Alternatives to traditional advertising for Retailers / Merchants

Some musings on a subject I know little about :)

10 Alternatives to traditional advertising for Retailers / Merchants
1. Product placement - on TV, in films, in video games, have a famous person be seen using your product (note: give your product to a few famous people who you think may use it)
2. Normal Reviews (send a sample to a high volume review site / blog)
3. Paid reviews (pay a high volume site to do a review - a good review if possible)
4. Blogs - retailers own blog
5. Sponsorship - sometimes hard to separate from adverts but generally links a retailer / product / service to a popular item.
6. SEO (search engine optimisation) - If I search for beer, which breweries will get the highest ranking?
7. Word of mouth - viral marketing, If you sell pizza's, go to the pizza websites and the pizza newsgroups and follow them for a while, find out who the most respected members are and send them some free pizza's to ask for their opinion. If you open a pizza shop in some town then find a newsgroup about that town and do the same, a free pizza for the 10 most prominent members.
8. Affiliates - like adverts but the advertiser only gets commission on actual sales, not on views / clicks - vet your affiliates carefully as affiliate spam can be damaging.
9. Branded items, a pen with your logo and phone number on it will cost about 20p (6.5p* each for the really cheap ones) if you buy a few thousand, why not give one away with each pizza order? (people love free pens)
10. Vouchers, not used so much in the UK, but offer 10% off your next order using a voucher (add an expiry date so that the customer comes back sooner rather than later)

P.S. If you do plan to give away free pens then feel free to send me one, I may even post a picture of it here on this blog that no-one reads.
* 6.5p (around 10 US cents) for quantities of 25000