Right i've read hundreds of advertising posts on here, played with free advertising etc but things have gone quiet.
Ive decided to try a month with some paid advertising, I'm looking to spend up to about $200 preferably less but not all in one place.
Has anyone got any ideas? Oh yeah we are a uk company so preferably where people in the UK will find us.

I would recommend the PPC search engine Espotting.com with your advertising budget. Their target audience is solely the UK and they have listing partnerships with quality search engines.

I have been doing all my advertising for free, posting on message boards. My target audience is primarily adult webmasters, so I post on the adult webmaster message boards as often as I can, I usually get good traffic that way.

I also have run a banner ad on one particular resource site that has done well for me at times, and the price is right.

I am going to try a targeted mailing to adult webmasters in the coming weeks along with buying more banner impressions on the site I have used previously. In hopes of drumming up some extra business.

I am not 100% sure about espotting myself.

We have put several hundreds of pounds through them with little noticeable results.

Conversely we ran (and still do run) an identical ad through google's new adwords program and have had excellent results each and every month.

Try overture they are great - and for $15 per click, you can get 10 visitors for only $150! It is the best advertising deal on the net :D

I just put a display ad in the local yellow pages -- I'm sure the UK has yellow pages.

Yes, why do we not all just throw more money at overture :)

Seriously though. If you are willing to spend a bit more, try findsp.com or hostsearch.com. We are getting great results from them. You should also try google adwords, we also get really good results from them as well.

Regards,

There is a thread here somewhere that lists a whole bunch of hosting directories.. That I would suggest would be the best place to start and best of all alot of them are free. Do that which will take you a week or so to list yourself then look for some cheaper PPC places.. Overture and any of the big names are a big waste of $$$ dont bother spending over a dollar a click.. That should generate some traffic then like said above look for some decent webmaster realted sites/forums to advertise in and start from there.. Last but not least it is always worth putting an ad in the related offers forum offering sponsored hosting to sites that have good targeted traffic .. thats if you have some space to play with... anyway good luck.. I highly suggest submitting to the hosting directories first thought.

Originally posted by OKIHost
Overture and any of the big names are a big waste of $$$ dont bother spending over a dollar a click..

Sorry, but as long as you stay on a low cost per click value Overture can work miracles. I have managed to drive some serious traffic to a community site with that (and not only traffics, also signups).

Yes the yellow pages is here in the UK but for the tiniest ad possible it is £600 my problem is that client signups are slowing down, its only a small company i can't afford a decent size add in the yellow pages atm.

Originally posted by Benjamin
I just put a display ad in the local yellow pages -- I'm sure the UK has yellow pages.
I don't know about you, but YP was probably the worst investment we ever made. The origonal sales guy was great, fantastic guy. They lost our ad like 3 times and almost didn't place us at all. They over charged us ( later got a refund ). The only thing we really got out of it was increased cold calls from telemarketers really. They have called us back at least 3 times now asking us to return, each time we turn them down. LEAVE US ALONE!

Haze, really? I'm an ISP, so I might get a few more leads from the yellow pages than web hosting ... but still that is terrible to hear.

Originally posted by tazd9t9
Yes the yellow pages is here in the UK but for the tiniest ad possible it is £600 my problem is that client signups are slowing down, its only a small company i can't afford a decent size add in the yellow pages atm.

According to a currency converter at http://www.rubicon.com/passport/currency/currency.html , that's more than $900 dollars USD. That is really expensive. Our display ads are anywhere from $45 and up to $300-$500 or so. I guess it matters how much population the yellow pages cover -- the distribution rate, etc.

$45, $300 - $500 paid monthly, that is.