education or a cheap established site that isn't realizing its potential - take that and flip that biatch into a money maker. even if you double your profits which at $400 would be cake you're well ahead of the game. Do that a few times and before you know it you'll have $4000 to invest.
dump it on a decent programmer (or learn to hack) who will build you a database driven site. This should be looked at as a long term investment for other sites you develop. The concept goes like this. 1. Build 100,000 + good quality pages from a database or spreadsheet dump 2. Get indexed (20% will do just fine as this number will grow in time) 3. After getting some popularity, dump links from the database site on some "big bank" sites you are building. The database sites will end up pulling their own weight with adsense or other and in about a year or so they will be an extreme asset to your web site portfolio to dump popularity on your next "money making venture". PM for an example ...
Buy wholesale products, sell them on ebay until you double or even triple your money...then you can easily buy a well running website. Westoff.
Why dont you go to phplinkbid.com, start up a directory with about $30 bucks, spend the rest of the money driving traffic to your directory..if your site brings in enough traffic, you can have webmasters purchasing links to place on your site..you'll gradually end up earning your $400 back and more if your successful with it! BidLinks.org or nicksdirectory.com are just some of the few examples
I'd give it to the first bum I saw on the street and tell him to buy whatever his heart desires. Yeah do that.
You can buy this site off of my for $500 (yeah, a little over your budget but hey!) Top 10 In Tokyo dot com
start a make money blog with 400 worth of ads. i made 700 my first month.http://www.bloggernoob.com/my-official-first-month-income/26/
Spend it on something that you have interested in. For example, if you are good with graphic design, spend your $400 to build a site to promote your service. If you like to play games or know a lot of friends who alway play games, spend it on a game script. There are a lot you can do to make money online, but it's just that you will need to devote a lot of time to make it successful. Regardless what you are going to do... good luck.
Do you already have a website? If not, I would suggest putting that investment towards development. Already have one? I would go with off-line marketing, fliers and what not.
That isn't a lot of money to invest anywhere. I would just throw it in a high interest savings account, GMAC or ING are the highest, and just sit on it. At least by doing this you will be making money interest and the account balance will be growing.