You are still thinking in narrow terms.
Lets broaden it out somewhat and forget about what is spam and what isn't.
Going back to the real shop, You and your staff have t-shirts with the name, logo and address on them, and each time you step outside the shop and walk down the street to get a butty (sandwich) or a drink you are promoting the shop.
Get on a bus full of people and when they see and read the t-shirt you are promoting the shop.
You have carriers printed with the name on, your CUSTOMERS are promoting your shop.
You tell people what you do for a living you are promoting the shop.
Everything you do outside of your shop is
promotion, likewise with everything you do
OFF your pages is promotion and marketing
It's not annoying people, it's not affecting their normal routine, you are being a good business person and using everything you have at your disposal to increase the footfall to your shop and thereby generate more sales.
Now on the otherhand you could look at aggressive marketing, telesales, cold calling, posting flyers through doors, fly-posting, thrusting flyers at people walking down the street, mass mail drops etc. Now
THIS equates to SE Spam, your marketing methods has started to impinge on other people and their life, now that's not to say that it doesn't work, because a small percentage of it does work, it's simply ineffectual and wasteful you put in a lot of time and effort for very little return. I always call it "machine gun" marketing, you spray "bullets" into the crowd and hope you hit your real target.
Choose where to drop links, choose where to talk about your products, don't worry about "quality" pages. By all means post at forums but be choosy, it's rather pointless coming to a forum full of website designers and developer and having a signature for a website designer or developer because the members probably are not looking for one of those.
Alan Perkins published his white paper of the
Classification of Search Engine spam ten years ago and it still holds true to this day.
Only the search engines can decide what is and what is not really SE spam.
We call things spam because they are NOT what
WE want to see in a particular place.
What we class as spammy here is accepted as aggressive marketing at Digital Point or Warrior Forum.
As I said above with "agressive marketing" techniques you have to do far more to see results, and have to continue doing more and more because it has a short "shelf life"
))
