You can make online diary extra persuasive by also including customer's personal profile, pictures, online video of them using your product, net audio of them talking about your product, even scanned handwritten letters, etc.

An online diary would likely outsell common testimonial because it's updated on a regular basis and reveals more personal information. A diary is considered private which would make people more curious to read it and believe it's legitimacy.

4. Search Engines - List, not only main or home page of your web site with search engines, but also your additional pages, as long as they are different and titled accordingly. Doing this, will dramatically increase traffic to your site. In fact, at some point, you should experience an increase geometrically.

5. Announcement Sites - This is a 1-shot opportunity, so make it good. What you want to do at announcement sites, is to provide most attention-getting information you possibly can for your venture, as you can, generally, only do this once for new start-up businesses. Two popular announcement sites are "What's New" and "What's New Too" sites.

6. Announcement Lists - There also exists Email announcement lists, much like announcement sites, whereby, you can provide notices and posts regarding your product, service, or information.

The main difference, however, is that as announcement sites only allow for a 1-time post, announcement lists, contrastly, allow postings periodically and, generally, on a weekly or monthly basis. You can also find these at Egroups, Topica, and Listbot sites.

7. Ezine Ads - Ezine ads are great, as long as their publications contain high enough circulations to warrant CPM (Cost Per Thousand) readers. However, drawback is that many readers pass them by, naturally, having more interest in content of publication.

Additionally, ads tend to get "lost" in publications that publish a high number of ads in issues. In most cases in offline-publishing world, an ideal CPM rate is 10,000 readers per $1.00 spent. Try for this same ratio in your Ezine ads as well. A great resource for advertising in ezines is Ezine Directory (http://www.ezinedirectory.com).

8. Publisher Swaps - This promotion method is exclusive to Ezine and newsletter publishers, and is, whereby, publishers trade ads with each other to be placed in their respective publications in effort of gaining new subscribers.

Successful ad swaps can provide dramatic increases in subscriber base of your own publications. The Ezine Directory should provide some, if not all, information regarding it. Or, you can use directory's content to contact publishers with a "swap proposal."

9. Opt-In Direct Email - To "opt-in" means to voluntarily accept information or notices via Email from outside sources regarding particular interests that you have. There are, literally, millions of people online who are members of such lists.

As a business owner interested in promoting your product, service, or information, you rent such a list from opt-in service, providing your sales letter or material to service, then allowing information to be sent via Email by service to list members you have selected.

This is popular and preferred alternative to unsolicited bulk emailing or "spamming." Once a list is mailed, your response is almost immediate.

The interested responders then purchase your offer, or request more information, at which time, you should have an auto responder already set up to "feedback" more sales literature. An auto responder is an automated Email address that, when accessed, returns certain pre-input information.

Once purchases are made, these particular list buyers then become your own customers, and you can usually provide them with similar follow- up products, services, or information in future without re-renting their name from list. The most widely known is Postmaster Direct at http://www.postmasterdirect.com.

These are methods and techniques that I have found to be realistic, sound and, most importantly, successful. They are applicable to anything that lends itself commercially viable, whether it is a product, service, or information.