What is the best way to advertise a web application or site on the web, specifically paid advertisement, but if there are any great free ones, those are welcome as well. Please refrain from mentioning meta tag's and technical SEO related site modifications.
Google ad-words is one way we all know about. But I'm looking for other suggestions that have worked well for you or someone you know.
Since this is subjective, I have marked it a community wiki.
Create unique content.
One of the best ways to promote a product is to create unique content relevant to your product.
- Articles (Blogs, Guides, etc)
- Graphics (charts, manuals)
- Videos
- Widgets
If done right, you will get links from other sites, leading to higher ranking in search results (Google, Yahoo). This will lead to more long-term traffic to your website.
Although you could do this on your own for free, there are may services and freelancers that can help you write blogs, for example.
I think banner ads, and even link ads do not give the best return unless they are well targeted. You mentioned AAdwords.
A lot of people will give you tactics (like blog commenting, sending press releases, etc). Here's a resource that actually lays out a strategy, and you can do just about all of it without spending a single dollar on advertising.
The Ultimate Guide to Launching and Marketing Your Web App: http://www.minisprout.com/web-apps/the-ultimate-guide-to-launching-and-marketing-your-web-app/
I personally think it is still keywords, back-links and search engine position that will make your site successful. Remember to get started give away your app for a year if your app is good they will become addicted. I have built a calculator integrated with a billing, totaling form that I think is a tool that was well overdue I call it the spreadsheet calculator. It's simple to use as using a calculator. 90% pf the people can use without reading the help file. How many calculators do you know that you can save you results and print a invoice form. It's unique non like it. It belongs on everybodies favorites bar I am my friends use it almost daily.
This depends a lot on the site that you're trying to promote and the target demographic of the said site. While banner ads, popup ads, pop down ads, side bar ads etc. have worked (and continue to work), they are also incredibly annoying to a lot of people. You might want to look at other viral marketing mechanisms which are becoming pretty relevant thanks to sites like YouTube (check out the Kobe Byant/Nike video) and social networking sites.
Well , no body mentioned developing an addon for promoting an app. I developed gradientoo - a WYSIWYG CSS gradient generator and launched its Firefox addon. At the time of writing this post there are 698 Downloads and 203 active daily users as per these statistics. In the addon I have incorporated a link for gradientoo web app. The addon generates traffic and makes gradientoo's name spread. Chrome, safari, IE and opera also support addons. The best case would be to develop addons of your web app on these browsers also. But remember that your web app should always offer some thing more than its addon version. Similraly you can also host your addon on softpedia and download.com as a downloadable software. And last but not the least ,Mozilla AMO will be the prime source of your addon downloads. The more your addon spreads the more popular your web app becomes.
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1167531/promote-advertise-your-web-app-site-on-the-web