First, make sure you have plenty of sites to promote. Much of this forum is about creating different types of content and sites.

This is the first and most important step. You need "stuff" to promote and the more stuff you have, and the higher quality it is, the better you can find links and promote that stuff. "Stuff" is websites and pages, blogs, lenses, videos, articles, etc. These include your gold sites, some silver sites.

Only after you have enough stuff to actually promote, sign up for the free trial periods of one of these services. Use each FULLY for the time given, then cancel and move on to the next to test its results.

EXPLOIT THE FREE TRIALS OF EACH ONE AT A TIME:

XGenSEO
Download 14 day free trial version
http://www.xgenseo.com/xgendownload.html
Info: http://www.xgenseo.com/xgenseo.html

SENUKE
7 day free trial
http://www.senuke.com/membership/

BRUTE FORCE/EVO
$7 for 7 days
http://www.bruteforceseo.com/

SERP ASSIST
$7 for 7 days
http://www.serpassist.com/

Video Promo

Traffic Geyser
$1 for 21 days
https://secure.trafficgeyser.com/catalog/gyser/21daysi.html

Tube Mogul
Free but limited use per month - still good
http://www.tubemogul.com/about/oneload

Hey Spread
Use after Geyser and your monthly Tube Mogul quota are used up.
"Pay as you go" service
http://heyspread.com/

VideoBot (Desktop software)
See "Incansoft" below

That's two solid months of heavy-duty promo for about $15.

After you've used your trials, consider these options:

ScrapeBox -
$99 but should find a discount if you look.
Can be a blackhat comment spamming tool, but has many more features that make it virtually essential, IMO. Lot of features always added, lots of updates. One time fee.

Icansoft -
$20 per month
http://incansoft.com/Catalog.php
Did you know that if you join the affiliate program for $20 a month, you can download and use all the bots and programs created by Big Mike? Just enter your affiliate ID and the programs will register.

A couple of notes about Icansoft:
-If you cancel your membership, your programs will stop running.

-If you cancel, you can't get back in. But you can always buy the programs you want at a reasonable price.

But still, for $20 a month there's a lot of tools there for you to try out and see if they can add to your marketing mix. Check it out, but only after you've used the trials above.

Bookmarking Demon
$147 One time
http://919929wdl9qzsic6xbpyfbsl27.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=THINKLINKS (My affiliate)
Still a very good program, although success rates are getting lower.

Total spending:
$15 trials
$250 (BMD and Scrapebox)
-----------
$265 one time
+$20 per month Icansoft

You should now be in a situation where you choose one of the services you tested, both finacially and from actual testing and experience.

Pick a program that fits in your your Incansoft, BMD and Scrapebox fuctions.

For example, XGenSEO is really good at creating accounts at this point in time. But Bookmarking Demon has some other options. So use XGenSEO to create and verify accounts, but BMD to actually bookmark those accounts.

Your next expenses should be spent on these:
Content creation
hosting
proxies

Sorry, I can't recommend proxies, but I do think to compete in today's more competitive SEO world you will need access to at least 10 dedicated proxies.

Finally, using free trials where you give your payment details (unless it's Paypal subscriptions) always have the risk of them not really cancelling.

Do due diligence, and even then conditions can change. Calculate your risk vs. gain.

Here's the Incansoft software you have access to as long as you're an active affiliate ($20 a month):

Llama Spin Easily Spin Hundreds or Thousands of Copies of Your Content Using Jet Spinner Syntax, Shared Thesaurus...

RSS Gadgets Grab Product Feeds from Amazon, ClickBank and Ebay to automate all of your Affilate Marketing activities...

BlogBot Easily Create, Manage and Post to Word Press Blog Networks Right from Your Windows Desktop...

WEB20Bot Web20Bot Represents the Finest in Automated Submission Utilities in its Class - Supports Decaptcha...

PADBot Take Advantage of the Back Links and Traffic Shareware Sites have to Offer by Auto Submitting Your PAD Files...

VideoBot Uploading your Videos to over 100 popular Video Publishing Sites just got a whole lot easier with VideoBot...

GFX Video Writer Seamlessly Convert Your Article Content Into Videos For More Traffic From All Of The Video Directories...

ArticleBot V2.0 Submit Your Articles to More Than 450 Article Directories Completely On Autopilot For Massive Backlinks...

Incansoft Translator Quickly and seamlessly translate all of your web pages on the fly - fully automated with 11 languages...

EZ Content Manager The Ultimate CMS Designed Exclusively for Content Producers and Content Managers And Webmasters...

SocialBot V4.3 Quickly Bookmark ALL Of Your Website's Pages Automatically (Without Doing It Page By Page) With SocialBot...

PressBot Distribute Your Press Releases to 25 of the TOP, Free Online Press Release Services With One Cick...

Content Mania Write or re-write article content highly optimized for LSI and top SERPS in moments with Content Mania...

EZ Niche Builder Simplify and automate the most redundant parts of building Ebay and other Niche Stores online...

EZ Testimonial Manager Pro Centralize/automate the process of collecting Audio, Video and Photo Testimonials on your web pages......

EZ Coupon Manager Central Discount Coupon Management with new HybridWareTM only from Incansoft and our authorized partners...

Secure Digital Downloads Learn how to properly secure Digital Downloads to prevent theft and indexing by search engines...

WEB 2.0 Video Gadgets Add targeted video content to one or more web pages automatically to improve your visitor's experience...

EZ Comment Manager Centralize and automate the tedious process of collecting and displaying visitor comments on all your web pages... ...

DirectoryBot Quickly and Easily Submit your Domains to over 500 online web directories with the click of a button...

Desktop Acquisition Manager Effortlessly track and manage all of your purchases online or off with the click of a button...

EZ Project Manager Easily Manage your Projects online with EZPM - robust UI for working with multiple projects and subs...

RSSBot Traffic Mania RSSBot - Easily Submit Your RSS Feeds To Major Online Aggregators On Auto Pilot! ...

EZ Lesson Manager Online Training at it's best! Create unlimited courses with text and multimedia. Offer paid or free courses... ...

EZ Testimonial Manager Lite Automate the tedious process of collecting and displaying customer testimonials on your web pages... ...

GFX Writer V2.0 Header Creator Create headers, ebook and report covers, graphic software boxes; low cost alternative to PhotoShop... ...

Here's an interesting program:
http://webdombot.com/

It works with 70 social sites for automating tasks.

Has a free 2 week trial, then $20 a month subscription.

Here's a pretty good bot for creating forum profiles on 5 popular foorum platforms. Lots of features like creating an RSS pheeds for all your profile links...And it actually works (at least now).

Read More:
http://www.autobacklinkbomb.com/

Only $28 if you buy using this link:
http://www.autobacklinkbomb.com/special.html

LAST EDITED ON Feb-26-11 AT 02:24 PM (PST)
 
Here's a good article marketing plan that will work for weak to moderate competition keywords.

Prep (Before getting started!!!)

10 (about) really good, totally original articles.

20 (about) pretty good articles, totally original.

10 OK articles - Used for spinning.

You want to get everything ready beforehand, so you can take advantage of free/cheap trial offers.

Now go to this thread and look at the chart in Post #4:
http://www.dombom.com/cgi-bin/dcforum/dcboard.cgi?az=show_thread&om=275&forum=DCForumID42

Use that guide as the GENERAL guide for your mini-net. Use your 10 best articles on Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger.

Use your 20 "pretty good" articles for the secondary sites like ezine articles, goarticles, etc.

It's OK if you don't use the exact same resources as in the chart, but try to stay close. The important thing is to see how the links flow.

Next, sign up for SERP Assist:
http://www.serpassist.com/

It's $7 for 7 days, subscribe through Paypal so you can cancel at any time.

SERPassist doesn't have the most accounts. What sets it apart is its visual linking chart that make it easy to create linking strategies.

Use SERPassist's resources, fitting them into the chart posted above. Again, they won't match perfectly to the chart, but that's OK, we're automating what we can.

Only after you've sent this up (the meter is running on the trial periods), download the free 5 day trial of Article Marketing Robot:
http://www.articlemarketingrobot.com/

Note: AMR was $47 one-time as a WSO. Then it was something like $77 a month subscription. Right now, it is $77 one-time (there may be a wso), so the price seems to be very fluid.

It's a great piece of software and one of my favorites right now. Because the price changes so much, you may want to buy it now.

If you're going to use the free trial, or want more info, check out the instructional videos here:
http://www.articlemarketingrobot.com/videos.php

AMR creates accounts, verifies the email, submits to 100s of article directories and has a spinning system that's as good as The Best Spinner, although different in how it works.

Check out this video to see how the spinner works:
http://www.articlemarketingrobot.com/advanced-article-rewriting.php

Spin your 10 articles and use AMR to build links to all the resources you created above, including directly to your money site.

Be very careful of linking to your Hubpages and Squidoo lenses. Both will ban your account for "wrongful linking". Instead, build links below these properties in the link chains.

-Next, "gently" bookmark your sites. Don't over-do it. Just 15-30 bookmarks each should be good, using different bookmarking sites for each.

-By now you should have a Ping.fm or Posterous account set up with the major web 2.0 services set up, like Twitter, myspace, linkedin and facebook. Get the links out in the Web 2.0 universe. You created good content, be sure the social sites know about it.

I believe this is very good for SEO. Again, don't over-do it. You created white-hat content and no sense getting your hubpages or lenses banned by someone complaining. Your mission here is NOT to drive traffic, but simply to make sure the engines see your links in 2.0 space.

-Gather up all the RSS pheeds you have and blast away, including as many of your spun articles as you can easily and quickly find and add add them to RSS pheeds.

Ping the URLs as you collected for the RSS pheeds, using services like Ping-o-matic or a mass pinging tool. (See free stuff thread for a mass pinger).

-Use internal linking leverage of the sites you created above. Hubpages, squidoo, ezinearticles all have ways to manipulate the internal links on their sites for your own gain.

Again, be gentle. However, there are white hat (and gray hat) things you can do, like being smart with tags and getting on tag pages.