inflex's Journal: Marketing online... where to even START!?

So here I am, a product in hand and somehow I have to get it into the market mind share, far beyond just 'friends in and family'. About the only thing I've ever had a lot of success with is infesting forums - the trouble with that is it's so much work and you really can't seem to break past the 1:1 ratio of effort vs sales. Things like AdWords, Facebook Fanpages, Facebook advertising don't seem to provide high returns either. Beyond the top couple of major social networking methods there appears to be hundreds of smaller avenues but they all seem to be even worse on effort-vs-return.

My suspicion is that it's a lot like winning the Lotto... you see the occasional big winner (like the White-board Resignation the other day) but for the most part everyone just ends up spending a lot of time, money and effort barely getting decent returns.

I think I need a cofffee now.