My website is a community based website aimed at residents and prospective visitors to a seaside area of 3 towns and 40,000 residents. It has become fairly well known to locals and has 1,500 ACTUAL visits each month (not bad but not good either) however hardly anybody clicks on my google ads.
I have recently made up a series of dummy ads in the same style of the peoples current web design and offered them a prime spot for a reasonable price of £300 for a year. NOT ONE has even replied to me????
Does anyone have any idea where Im going wrong.
www.teignmouthnews.co.uk for a typical dummy ad www.teignmouthnews.co.uk/manor.htm and also /sands.htm

First of all, I converted to $, because it's what I'm familiar with (whether it's tanking or not). It looks like £300/yr is about $578/yr or $48/mo.

The problem is that a site that gets 1500 visitors per month, has a low PageRank (2), and a poor Alexa Rating (11,133,293) probably can't ask that much for an ad, even though the ad is HUGE.

I'd recommend moving to more standard ad sizes, and choosing much smaller ads. Then try to sell multiple ads (4-5) for a lot less money per ad. If you can convince people, make them "nofollow" links unless they are to sites/pages containing related content.

I'm trying not to discount your site, so please don't take this personally at all, but 1500/month is not a lot of visitors. If you want to charge a higher amount for ads, you'll probably have to put them on every page, to assure the advertiser that all 1500 people are seeing the ad.

As a side note, Ad Block Plus for firefox hides Google ads, so that could be a reason why you aren't getting very many clicks (not to mention, people just generally don't click ads).

Thanks for the replies. Firstly I think Skyshadow may have a point, the decision maker is probably oblivious to my Email. Another point Skyshadow makes "oops I thought they led..." In my Email I did point out that they were only facsimile ads, and the proper ad would contain flash (designed by my bro in law) and that they would have full say over final design and content and that it would link to their site)
As for Aaroncampbells point, would these 60 room hotels, and family holiday parks be aware of how many visitors I have, or page rankings.
Another problem I have is that there are a couple more local sites with very little content that offer free adverts, because they do it for a hobby.
Any thoughts? anything I could do to improve my site? it has to be something that I can edit myself, I don't want to rely on anyone else, my bro in law is an amazing and very cheap designer of websites, but as a favour to me its something that he would never actually get around to doing.

If anyone is interested in his services check out www.righton.co.uk and his own site www.mediainet.co.uk (which has his phone number on it)

Skyshadow, thanks I will have a go at implementing your idea's.