What is the best advertising - on a shoe string budget?

If your web based teach yourself SEO and then thats free. If you want to stick with paid advertising I am not so sure. I think google ads can be a bit steep personally, are facebook ads any good?

If you aren't willing to spend money on advertising campaigns like adwords of facebook ads, then probably it would be wise to use social media as an advertising tool. I see it like this: If you don't have money, that try to make some time for yourself. Being active on social media with all your newest products, latest offers, christmas-, easter-, holiday sellouts might help you show off and get known. But this goes without saying that you will have to work hard to be active as much as you can. You might even become a social geek ... It's not easy but it will probably worth the time.

True to a degree, but as someone who lives on the coal face, and sees outsourcing efforts every day, I'd question quality claims. Having someone who,say lives in Sri Lanka or Bangladesh, write or create content for a purely local UK English market rarely works and soon becomes apparent. Worldwide English, or call it Internet English isn't the same as local English, and we see it every day on our directory. The English has got so poor for some entries that we now visually show Country locations from the IP's in our admin panels to help with moderation and approving listings.

I'd say 80% of listings generated from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are poor English and have to be edited or simply deleted. These are obviously outsourced low quality SEO companies. That said, prob about 60% of listings that originate with Indian or Pakistan IP's are surprisingly good. Also surprising to see is the origin of a lot of SEO generated listings, which include unlikely places like France, USA and South America. These all tend to be pretty good and are rarely deleted or blocked.

But the surprisingly worst offender is the UAE, where it's not just poor English, but random made up UK addresses, irrelevant categories, all in the name of trying to get a web link. I genuinely feel for the small businesses that have been sucked in by these rogue SEO bods, and their awful link building efforts.

I may have to do a proper post with pretty graphs on the originator countries of outsourced SEO/Marketing, and quality percentages Maybe even list the IP's and build a hall of shame!

If you're looking for paid, online advertising, Facebook ads are probably a better bet than Google Adwords as you can really drill down and target only those people who fit your target market profile. Classified ads in journals or publications read by your target audience are also a good bet, especially if you can put a website URL (or better still a QR code) in the ad so people can use their smart phones to visit your site as they read.

For free advertising, as Ideas Reaction says: teach yourself SEO and get free traffic from search engines. Download a copy of Market Samurai (the trial version should be enough to get you started) and look for some long-tail keywords that have plenty of searches, but low competition. Target those first.

Having a Facebook fan page for your business is also a good source of free advertising.

Interesting response, have you seen this yourself then?

I've been a longtime fan of Google PPC because it works. Our campaigns are optimised and we sit around the 30% conversion mark which I'm happy with and makes it very viable.

I've tinkered with Bing campaigns and FB ads, including just a couple of weeks ago and can never get any kind of return. I can generate likes, page impressions or visitors very cheaply. But if I'm paying for traffic, regardless of how targetted it is, I just want to see conversions.

Maybe FB (as I've long suspected) is dependant on your biz type.

Yes, I have.

It works by linking the data from people's Facebook profiles into the ad database, so only specific people (AKA your targeted audience) see the ad.

For example: let's say you were advertising a bridal shop in Manchester. You could set your target audience as: Women, in Manchester and (say) within a 10 mile radius, aged between 18