Organic search engine optimization. I could talk about this topic every day and not get tired. My two best tips are that 1) create a way such that linking to your site solves a problem for someone else and 2) do #1 in a scalable fashion. If you can do that, organic search is like a free money buffet.
Failing that utopian outcome, at the very least you can create things on your website which solve problems for the type of people who give links. For example, I'm a Rails developer. Among other talents, I can write code. Being able to write code means I'm able to write OSS projects of use to other businesses which use Rails. I host them on my site, and when other developers write blog posts taking credit to their friends and bosses for solving the problems that I actually solved for them (grins), I generally get a backlink.
OSS is by no means the only thing you can do. Good tutorials, evergreen resources (things which will never go out of style in your field), authoritative statistics, high-quality visualizations of data, etc etc, all attract links. Again, try to do them at scale.
twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, this kind of services
Do you find that that actually gets results? I am kind of outside the Valley, physically and spiritually speaking, and I just can't imagine a business spending time on Facebook or Flickr and that benefiting them more than spending the time on their own website.
SEO getting you a little money to reinvest into AdWords or similar paid acquisition strategies is a nice feedback loop if you can get it, too.
Yeah, I forgot to mention organic SEO (it's almost always the first thing you can do).
>> twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, this kind of services
> Do you find that that actually gets results?
Yes, if the tech industry isn't the only industry :) . I mean, it's not always about web applications, like this time I have to advertise a series of books (not mine).
Till, there is a company that centralizes this process (like a product recommendation service/device in every ones homes; like a Google TV with Google Tv Ad :P), we'll have to do things like this manually.
EDIT: If you're pretty much always responding on twitter/other service about the bugs on your OSS project, then it might be considered a bit of customer satisfaction, I guess.
Failing that utopian outcome, at the very least you can create things on your website which solve problems for the type of people who give links. For example, I'm a Rails developer. Among other talents, I can write code. Being able to write code means I'm able to write OSS projects of use to other businesses which use Rails. I host them on my site, and when other developers write blog posts taking credit to their friends and bosses for solving the problems that I actually solved for them (grins), I generally get a backlink.
OSS is by no means the only thing you can do. Good tutorials, evergreen resources (things which will never go out of style in your field), authoritative statistics, high-quality visualizations of data, etc etc, all attract links. Again, try to do them at scale.
twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, this kind of services
Do you find that that actually gets results? I am kind of outside the Valley, physically and spiritually speaking, and I just can't imagine a business spending time on Facebook or Flickr and that benefiting them more than spending the time on their own website.
SEO getting you a little money to reinvest into AdWords or similar paid acquisition strategies is a nice feedback loop if you can get it, too.