What would you spend $100 of marketing on?

Ok guys, had my site up and running for a little over a month. Still needs more content which grows rapidly for every post made (which is little right now). Make a long story short I'm 16 and would like to make this site and maybe another one in the future my summer job instead of working a mcdonalds. Say if I took a $100 out of the bank account to invest in marketing the site which route would you go.

1. Hire SEO (cheap india based most likely)
2. Buy links (If so alot of low pr or many high pr)
3. PPC Campaign
Or something else...

My keywords are "saltwater fly fishing"
http://saltwaterflyfishers.com
and "Saltwater Fly Tying"
http://saltwaterflytying.net

#3 and #1 in MSN. Google and Yahoo Im no where to be found but just installed a mod_rewrite to hopefully help me out. All ideas and feedback is appericated.

 

No decent SEO will cost you only $100.

 

if you can get an ROI on 100$ in PPC, you shouldn't limit yourself to doing it once

 

In your case?

I would spend it on two extra domains, create the gallery on one of them and the forum on the other.

Get lots of pictures about flyfishing.

Buy a few candles, and pray for forum visitors.

And spend the rest, about 70 dollars I suppose, on whatever you like.

 

Spend the $100 on 20 litres of coke and sugary substances, read this entire forum and do it yourself..I'm pretty sure this forum contains almost everything on SEO you could need.

 

I agree with disgust, I say try a little with pay per click. And if you are able to turn a profit with it then it is worthwhile and you should continue doing it past your $100 since it will be paying for itself.

I am guessing with a limited budget like $100 you should read up and do as much SEO as you can by yourself, as it is not that difficult as long as you have time to read a lot... Teach yourself how to fish and you'll eat for a life time

 

Been reading them quite religously. You'll kill me when you speak of 85,000 backlinks or what not. My #1 competiton has 2,400 in google (but then again has 102,000 pages indexed).

 

Some good advice already,

I would agree just to read these forums and do your own SEO. Don't pay for backlinks, at least not at first. What is the main revenue of your site?

 

Take all of our advice, read the forums, spend 100 on PPC to help you workout which keywords are good for you (and which might give you a decent adsense return). The start links.

Also, its not about 00000s of backlinks anymore... it helps obviously. Relevance and strength are much more important. Get quality and you can have many less:
1. Dmoz and directories
2. Unique URLS
3. Relevant sites (esp homepages) - with good PR (the PR gives you a clue to their strength/ popularity).
3. Use different anchor texts

That should get you started.

 

Also keep an eye on your log files for search terms in the search engines. You would be amazed at how many little 'nuggets' people find by looking at them. Not competitive terms that bring traffic can really get you rolling. I have two that do amazingly well and I stumbled upon them by reviewing my log files and the terms to find me. They are now the #1 and #3 terms used to find one of my sites.

 

there are some decent SEO will cost you only $100. but in top 1000 not top 10 ranking ...lol

 

I'd probably go for AdWords camaign, look for great keywords (you probably know where to find there - I love this site ) and start it ASAP. It may bring you quite a good money when 'corectly' done You needn't spend and lose all your money at once, just use the right keywords. Sure, it'll took a little investigation.

 

I would focus on finding related sites that you can exchange links with and optimizing your pages for keywords. Use the $100 to bid on keywords. Submit your site to all the free directories you can find.

- NMS

 

I think I agree with others about what to do. What not to do: don't hire SEO guys for $100, most of them will not help. I remember back in time on various freelancers auction sites, there were guys offering complete SEO for a site for $50 with top ten in google guarantee. . Many of these auctions repeated over and the owner said the previous ones didn't help, yet he still was going for the cheapest ones. What most of these guys did, if ever, they changed few html tags, and maybe pointed some backlinks temporarily.

But to my knowledge, there are exceptions to this rule as well, of course! Just often too hard to find them.

Invest time in your own education, you can learn what most of these $100 guys do on your own in few days. After that, it is mostly hard work. Submit, exchange links, make deals with webmasters of similar sites, work on content.

 

I would definately go for a PPC whilst optimising the site and getting more free ibls

 

AdWords for sure.

Then put your increased profit back into AdWords and repeat this exercise.

 

Since seo is free for me and I'm tired of doing it, I would find the best overlooked small keywords for pay per click in overture , the keywords that are most likely to generate me business e.g. "Web Development Solutions in San Diego" - I'll get a whole bunch and probably have good results ... $100 can take you far!

 

I've have good success with press releases. If written well and keyword-rich, it can bring heavy traffic and nice exposure. I prefer PRWeb, but there are several decent ones. Most offer a free pr service, but put funding behind it and it gets increased distribution to major media outlets and picked up by hundreds (if not thousands) of newspapers, magazines, e-zines, writers/journalists, etc.

PPC is a good thought, but how far will $100 go for anything the least bit competitive? I'd rather buy up a few domains, get hosting, and build highly relevant web sites to compliment the main site or subject.