How to advertise/get players?

To be honest if you really want to get more, it's about the timing and execution. The timing is relevant to what time of week you choose for advertising your server. Statistically across the internet, thursdays are more active than any other day of the week, riding a wave of activity up until saturday. It's within that timeframe you need to get your server noticed and have people join.

The second aspect is keeping what you already have. As you've said, you're keeping a general capacity of ~50 players online. What you do need is some way of keeping things entertaining, but also personal enough that players feel they still have a connection to the server. People don't enjoy a minecraft server if they feel that they have absolutely 0 worth there, and vice-versa.

I dont think a banner has much to do with it, and 14manj, ive noticed overly unique servers get less. People that havent ever ran a server with more than 3 people dont know. I guess to see how some of these people get 200+ players is to ask them, most of you guys wouldn't know.

It looks to me like they start off with paid for advertising, minestatus banners and such. pretty expensive.

I also recommend having your "server banner" say something different that "hardcore pvp" because 90% of server's are "hardcore pvp". Its a common attribute for a server.

KristyroxMy server is a smaller server that usualy peeks around 50 players on good days, how do I go about expanding this? I see some servers with 100+ people and many of those servers, i can name in more ways that one are worse than mine. How do they get so popular and mine is still in the gutter?

if its paid for advertisement or whatever it takes, please let me know of a good one. im willing to do anything to show people my view of how a server should be.

Thanks

Usually unique servers are able to haul in more traffic / Players. Try seeing if you can set yourself out from the crowd. I've done this before with a few of my projects and it hasn't failed me to this day.