I would personal will go with Free Advertising because I personally believe paid adverting is a waste of money and time. If you use free advertising, it will be slower though you will still build up your site traffic, What's your opinion on this?
Since what I do online as far as my forums and blogs I do for leisure therefore I think free advertising is more feasible. However, if I was to run a business and depend on advertising for customers I would definitely spend money on advertising as well as utilizing and free avenues.
Been using free advertising equivalents of paid advertising, and only a few services out of the ones I have tried, are not worth my time as a free service.
A combination of free & paid advertising should be reasonable. However, for a new site, free promotion has to be a priority. When your site produces enough budget, you can choose paid advertising selectively. After all, free promotion needs more time and will run into the bottleneck.
For me it is free advertising, what I have seen in the past is paying to get advertised and you dont find good results. It was just like pouring money for nothing because of high costs.
I recently started off with forums and I am having good results.
I never spend money on advertising. Why would I? That's what a promote page is for, which includes links, banners and buttons, so that your members can do all the marketing for you. It's also a good idea to give free advice and help others because if people like what you have to say, then your sig is the first place they check.
Paid ads seem to reach a lot more people, but often they are people who are not interested and will ignore the ad / not click it. Free ads tend to be more appropriate fro the audience though.
There are paid ads that do appeal to the audience in some instances, for example advertising services that allow you to choose what sites will show the advert.
Paid advertising should mostly be considered for the lack of visitors spreading the word for you. I don't think it's a big issue for most small communities, as even those can be pretty active.
This is an interesting topic in my opinion. I think paid advertisement will be more effective if you find the right type. Paid advertisement often offer more than free advertisement because of the extra cost. If we compare a free advertisement post and a banner ad in the header, more people will likely see the banner ad than the advertisement post and it really helps you build a brand if it is seen a lot by people. Generally I think if you have a good unique selling point, paid advertisement will be more effective since it has a larger reach and that is the thing you are paying for.
I think as long as you buy effective paid advertising you are going to benefit from it more than free advertising. That being said, if you work hard enough at free advertising you can have pretty much the same result.
Depends entirely on what you're actually advertising and what you're trying to achieve. Neither is objectively better than the other.
For example for CPA and affiliate marketing paid advertising will start generating income right from the moment you start your campaign, but if you try to use it as a method to get people to post on your forums you're most likely going to have bad time.
I prefer free methods of advertising because you won't be at a loss when you don't get the results you want. Free ways are pretty effective if you carry them out in the right way.
