Should I use Adwords/Adsense?

Recently been looking in to the two as options for my website, but can't help thinking they would put some users off as we already have one banner for adverts. Am I being a bit picky and should I do it regardless? Also which in peoples experiences works best? Many Thanks

They are 2 different things - one brings you money (and may drive away potential custromers) and one costs you money (but should drive potential customers to you).

What are you trying to achieve?

We are trying to establish a member base, so when you put it like that I guess it is clear!

what do you want the members to do?

Click on ads? Give you money? What ? (& why?)

No not at all, no members pay a penny toward anything. Just from looking on big sites it appears to be the norm, and I was told it bumped you up on google the more ads you had clicked on. It isnt a financial incentive

still not sure what you are trying to achieve.

Tell us the workflow you want to achieve and we can then maybe help?

Neither Adwords and Adsense have any beairng on your position in the search engines.

We are trying to become a place where North Sheffielders will go to when they want to find a local event, group, discount or share a local issue. We have been live 7 weeks now and realise that we need to be the first place to get local news or events on the site and we are talking to people at the moment who can give us those first hand articles.

So you need to raise your profile locally and get yourselves known locally.

So adsense is pretty useless in my case?

hmmm - local news can sometimes be a bit of "man hits thumb with hammer" type of news so its tricky to make it interesting.

How do people (who you want to look at your site) currently consume local news?

there's about 6 odd local papers, I know what you mean local news is never big news or it would be on the radio or some bigger medium. We have considered changing focus to a discounts on shops and place to chat with locals, what do you think?