What to Spend Your $5,000 On

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Thanks to ChrisG’s post on finding post ideas when you’re stuck, I headed to the DP forums for some juice and found this little nugget:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=814856

Smitts has $5,000 to spend on his 2 websites and is curious on what to spend it on.  Up until this point, he mentions he has spent his marketing budget on the following:

• PPC
• Blog Posts
• Social Networking (mentions he built up the network within each site himself)
• CPM
• Yahoo Directory

He’s had little-to-no success at this point and wants to determine where to go from here with his much larger budget.  The discussion gets somewhat heated and everyone seems to have their own opinion, but it all really just boils down to people recommending SEO, PPC, Social Marketing and the like.

I asked around (mind you, my Plurk account is no doshdosh or problogger) and it seems people are recommending things more like design & content, which is what I agree with.  I believe it’s important to focus on usability and customer interaction before you start considering where to get links and what blogs/social sites you should promote yourself in.  A design from this guy would do you well and would help reach you clients in a way that you may not have thought about on your own.  There’s been plenty of regurgitated blog posts on design and I don’t know a thing about it, so I’ll leave it at that.

Content is going to be great benefit to you in both the short and long term of your marketing campaign.  Content is not only just great for Google’s spiders, but it’s great for getting new links (if you’re focusing on writing quality content, of course).  Jim Boykin did a great post a while back on creating content pages for the sake of link building that is a must read.

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Where to go from here?

Where you take your site will depend on your budget.  If you’re in the lower range, consider buying Aaron Wall’s Training Program, it’ll get you all you need to know from start to finish and will only set you back about $100.

Another thing is getting a copy of Dreamweaver (cheap on eBay/Craigslist) or similar software like Nvu and organize your site to look clean and simple.  Visit design blogs to get some ideas on latest trends and simple techniques to improve your site’s look.

If you’re looking for links, start with some free directories that still hold authority.  AddURL still updates their list and has a ton of great places to submit your site for some good ‘ol link juice.  No cost to yourself  dollar-wise, but you will spend a good amount of time submitting.

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For those on a medium budget, you have much more room to work with.  Unlike Smitts up above who submitted to the Yahoo directory and said it was a “waste”, I would highly recommend the $300 to get in!  They still pass PageRank (if that’s your beef) and is a great authoritative link!

I’d also blast a nice press release about your business or niche.  PRWeb has a great $200 SEO Visibility package that will not only distribute your PR to a bunch of news sites (and a ton other places too), but they  will allow you to get an image in there as well as place anchor text with the release as well.  Perfect for visibility, branding, high-quality links and much more.

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For those on a much larger budget, you would absolutely want to look into someone designing your site and blog professionally to get the right affect from your visitors.  Along with a professional design is someone to manage your blog and consistently write new, original content.  Get someone to post often!  There are tons of people on Craigslist that have been hired for as little as $4 a post (and they produce great articles).

Use PPC to test your market and keywords.  Not sure what keywords you want to be ranked for, or which may produce the conversion your desire?  PPC is a perfect way to see what type of traffic you will bring as well as test your demographic on your product/service.  I’ve dealt with clients in the past who had great rankings for keywords that did them no benefit because they were irrelevant or just not helpful.  Spend a good amount of time and money on getting the right traffic from the right keywords.

SEO Firm? Do your homework and find a company that will actually help you in achieving the rankings you want/need.  Rand talked a bit about this a gave some great advice on how to research and find a good SEO company for the right price.  In my honest opinion, you get what you pay for.  If you’re going to be stupid enough to let some guy submit your site to 5000 “search engines” out there for $500, you may learn your lesson the hard way (unless you’re reading this, I hope).  Find a company with a great reputation and a great service agreement.  Although the good companies won’t give you any guarantees, they can give you realistic and positive expectations!

Technorati Tags: content, link building, marketing budget, seo, social media marketing, Web Design