This weeks discussion is a hypothetical spending scenario.  I’ll lay out the scenario and you guys have fun saying  how you would go about spending $500 “e-bucks” to get the best results.

• Your website is brand new so no age, authority, or existing links exist (unless you’re using your budget to purchase a domain).
• The end goal is to make a recurring monthly income – this can be via Adsense, affiliate marketing, E-books or any other way you want to monetize a website.
• No rules for tactics used but a strict budget of $500.00 is enforced.
• You can assume you already have web hosting paid for.

Some things you may want to consider covering when “spending” your money includes domain registration, content generation, design, logos, e-mail lists, link building etc.

How I Would Spend $500.00

It’s only fair that I go first in this weeks discussion.  Here’s my breakdown.

• I would look to create a small niche website based on an affiliate product.   COST: $0.00
• Research affiliate programs and do keyword research for what I believe would be the best “selling” keywords in the niche.  COST: $0.00
• Purchase an exact match domain or domain with the keyword in the domain that is also brandable COST: $10.00
• Install WordPress on the domain and purchase a relevant theme COST: $40.00
• Lay out the exact way I want my content written in a word document that I can send to a copywriter. COST: $0.00
• Pay someone to write 5-10 pages of content for the website. COST: $100.00 – $150.000
• Pay someone to write 5 blog posts that will be used as guest blog posts later on COST: $50.00
• Purchase 1-2 of the affiliate items and run a contest on the new site COST: (Depends on value of affiliate item: lets say $50.00 each) $100.00
• Manually scour websites that accept guest blog posts and offer them one of the blog posts already written COST: $0.00 (already paid for)
• Manually search niche related directories COST: $10.00 – $20.00 each depending on value of directory $50.00 total
• Press Release advertising launch of website and product give away – COST: $75.00
• With the remaining $25.00 I would probably use it to entice a blog owner that typically doesn’t accept blog posts to make an exception.  COST: $25.00

My goal with the outline above would be to rank on the first page of the search engines for some of the “selling” keywords and also rely on long tail keywords generated by the additional content found on the site.  The press release and contest will hopefully generate buzz, social sharing and build ‘natural’ authority links to the site.   Assuming all works out (cause it always does right!? ) I could use the monthly income to further invest in the site or start up another fun project.

Your turn – What would you do with $500.00?