I am helping with a stealth startup that will use Adwords predominantly for its advertising. What other effective paid advertising tools are out there. Creative responses would be great too.
For paid ads, I like searching the Adbrite.com directory for bargains. Find sites with 500 to 5000 hits a day. Pay the default .05 cents per CPM and you will be paying .05 to .25cents a day to reach all of those people. Finding the right sites is a bit of a challenge but you only have to find a few sites and stick with those to drive new traffic to your site every day.
<a href="http://inthesidebar.com" rel="nofollow">http://inthesidebar.com</a> is a recently-launched ad network targeting developer/designer crowds. (disclosure note: i am one of their publishers)<p>there is also the deck <a href="http://decknetwork.net/" rel="nofollow">http://decknetwork.net/</a><p><a href="http://adify.com" rel="nofollow">http://adify.com</a> is the head honcho but I haven't had a good experience with them.
I have had great luck with StumbleUpon advertising, but it really depends on the site you're trying to promote. The problem with SU is that you need to capture the user in the first few seconds, or they're just going to click "stumble" and bounce to the next site. But if you do have a fun/interesting/cool site, SU is a great source for consistent and cheap traffic ($0.05 per visitor).
How about <a href="http://www.projectwonderful.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.projectwonderful.com/</a> ?<p>I actually used it once to advertise my blog. It worked fairly well, but I wasn't really interested in advertising my blog; I was just interested in trying Project Wonderful.
Stick with AdWords initially and worry about it more later. Until you have a significant amount of traffic no one cares about you. Once you do have traffic you can try out a bunch of ad networks until you find the best one(s) for your site.
Federated Media is popular among tech-targeted sites. You can check out their publishers here: <a href="http://www.federatedmedia.net/authors/index" rel="nofollow">http://www.federatedmedia.net/authors/index</a>
There's also interesting affiliate programs. Everyone knows about Amazon's affiliate program. There's also Linkshare.com that represents a large number of web sites as well as numerous web sites that have an affiliate link.
I'd look into serving ads (using your own system) with affiliate codes built in that target the niche your startup is servicing.<p>Payouts tend to be higher than AdWords, but are based on actions not clicks.
You should check out right media, their ad exchange (soon to be Yahoo AMP) pulls in multiple ad networks. <a href="http://www.rightmedia.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.rightmedia.com/</a>
really depends on what your app does and what market it targets. there are tons of specialized ad networks that work to maximize revenue based on what you're doing.<p>or you could go down the route of obtaining sponsors/advertisers yourself, and managing ads on your own. cut out the middleman, get a bigger profit, but have to deal with the overhead of it yourself.