Article submission for: links :for traffic from article directory and search engines : for syndication
• Ezine articles? Go articles? Articlesbase? Others?
• Press release submission (paid and free sites)
• High pr (.edu .gov) link building - is it worth it even if it is on topic, obviously without spamming?
• Link exchange
• Feed submission
• Social bookmarking
• Web directory submission
• Video marketing
• Pinging
• Web 2.0
• Keyword research (at all, using paid programs or free google tool)
• Using paid link building/submission tools such as Senuke and others (personally have not used any so can't remember names)
• Yahoo answers (have not had too much success with this and stopped about 1 1/2 years ago) how are you gettin on with it?

• Wordpress blogs and websites v's dreamweaver, Xsitepro etc.

That's all I can think of for now.

What's your thought on this and which methods do you think (or preferably know for a fact) are still worth sticking with?

All the best for 2012,

Bethsuzi