I'm going to start promoting my site, www.HipHopDefined.com, soon and I've decided to put in about $800 at this time. Any suggestions on how I should use this money? I would prefer to spend some here and there, and not everything on one single thing/site. Any and all ideas are appreciated.
Spend in traffic, even if you don't know how to monetize your site. If you have good content, you keep your site updated and people like it, they will come back. That's what you need, then you figure out how to monetize it.
Emil, do you know what your target audience is? What is your niche? I think that you should invest some funds in market testing, e.g. finding which keywords work for your better (have better conversion). You can use paid Google ads for this purpose. Once you know what your niche is you can start fighting to get higher positions in search results - use article marketing, exchange and buy links, order paid reviews. As a result you will have good positions in a tight niche in about 1-2 months. I'm running something like this both for our products and as a public service.
I'd actually go with a few sig links for a month. Head to BST and start a thread asking for ANY NICHE outside of the SEO/Webmaster and check out the quality of posts of those willing to sell. Hiphop should sell itself, as it's certainly popular enough, so if your content is there (as in there is something to link too) then just getting the word out should likely be enough to get the site rolling. A few related Text Link Ads may also get the ball rolling...
with an 800 you can do a few things. First i always say find a JV partner that will help you promote for an affiliate commision. Then get some people (affiliates) to start promoting it for you.