How & where I can advertise/spend $20,000 budget for my startup?

[575]

I have just launched my startup. I don’t know how & where to advertise, I tried google adwords and facebook ads for a couple of days but I felt they will not work for me, Because I don’t have any specific keyword to describe my startup.

It is totally a new idea and I can describe it as a new and alternative search engine, a web 2.0 base search engine, a search engine with human optimized results.
Can any one advise me how and where I can advertise/spend my $20,000 budget.

Personally I feel that my startup needs more media/news coverage than the targeted keyword advertisement. Do the technology news blogs i.e. techcrunch or venturebeat post sponsored news or they just accept banner ads/through advertisement.

I just need to “spread the word” then I am sure most people will love to use it because its free and it brings more relevant results for web surfers and for web site owners they can just add they web site and choose their keywords it takes less than a minute. You can test it at http://www.socialsu.com

All suggestions are welcome
Thanks

[?]

Put the site out and see if you can get places to cover it vs. trying to advertse.

But make sure it works - I searched for a couple of things and got nothing. Given that I'm not interested in exploring further. That's about the attention span people will have for this - if it's not intuitively obvious why this is a good idea in the first 20 seconds or so, people will visit, leave and never return.

[Jake]

It's certainly worth paying a professional writer to create a press release that combines fact and story that will get in reported in media outlets, prweb.com may be the best known press release publisher, starting at $89.

A Branding campaign may make sense, developing a recognized name can make a difference, ad re-targeting gives you cheap multiple exposures to people who have shown interest in your site.

[KJL]

Don't give up on Google Adwords just yet. If you're thinking of a straight branding campaign, there really isn't any better medium to get the word out than Google's display network. You pretty much have the ability to target any demographic you could imagine on a massive scale and can even target specific sites for ad placement. And don't forget Youtube video ads.