The first thing most businesses do today is create profiles on Twitter, Facebook, and several other websites to start promoting themselves and you can’t really blame them either. For one thing it is free, and it is also the buzzword in town these days. However, what any businessman should remember is that we’re still in the age where old school marketing works — and works well!

Here are some of the things that absolutely should be done regardless of whether or not you’re spending time on social media marketing:

Link building on relevant websites

This is the most reliable method of ensuring that you obtain the following benefits for your business:

• Lots of direct visits
• High PageRank and top position in the SERPs (search engine result pages) for all the relevant keywords
• The above benefit ultimately results in a lot of organic traffic, which is the best form of traffic you could ask for as it is also quite relevant to the exact thing your business deals with

Of course, there are some very important things you should note about link building:

Try not to indulge in cheap practices such as posting a thousand links on forums by means of your signatures or creating your own set of websites on which you’re advertising yourself. Google frowns upon it, and if they find out, they could either penalize you or worse, ban you altogether. That would be Internet suicide.

If you do want to make use of your signature for building inlinks, I suggest you subscribe to forums where you can participate in some genuine discussions or create your answers profiles where you can post share valuable insights with others.

The best way to receive quality inbound links is to provide your product or service to someone for free and ask them to leave a genuine review on their blog or website in exchange. If what you offer is actually good, you will have great sucess with this method, and it will also inadvertently improve your reputation on the market along with your visibility on search engines.

Another method of obtaining inlinks is by doing link exchange with relevant vendors. This is not a major aspect of link building but has its own advantages like helping you stay connected with potential partners and keeps opportunities for future collaboration open.

Banner and other paid ads

This is perhaps the oldest method of advertising for your business, and guess what, it still works. Of course, it’s not as efficient as link building can be in the long run, but it can provide decent returns if done on the right websites.

Direct marketing

This kind of marketing involves creating a number of campaigns on your website and promoting them to your existing subscribers as well as to other visitors via email or press releases. Examples of such activity include creating bundle offers for your products, offering seasonal discounts, offering prizes to a random subscriber on a monthly basis, etc. Not only can this method help you do a number of cross sells to your existing customers, but also attract a number of new subscribers for future campaigns.

Content

This is one of the most long-lasting techniques of staying visible on the search engines. Great content around all the relevant keywords is the best way to become visible to the search engines and stay on the pages for a long time.

Another specialist area of marketing yourself through content is to publish link bait articles. Link bait articles are those based on topics that are so intriguing that they promote viral link building across all forms of websites — social bookmarking as well as other websites that thrive on providing interesting content to their visitors. In my experience, I have seen such link baits bring in traffic in excess of 10,000 visits and 1500 inbound links the day the article was published. Of course, content isn’t the only thing here; you also need to ensure that relevant people with great profiles on bookmarking and other websites are writing about your article. Your SEO vendor will have a better idea of how to execute this.

Other than this, having a good blog definitely helps bring more readers whom you can try and convert into subscribers.

PPC (Pay per Click)

This is one of the quickest methods or bringing more sales — provided you do it right. There are a number of affiliate marketers who survive solely on PPC campaigns they do for someone else’s products and still end up making five figures on a monthly basis. The key here is to hire a good PPC expert and seek their advice on how much budget you should allocate to this activity for optimum returns.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing means you encourage others to sell your product or services and offer them a percentage of the revenue in exchange. If your affiliate program is good and the product useful, this method too can offer quite good success. Apart from running this program at your own website, there are a number of portals such as Clickbank where you can offer your affiliate program. The benefit with such portals is that they are hubs where a number of experienced affiliate marketers lurk around regularly looking to find the next best thing to sell.

These techniques have worked wonders for nearly every online business and they’re not going away any time soon. The reason is that they are grounded on providing all your marketing partners — whether they’re affiliates, Google itself, or just a happy customer who’s about to post a good review about your product.