Alright, well I am sure that you all know of the importance advertising for your company to get hits and clients.

Well what I ask is where do you do your advertising and where is most effective?

I probably asked you this before, but I really want to get some cheap advertising.. I have banners made and such, just wondering, where I should look at placing them for the best results?

Do forums work good to advertise on?

If you have a lot of time to spend talking with customers and making posts, forums work well. They're free . If you're looking to advertise to a larger audience, banner advertising works really well.

I do a lot of making posts, talk to customers on Live Chat, do a bit of banners here. It works pretty well. I get lots of dedicated leads from WHT.

Gordy, this is something that can be very important..
Don't just make lots of posts on forums with your name in your sig, this won't bring new clients.

If you are making posts that are helpful, going into detail, creating posts that are interesting and involving then people will notice this, they will take more notice of you and in turn, your company.

Would you take more notice of a company and think it is professional if the owner made 1000 posts that were just replies for the sake of upping their post count and getting their sig on the site, or would you take more notice of someone that did 300 posts, each helpful to the poster if they are replying, or something with a little effort put into the post that interested the post.

Your posts will reflect on your company if you have it in your sig, if you make a post that gets people angry, they will relate this post to your company on the other hand, if you make a post that is helpful and you go into detail for the user, they will think of your company as one that really pays attention to their customers.

Some people don't even include their company name on forums they post or tell people who they are simply because of this reason.

You have to keep a good profile where ever you are posting if you are advertising your company at all.

I don’t think many people will share their best places to advertise, I know a lot of people have good sites where they are getting a lot of customers from, a niche community normally works very well.

A lot of people have great success with adwords, but you really have to find good keywords, you will probably end up spending a fortune before you find your own niche on adwords.

You won’t even find the name of a lot of your competition on google adwords because they are going for a niche, you normally wouldn’t find it just by typing in their company name.

If you know who you are targeting, you won’t really have a problem finding sites to advertise on, you just need to know how much sales are worth to you.
A lot of people don’t put the right value on their sales.

Yeah this is true John, I dont think anyone would say, yes I advertise on thisbigsite.com for cheap.

I am just looking for general ideas, ie; forums, banners on websites, email.. etc..

But yeah, there are some options out there that could just rack up a nice bill for a while before you notice anything.

I'd say it depends quite a bit on your target audience; who do you want your customers to be? I aim my hosting business towards the teens/early twenties personal website market, so therefore, I tend to advertise on sites/blogs/forums aimed at that demographic.

(Oh, and as for adwords, I think it's a bit of a waste of money, personally. I may try again at some point in the future. You do need to have highly targetted keywords in order to get any results)

Hello ToastyHost,
Welcome to HostingRefuge

I think with adwords you really have to know what keywords to target, otherwise you will get a very bad ROI.
I know of companies that are investing a lot of money into adwords and it is really paying off for them, but it does take time to know what keywords works best for you and your company.

Once you figure that out, adwords can be a great source for new customers.