Well I dont earn any sort of money from my site so I wouldnt pay for advertisments either, besides my forum has grown up to 555 members in 5 months just with word of mouth advertising.

Well, I started << url snipped to abide by forum policies >> about 2 years ago and advertised quite a bit on Adwords. I still advertise using Adwords, but not as big a spender as I assume Dani would be. My site doesn't earn much anyway.

Its important to remember that just like any venture, advertising is key to promoting it to large scale proportions.

Keep in mind though, the best advertising is not always the paid stuff.

Getting interviews with online media, entering into contests, registering on sites and leaving your link in your profile, etc, are often much more effective than traditional paid forms of advertising.

I'm with Alex here. If my site were a commercial venture I'd pay for that if it were commercially viable to do so.
If it isn't, word of mouth is excellent advertising. If it's a hobby site you're probably a member of some of the other associated sites with that hobby. Most offer link exchanges for hobby sites (even the commercial sites often have these for free for noncommercial ones), put the URI in your forum signatures, etc. etc.
Far more effective than paying for it for the simple reason that many people will not click on advertising banners or sponsored links in search engines but will visit a site referred to them by a friend or a site they trust for no reason other than that the referrer liked the site.

Although i voted that i would i still agree with the following:

I would add that word of mouth can include banners, text links, and even signatures

I even publish a monthly forums signatures travel notes on my blog.

Depends on what advertising we are using.......

My sites visitors/members are all mostly attracted by stickers, posters and T-shirts that have been seen in the loacl area. Did everything myself, design and print and then got everything photocopyed (Execpt for the T-Shirts which where screen printed). But that site has moved on and I am wishing to do it all again for another one.

I do not see any point using AdWords with the exchange rate (every NZ$1 equals to around US$.40 cents). So i have never bothered to look into to. The only other way was to use a banner a local banner exchange. Which did work . Ehh my mumbled 2 cents

Advertising can ALWAYS help.

My site is sports related so we advertised on the team's broadcasts and had a banner for tailgating and at games.

We've never done any web based advertising. If I were to do it I'd be pretty picky because we get some pretty off-beat ads based on what the google adsense spiders think our site is about.

But you do have to promote/advertise in some manner to ever get traffic. If not for a google ad, I wouldn't have found this site.

No, but I don't know where to advertise. :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

No, unless I get huge amount of ROI.

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