checkatrade - does work, but really only once you have a reasonable number of customer comments, which obviously you won't have if just starting.
newspapers - gets customers sometimes and not others, unfortunately this will mean paying for adverts which get no results, as there seems to be no pattern as to when the adverts work and when not.
website - pretty much useless.
There is also the yellow pages - biggest waste of money you can find. A better result would be obtained by stapling business cards to a stack of tenners and throwing them from a moving vehicle.
Their website offerings are worse, because unless you spend thousands of pounds, your ad will be on page 400 of the search results and no one will ever see it.
Leaflets/flyers can work, provided they are decent ones (full colour is essential) and you choose the delivery areas carefully, however these require that many thousands are delivered to get any sort of result.
Poor quality A4 photocopies hacked in half with a blunt butter knife will get nothing (yes, I have actually seen some so called businesses advertising in this way
)
If starting to advertise, you will get plenty of leeches calling trying to sell you all kinds of other adverts. They are all a total waste of money, and when they call, only two short words are required.
Examples include calendars, appointment cards, magazines you never heard of, website people claiming to get you on the 1st page of Google, advertising boards in supermarkets, card displays in DIY stores, spurious publications for unknown charities / disabled children and so on.
