What advertising and promotion strategies have you found to be completely ineffective? I hear all the time about people paying for services only to have them not work towards building up their site or company. Has anybody here had those types of experiences?

Generally we have found paid advertising ineffective just purely because it is near impossible to compete with the hosting companies that spend thousands on advertising.

SEO in the web hosting industry is also very tricky as there are so many companies competing for the top 10 on google for "web hosting". You need to target different types of keywords that you think people will search for.

Kind Regards

Most ineffective would be buying pop ups and "traffic".

These are nothing but scams that will send a lot of untargetted hits to your site with no results.

Can help to scam advertisers out of their money, if they pay CPM though.

The advertisers know they are purchasing CPM ads and are therefore untargeted. If they have any knowledge at all, they must realize that this is not a very effective method. The thing that is attractive is that it's a very cheap form of advertising. Many people will start with that sort of thing, hoping to get a few click-thrus and then sales to start out with before buying better forms of traffic. It starts with all the people jumping into any kind of online business without a clue to how to run a business - like startup capital, advertising budgets, etc. It can be done but it's like rowing your boat upstream.

Definitely buying the '1000's of hits' packages to your website. You want to focus on relevant and targeted traffic.

I agree 100%. No point in getting thousands of untargeted hits. Thats like HomeDepot advertising to homeless people. Theyre just gonna sleep on site. Make a plan, figure out your budget (even if it is minimal, just set one!), dont spread yourself too thin (big no no), ask for help/advice when you need it and be involved in the community. And if you lose money, never sit around crying about it, consider it this way... you paid that money for a lesson well learned.

I'd say spamming completely unrelated websites to what you are offering is the most ineffective and just annoys people.

In my view the Pop-up/Pop-under traffic schemes, email spamming and url redirection (redirecting visitors to complete irrelevant site) are few most ineffective promotion strategies, the sites engaged in such activity have absolutely no future...

I would say purchasing blocks of traffic is the most ineffective advertising method. It will drive visitors to your website, but the majority will be visitors who didn't intend to visit your website, and are unlikely to purchase your services.

Google adwords not effective for me. Extra cost and no income. I was really diaspointed with that.

Definitely the 1000 visitors, 1000 directory listings, etc. Anything cheap and too good to be true sounding is done through poor methods and ends up not doing alot of good. When you contemplate how many people are trying to sell hosting its a wonder anyone can change their Google rank.

CPm is the worst for me.. vry bad expericnce frm it...

We once paid a lot of money on banner advertising on autos and taxis in Delhi. We did not go throgh the formal way and just gave some gifts to the auto owners to display our banner at the back of their autos for a month. Every auto owner wanted the gift from us and put up our banner. Next day all the banners were gone. They were most probably expecting some ther company to give them a similar deal now. It was a disastrous advertising campaign on our end.

In a eraa of survery if you use CPM is justtt a baby ... and what i have earned through surveryss i nevr got with CPM..