No matter you got a blog or an e-commerce site getting visitors engaged with the site helps increase the loyal visitor count.

You can get the visitors engaged in many different ways. You can run a contest, give away something free, offer a free service and many other things.

I like one of the techniques blogger ShoeMoney does on his blog. He got a "Free Shirt Friday" event every friday. He recieves T-Shirts from different websites/companies and he wear them, take some pictures and post them as a blog entry. As an example I am posting this picture from ShoeMoney blog (hopefully he won't sue me for this)  

Now that ShoeMoney is a reputable blogger and he earns a good amount of money from his blog; why he would spend all these effort taking pictures and making a blog entry? Answer is simple, building customer relations and getting visitors engaged.

Its always good to learn from people who already made the way up.

This is an example of very aggressive marketing, one forum advertising on another competitor forum using AdSense.

Now lot of people would think its unethical. I have seen many different forms of marketing starting from business cards to thongs.This one is sort of on the extreme side where the ad text is saying "Sick of DigitalPoint?" and the ad is right on Digitalpoint.

 

Picture from http://www.webcosmoForums.com

Recently internet world talked about the launch of a new search engine, Cuil. It was launched by an ex-Google employee. It made the news big time, seem to be more then what it deserves. Many other search engines emerged in recent history, but none made that kind of news.

I am not going through the analysis if its any better then the existing search engines; I rather find it fascinating how successful their marketing campaign was. They been very successful making the launch news viral. Many bloggers, forums talked about it; it was also on the news media. Its just simply a nice example of a successful viral marketing.

Few days ago a car dealer offered free gun or gas for his car buyers. Now a Nevada brothel is trying to market their business by offering free petrol.

Clients of the Shady Lady Ranch will get a $50 petrol voucher if they fork out $300 -- worth about one hour's worth of services -- at the brothel in Beatty, Nevada, 130 miles (209 km) northwest of Las Vegas.

Owner James Davis said he already has had to order another $1,000 set of petrol vouchers because the first $1,000 were spent in one week.

Ass-vertising is a new ad medium from a crazy advertising agency, NightAgency, which is based on a simple philosophy; "if you want to be seen, go where people are already looking". It involves putting a logo, a web address, or a brief message on the seat of a pair of bikini style panties. The panties are then worn by beautiful girls and ready to show your message to the target.

As shown part of a ass advertising campaign on the picture, bunch of shapely asses paraded outside Grand Central Station in New York to promote the New York Health and Racquet Club and a class they offer, called, appropriately, "Booty Call."

Recently CraigsList introduced the phone verification for their site. Now guess what some people sees business in this.

How? People living in the USA create accounts, do the phone verification and sell it to other people who are outside USA.

Guess nothing could stop the advertisers, or shall we say spammers