Along with the ideas mentioned above by the respectable professionals, I'd love to recommend the following strategy: - Discover your top competitor's websites (3-5 are a good number to start with) - Then discover how they are doing on the web e.g. PPC, SEO, Social Media or Local Citations whatever it is - Then extract their Foot Prints and "carefully" follow their tactics. In this sentence, word carefully is important. In online world, some strategies, if worked well for me, may not be good for the other. So keep getting some advice/help from Pros before you finalize anything. PPC and Local citations to directories such as Yelp, Yellowpages, Google My Business are a faster way to get targeted traffic, in turn, sales But organic SEO...Needs at comparatively longer time span to achieve goals!

According to Google's head of web spam team, Matt Cutts, Guest posting is not useful anymore. Here's their official take https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/ . I think forum posting and blog commenting is still effective, the only problem is, people don't often do it the right way. Let me share one thing about forum posting. If you join a forum related to your product and you post a lot of messages (relevant and useful only) and your account is not brand new, it has passed few weeks or months, then if you post a backlink to your website (at an appropriate place and in an appropriate way) then neither forum moderators would mind it, nor would Google. And if you just joined the forum today and you write a signature like this "Hi this is very good forum. Thanks. www.BlahBlahBlah....com then of course it's more than a spam. Do you people know, last month, I was quite nervous, that Google says everything is spam. So how we should build natural links! Then I did my research, I didn't work for 2 months that time, since I wanted to discover something new, then I figured out the natural way to create Google friendly backlinks. With those, we can compete with big brands in any industry as well.

This happens due to various reasons: #1 - I saw many so-called marketers take over their campaigns, and start blindly without having a long term plan #2 - Some people don't understand the basics, e.g. if they started organic optimization, they start expecting results within a few days, not paying attention to the fact, it's a long term process #3 - Of course poor call to actions and poor user interface of the landing pages #4 - Main reason, they build their websites for search engines and not for users #5 - They don't learn from mistakes.

If you've good budget, then I'd like to recommend you go after 2 options as part of your major strategy: #1 - Use Pay Per Click program from Google #2 - Use Local Citations, since if you search for few search terms, then websites like yellow pages, Google maps and other similar are turned up. ***I can guide you in 5-10 minutes, with a full fledged plan on how you can achieve this YOURSELF.*** #3 - Doing organic optimization, that's a long term solution.

I think the 1 liner answer to your question is "it depends upon your project specs and the allocated budget" My major specialty is SEO. And for all of my clients, I'm responsible to keep their websites 100% user friendly and hence search engine friendly too. So based on my 5 years of experience (at oDesk.com) I'd strongly recommend you go after Wordpress. It has several reasons! Let me share an amazing reason here-under: "Once I've heard from a big Internet Marketing name, that using Wordpress as a CMS is one of the 200 rankings signals that Google uses to estimate a website's rank" We can't blindly say it's true or it's false, but it makes sense when we focus on a main Google's guidelines. Google recommends using a CMS that's easy to use/manage. As you're going to share news mostly, so it'l cost you much to upload your content, as every time either you've to hire someone for that, or pay for some online course to learn that CMS. Means a lot of tensions! In wordpress, to manage a lot of the things, most of the plugins are free and easy to use. Just chose a best template for your niche and hire a designer/developer for one time project to make your desired layouts. Run free tools like GTMetrix.com to optimize the website speed. There are some plugins as well. But while using wordpress, pay a lot of the attention on your website's security. Wordpress websites are often hacked. Feel free contacting me to know more about it! Have a nice time!

There are few ways you can do that. As Hernan and Bryan mentioned as well. #1 - I don't know if you've a sufficient daily visits or clicks (favorably relevant) count. You may increase them in few ways for example, create high quality content that has 100% demand, join social groups relevant to your niche and make as many relations as possible. Then share your content for the sake of benefits to others and then get a big reach in return. * I also started this strategy for my personal blog and I'm getting a good response, I got 4 friend requests and hence I requested their email addresses for email marketing, wihtin a few seconds.* You're welcome to contact me anytime to more deeply discuss the various aspects of such tactics. Once you get a good volume of visits/clicks then setting up an adwards program is the best way. #2 - There are several private visits delivering programs that offer cheap packages for a set number of visits per month. #3 - If you've something to sell, then using services from a well reputated affiliate is also a good way to earn more. I remember my most recent client from UK, by the way he had a photography software to be sold (free and premium) and he used to get affiliate services from 2 affiliate marketers and according to that client (I'm copying his words) "our sales are currently handled by our reseller **** and they handle our affiliate program as well" so you may think about using that sort of resellers or affiliates etc. (Feel free to contact me anytime if you want to know those 2 affiliates who did well for him) #4 - I can share a few more tactics as well, for that, I'd love if you could schedule a meeting :)