How much should I spend on advertising? What would it be best spent on? So far, I bought a couple of banner ads at somethingawful.com, and about $30 at stumbleupon.com. I would like to spend about $5000, but am not sure where the money would be best spent. My site is http://www.contestx.com
hm.. your website has an nice idea. if i'm on your place I would try to be first for "contest", "create contest", "find contest", "win contest" etc. on search engines. For that you need links. To buy links, cheap place is sales section at this website. Although, have in mind that some links should be from articles about your site, so perhaps you might need some review. Perhaps contact journalist and offer money if they write article about you in well known magazines/newspapers?
They say you should spend 20% of your revenue a month on advertisement. Spend that on google adword, and other PPC, buy some links. Submit to good directories.
Man, I only made $5.00 this month. (My first month) Should I seriously only be spending $1 on ads for the first couple months? Is $5000 an adequate budget?
$5,000 is an adequate budget, but you'll just fail if you go after conventional advertising methods. I would suggest concocting some sort of buzz or guerilla marketing strategy (yes, they're different). That would make your money go a lot farther.
Well, some people can make 5 dollars work, some use 5000, depends on what you are planning to do with it. I usually buy items that will pay off in the future.
Nice site. I too do a lot of advertising at SA. I would post an Advertisement at sitepoint.com, send our a press release ($500) at prweb.com (and do a free one at pr.com and prleap.com as well), PPC, SEO $5000 should be able to get you some decent traffic.
Maybe its just me, but I hate the adsense. What about something like 10% of total prize pool goes back to your site or something like that?
To get the site started, I would spend $50-100 with banners and text links on popular websites relating to yours. Then after a couple of months you should have some nice steady traffic as well as a nice ranking on search engines. Thanks