Looks like you've gotten a lot of free advice.  Consider hiring a marketing consultant.  You will save a lot of time and money on things that don't work.

It really depends what kind of niche you are in. There are couple of ways to promote your business. Online, Offline, Refferals(Word of Mouth).  

I know that some people will disagree with me but I believe that Craigslist is overlooked and underated as of late, since they have made changes.   I still feel that it can be used to get you ideas or IM exposed.

@ petrosianii - Good tips   Think about linkedIN - it's nearly like real offline contacts - find some future clients and connect with em. And then connect with their networks. Done.   Another way to promote your service is to do some press releases which - depending on the story - might attract 'real' jornalist.  

To answer you question, 1. Joining a local chamber of commerce and attend networking meetings 2. Meetups[dot]Com 3. Joining trade associations. For example, my firm is a member of PRSA, the Public Relations Society of America. They hold seminars, conferences, social media tweetups, business meetings, etc.

Hi Charles, I've owned a small business marketing firm for 25 years. The first thing I can tell you is to get out from behind your computer and hit the road attending some local networking events where you will actually meet some real people. Nothing you ever do will benefit you as much, and you will find it hard to strike up partnerships as an anonymous geek on the internet. Try some 'Personal Branding' (Google or go to my website where there is info Marketing Impressions) Writing articles and posting them on article directories (see ezine articles), offering yourself as a speaker on your topic (take a look at San Diego Speakers Guild, which my 'partner' and I created for just that purpose), create an informative video and post it on YouTube.com (see mine at Vicki's YouTube Channel, and look at the one on Personal Branding). Once you establish you are someone who knows something and worth listening to, an email newsletter might be good. Just don't sell too much on it, or nobody will read it. The trick is to build a big, big, big email list. And, how do you do that? Networking! Also, collect email addresses on your website. Hope that helps. I would love some feedback to know if it has. Vicki ---This post was edited to remove a commercial link. Read our discussion policies for more Community best practices.

I hope this does not fall into the SEO nonsense category, but simply put a decent blog about your product or service. I have never spent much time optimizing content (although I did spend some time at the onset building an SEO conducive framework), but simply built up content around a specific niche. The content has always been geared towards getting people to join my newsletter.   The combination of a content rich blog, and a subscriber based newsletter has worked very well for many of my marketing objectives. And while I have tried a number of methods, I think the best content (from a marketing perspective) has been that which funnels the reader towards subscribing.

Depends on your vertical. If it's service based, you can definitely (and should) leverage networking to get the best results possible. However, if you have products, you should be doing that 'SEO nonsense'.. because it just makes sense for your business. But many service based businesses can thrive solely on great service + referrals.. so do those two welll!

Now days, you can go a log way by optimizing for local search in the major search engines (google, yahoo & bing) along with local reviews. If your a real business with a real street address this works well. It is a little time consuming, but worth it. If you don't have a lot of time, there are people that will do it for you at a reasonable price.If you have questions, send me a private message.Regards,Mike

With YouTube, you must definitely make sure they want more after viewing. I was making videos for a while and began to get subscribers, but they just wanted the vids; no one came to visit the site!   If the vid is too much of a commercial, they won't come to visit unless they are very interested in your product. Snd if there is too much free information, they won't come to visit. The video audience is a different breed, so you may need to lure them with more vids on your site.   This is from my experience; I'm still working on getting the right balance. My other methods are doing well for new Traffic.