I need the advice of someone who recognizes this hurdle and who has some top tips for me. We have already achieved these:

1) Main feature on St@rtup (20th Apr 2000 on BSkyB's .TV Channel)
2) Yahoo! Pick of the day
3) .Net Magazine "Access All Areas" Issue 70
4) Site of the Month - Women's Business Magazine (April 2000)
5) Pick Of The Week - Freeserve
6) Pick Of The Week - PA News (Press Association)

...and, of course, we are well placed in the search engines.  But none of this seems to do anything to our number of visitors.  No-one will banner advertise with us without higher counts and we have the usual budget to invest in our own self-promotion (£0).

Any ideas/knowledge welcome.  And yes - I am new to this!

My response would be that droves of visitors are pretty useless, what really counts from an investors point of view is does your business model stand up to scrutiny, how good is the management team, and how can they make money out of you? In my opinion if your main revenue stream is from banner advertising then you will not attract any investment. To be honest, on my project we have relegated banner ads right to the bottom of the revenue list in an attempt to show that we really do not need it at all to build our business.

Congrats on your publicity achievements but in this incredibly crowded market place do not expect it to do much for your hits. PR such as you mention only really works if it is done continuously over a long period in very large volumes. My last company spent every bit of money that we could afford on PR for 18 months and as a result were featured heavily in several of the main industry journals every single month. It still took the full 18 months before people started to recognize the name.

Sorry to be a little pessimistic but please do not underestimate how difficult it is to be one of the winners in this space.