June 25th, 2007 by James Omdahl
Everybody knows that all new affiliate marketers have thousands of dollars in start up money to start their online business, right?
Actually, no. Most new affiliates are on a budget…sometimes a very strict budget. That’s why, back in May, Patrick Sexton of SEOish asked seven online marketing experts what they would do if they had a very restrictive budget to promote a site. The magnificent seven who answered this question were Aaron Wall, CK Chung, Lee Odden, Andy Beal, Andy Hagans, Todd Malicoat and Partick Sexton himself.
If you are a bootstrapped affiliate you should take the time to read the article, but for those of you looking for the Reader’s Digest version, here were some of the most popular suggestions:
Write/pay for great, link worthy content (by far the most popular answer)
Buy a good domain
Find a quality host (DreamHost was mentioned more than once)
Read/learn/educate yourself
Use WordPress as a platform for your site
Buy/Swap high quality links to your site
Make sure you have a day job to pay the bills for a while
Look for awesome affiliate programs to work with (yes I’m linking to our affiliate program here)
How about you? If you only had $100 to spend on site promotion where would you spend it? Content? Links? Ramen noodles? Let me know by leaving a comment…
[Thanks to the amazing April Hartmeister for finding this article.]
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June 25th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
Hey, I cant resist a word right before I leave on vacation. Im trying not to do it - but yeah, Ill probably bring my laptop. Ihope yall do the “Traffic on Coast” dance for me.
I think people should explore free traffic sources even if they have great PPC campaigns, because you know - things change - and your campaigns could do well on Tuesday and get buried on Thursday.
If I was starting from scratch, Id probably spend $50 on a few domains and affordable webhosting - install WP blogs and static sales pages, and then use the extra $50 to keep myself in diet coke and coffee!
Everything else - technorati, digg, article submissions, link exchanges, directory submissions, some free blogs on wordpress.com and blogger.com - etc. .. etc. can get started for free with lots of work. Thats where the $50 for coffee and diet coke comes in. LOL
June 26th, 2007 at 2:32 am
I would splash out on some manual directory submission service to spread the word around about the new site and pick up an initial pagerank which I could use to trade links with those “lovely” Indian SEO companies further along the line for free.
June 26th, 2007 at 8:24 am
No, I cant stay off the computer!
Anyway, Id add to what Brad says - some of the money can be used to hire an SEO service (or your teenager) to make directory submissions. That takes out some of the drudge work.
Without naming a specific country, it seems as if the cheapest services are not located in the US or UK (unless its your teenager - and your kid wont end up being cheap).