I'm looking for new ideas to promote my website - http://www.inktastic.com/

We have the best print quality in the industry, very competitive prices, and get great reviews. Our biggest challenge is how to get the word out in a cost effective manner. We have a couple of niches we do well in, but we'd like to expand that as we're barely scratching the surface of our market.

I'm open to any and all suggestions on effective ways to promote our web site as well as feedback on teh web site itself.

You could try paying a Marketing Professional?

we've hired 4 different companies for that, each was a complete waste of time and money. The last company we hired actually cost us a bunch of sales. My background is programming, not marketing, but I've done a better job at marketing than the marketing companies we've hired.

I just thought somebody on the .org might have some ideas we haven't tried.

[Edited 11/17/11 5:26am]

Establish clientle and use them as references. Nothing beats a proven track record. Get a page on the social media sites and see if you can like and be liked by as many people as you can. That gets your name out there as well as put in front of people. Consider that people are using Facebook and Google more and more over telephone books to find a service provider.

Make sure you have control of your businesses address and company profile on sites like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. Also get on sites like Angieslist or LinkedIn and even sites that are more specific to your business.

Ultimately, you want to be able to be availible for people who want to find you.

For direct online marketing, you can buy ad space on Google and Facebook and target specific demographics. To increase presence, you can post "commercials" or "tutorials" on YouTube and Facebook and embed them on your company's webpage and social networking pages.

Online marketing is about establishing your presence and getting people to look at it. It's not hard, but time consuming. Remember that not only do you have to keep up your content, but you have to acknowledge and respond to comments and questions in a short time. That's why it may be cheaper to outtask it, but it sounds like that hasn't worked for you. Maybe you can take somebody on part time.

Good luck!

I would recommend hiring someone specifically for search engine optimization. To end up on page one or even on page two or three of results on Google when people type in the relevant search words would prove to be a goldmine for you. It's hard though, and takes time and patience as well as technical and creative expertise.

One other thing you can do is go the traditional route, and hand out flyers directly to people who are likely to be interested in your service, and then hope for word of mouth. That's what I've done for my website and maybe it hasn't increased the quantity of traffic by much but it's sure improved the quality of the traffic (i.e. potential customers rather than aimless web surfers).

Good luck.