I recently read an article by Rosalind Gardner where she was asked what her 5 most consistently effective marketing processes are that she uses. Below is her answers. I think you will find them all worthy of trying!
1.Blogging for Search Engine Placement
2.List / Email Marketing
3.Social Media Marketing & Community Activity
4.Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC)
5.Article Distribution & Marketing
Blogging for Search Engine Placement
Essentially, my first priority is to publish fresh content to my blogs on a regular basis (some of which are more regular than others). Although I don’t engage in keyword stuffing, (which makes for horrible reading), the content of each blog post has to be tightly focused on one subject so that keywords and keyword phrases in the article are closely aligned and thus the post is more likely to get picked up and listed by the search engines, resulting in free traffic.
List / Email Marketing
The post is then distributed by email to the relevant subscriber list either through a blog broadcast (using Aweber / Feedburner combined) or through a link in a weekly newsletter.
Social Media Marketing & Community Activity
Engaging the audience personally through either blog commenting, forum posting or social media marketing comes next. I will respond to comments and answer any questions posted by my own blog readers and subscribers, which enhances information contained in the article and adds still more ‘fodder’ for the search engines to notice. My social media marketing efforts are fairly scant – using applications like TwitterFeed to broadcast the post’s title and link to Twitter for some more free traffic. From time to time, I’ll post a comment to a high-profile blog or forum in response to a topic relevant to my original article, along with a link to that article.
Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC)
Depending on the response from blog readers and subscribers, I may incorporate PPC marketing at that point. If the conversion rate is better than average for the audience, I’ll do the math to assess whether it’s worth driving traffic to that particular post or page with PPC, starting with Google Adwords and/or Yahoo! Search Marketing depending on the demographic. If the response is just ‘good’, PPC may still be worth the effort if enough of that traffic joins the list.
Article Distribution & Marketing
Article marketing comes in 5th and last, because I don’t post the same articles to my site as I would distribute to article directories so they require some re-writing, which takes time. Furthermore, the traffic isn’t as targeted as it is with your own list or with PPC marketing… but it’s traffic none-the-less and every click counts for something… eventually.
I hope that this gives you some great ideas for generating more traffic for your site.
Now it is time to put some of these to the test! 
Read Rosalind’s entire artile here.
