What to do with $50 per month

[Kimmoy]

Hey everyone,

I have a friend who's running an affiliate site (currently 100 visitors per day and 1 sale per day) and she needs help getting more traffic to her site. She wants me to help her and said she can afford $50/month right now, so what do you suggest I do to help her so that it's a win-win situation? Build links, article marketing, online promotions? If so how much???

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

Kimmoy

[Phil Tanny]

Hmm... Interesting question.

I think I'll cast my vote for article marketing, if you feel you can write interesting articles on her topic.

$50 will cover a few hours to research and write a solid article, and then go through an editing process with your friend.

The good thing about article marketing is you can document exactly how much traffic each article is sending her. EzineArticles has this data available, and/or you can set up your own tracking system.

If you can document a success your friend finds acceptable, it may lead to a bigger budget, and more work for you.

Best of luck,

Phil

[angienewton]

My first step would be to make sure she's optimizing everything on site first (keyword research, SEO for each page/post, etc.) THEN I would say guest posting if that works for her niche. Quickest way to get relevant traffic/back links.

[ChristineCobb]

I agree with Angie about optimizing. Also see which keywords are bringing in the buyers (with Google Analytic>Goals) and make sure you have pages that are optimized for those keywords.

[Hakan - The Mindset Man]

If your friend has $50 a month to spend, I would suggest invest it in an ongoing training program or join private member's forum which will provide her with the guidance to learn how to build traffic to her site and take her business to another level.
At the end of the day, you can do article marketing, banners, onpage SEO, offpage SEO, Forum Marketing, JV's and so on.

They all have the potential to work for your friend, however her chances will increase once she understand them and implements them.

An investment in purposeful knowledge always pays off

[jgant]

It depends on how competitive the keywords are that your friend is targeting.

If your friend is going after low competition keywords, then article marketing should do the trick for getting to the top of the SERPs (assuming there's 10 plus pages of decent content on the site). Article marketing will also deliver traffic if the articles target low-competition keywords.

If targeting highly competitive keywords, then I don't think backlinks from article marketing will get the site to the top of the SERPs (I appreciate article marketing will deliver traffic, but I'm thinking from an SEO perspective).

If targeting competitive keywords is the case, I'd spend time getting backlinks from high PR URLs either through blog commenting and/or guest posting. These are harder links to get, but if done right, you can get links from sources with higher PR than the pages on which articles are published in the article directories. These better quality links should improve search engine rankings faster.

By the way, 1 affiliate sale per hundred visitors is decent. The site is obviously converting so it certainly is worth investing more money into it.

I'd also continue adding content targeting more keywords until all decent keywords are exhausted ... which in most niches takes a while.

[Infinity]

What's your business model?

[DTaylor]

For $50 per month you could outsource quite a few articles, each group of which targets long-tail keywords, pay to have those spun and posted on free blogs etc.

Or, do the same thing with videos. Use keyword search for YouTube, target keywords and have videos built around them. Submit to as many video sites as possible.

Consistent action with both of these should result in a significant increase in traffic over time. With a 1% conversion rate she should be very happy in a few months.

Then, start another site and do it again.

DTaylor