Online Marketing - What is and isnt working for your business?

Colm_purchase

With new business directory websites and the like popping up here, there and everywhere offering you 'wonderful opportunities for only X' I thought it might be useful to start a thread on what is working from an online marketing perspective for your website so that we can share ideas.
One could spend all day everyday registering and uploading details on all these websites so perhaps the information in this thread might be helpful to weed out and prioritise for the different posters.
All businesses are different and the target market from one site might be useless to me but for other people it might be the bees knees so I guess we got to take that into account.
Anyway I will start with my own experiences.
My business is an ecommerce site by the way that specialise in sale of sustainable products.
Useful free sites that generate traffic
www.shoppingdirectory.ie
Free An Post site where you can load up promotions that you are currently offering
www.news4media.ie
Free resource (at present at least). Load your press releases which are emailed on to their database everyday.
www.gumtree.ie
Load your ads for free on the site. Not really my target market but I have got some sales out of it all the same. Alot of time and effort can go into loading your ads though.

Paid online Advertising
I have only dabbled with Google Adwords which has for sure generated traffic. I think the more you do it the more you learn and it might take a few failed attempts before you will nail your advert but I would be a believer in it.

I also ran a couple of Facebook campaigns. The first one I narrowed the target market too much and got hardly any hits and the second time I probably kept it too general and whilst it got me traffic I doubt it was the traffic I was looking for. Again I would try it again though.


www.buyandsell.ie
I went into this realising that the target market was not really for my business but the claims that they have our 600,000 unique visitors per month convinced me to give it a go. Incidentally I requested a screen shot of their google analytics report which they told me they couldn't provide 'for security reasons'
Still you can upload your store and up to 20 items for sale over a month for €50 plus VAT
Personally I won't be continuing this campaign.

I would be interested in hearing from any of you with experience of advertising or using the below sites
www.whatswhat.ie
www.sid.ie
www.greenpages.ie

I could list a good 50 more but I would be really interested in hearing about your business, what you specialise in and what is and isnt working for you.

seachto7

This is an interesting thread. I have just gone freelance in online marketing, so it will be interesting to see what people's opinions are here.
What I am looking out for specifically is the multilingual area, and whether people think it's necessary, or useful to advertise in foreign languages, if their client base comes from outside Ireland.....